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In an effort to make homeownership more accessible and sustainable,  President Obama announced  the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will reduce annual mortgage insurance premiums (MIP) by 0.5 percentage points. On a $175,000 home loan with less than 5 percent down, this MIP reduction will equate to a savings of $818 per year or $3,932 over five years. FHA annual mortgage premiums are paid in 12 monthly installments every year, and are paid on top of principal, interest and insurance. For new FHA loans, they last for the entire life of the loan, regardless of whether you have more than 20 percent equity in your home. The announced changes will take the annual MIP from 1.35 percent to 0.85 percent for loans with less than 5 percent down, and from 1.30 percent to 0.8 percent for loans with more than 5 percent down. According to the White House, the lowered premiums will help more than 800,000 homeowners save on their monthly mortg...

In Pipe Creek, TX, turkeys trot across a prime building site at Latigo Ranch. In Plainview, IL, they can be hunted in the yard of a tasteful 3-bedroom, 3-bath home. Forget the deer and the antelope. Thousands of listings on Zillow mention roaming turkeys as a countryside amenity. In this season of Thanksgiving tradition, Zillow researchers wanted to see what role turkeys were playing in the housing market. The answer surprised us. About 14,000 listings have made mention of turkeys since 2012, including homes on Turkey Street, Turkey Creek and other place-names. About 10,000 of those listings are apparently making reference to actual birds, which roam wild in every state except Alaska. In raw numbers, the top turkey towns are in the Midwest. In Springfield, MO, 137 listings mentioned turkeys; 122 Kansas City, MO listings mentioned turkeys. Many of the listings are lots for sale, where buyers can build a home from which to watch the turkeys gobble-gobble. Urban turkeys made ap...

Photo by Gail Albert Halaban via  Design Boom "I like to look into people's windows," declares New York artist  Gail Albert Halaban , whose latest  photo series  peeps into the apartments of Parisians. "I know it sounds kind of creepy. Many people may even think it's illegal," she continues in a  video  about her work, but "I am a friendly window-watcher." The photos, cinematic and intimate portraits recently published in her new book  Paris Views,  appear voyeuristic but are actually painstakingly stage-directed; Halaban has gained consent from all the parties she is seemingly spying on. The results are lovely, and, just like window-watching from a city apartment, hard to look away from. read more... http://curbed.com/archives/2014/11/04/gail-halaban-photography-paris.php

Photo by Koichi Torimura via Design Boom While many of us fret over the erosion of privacy, some of Japan's most radical architects continue to design homes that do away with it almost entirely. The country's latest very transparent urban dwelling is an all-white honeycomb-like stack of platforms called the S House. The bathroom is its only walled-off interior space. Step inside. >> Design Boom theorizes that the project "represents the simultaneous diversity and order that is ever present in our cyber lives." Yuusuke Karasawa Architects designed it so that the alternating rectangular platforms are connected by diagonal sections that line up with the crisscrossing lines in the facade. Aside from the bathroom, the only "room" that breaks out from the purposeful uniformity of the others is the kitchen. Take in more views of the project over at Design Boom. . read more..... http://curbed.com/archives/2014/10/13/s-...

Average long-term U.S. mortgage rates rose slightly this week but remained near their lows for the year. Mortgage company Freddie Mac said Thursday the nationwide average for a 30-year loan edged up to 4.12 percent from 4.10 percent last week, where it had stayed for three straight weeks. The average for a 15-year mortgage, a popular choice for people who are refinancing, rose to 3.26 percent from 3.24 percent. At 4.12 percent, the rate on a 30-year mortgage is down from 4.53 percent at the start of the year. Rates have fallen even though the Federal Reserve has been trimming its monthly bond purchases, which are intended to keep long-term borrowing rates low. The purchases are set to end next month. Mortgage rates often follow the yield on the 10-year Treasury note. The 10-year note traded at 2.54 percent Wednesday, up from 2.41 percent a week earlier. It was trading at 2.53 percent Thursday morning. Bond yields rise when bond prices fall. To calculate average mortgage ...

Priciest Manhattan Listing | Cheapest Manhattan Listing

5 images <div class="gallery loaded"><a href="http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/25/how_much_for_a_garden_duplex_on_the_upper_west_side.php"><img src="http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/53ab04b5f92ea1517b006c66/77987933.jpg" width="500" height="334"></a><br /><a href="http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/25/how_much_for_a_garden_duplex_on_the_upper_west_side.php" style="font-size: 9px; text-align: center;">Click here to view the full photogallery.</a></div> What: 2BR/2BA garden duplex next to Riverside Park, in the West 80s. Square Footage: 1,278 CC/Taxes: $2,342 What definitely looks like a recent renovation has left this duplex on the Far West Side looking a little confused, with a mixture of exposed brick and plain white walls that don't really seem to be cooperating with one another. It's impossible to ignore the apartment's good aspects,...

Watering is essential for any landscape, but it’s at the top of the to-do list if you’re growing an edible garden. Most edibles require regular watering. If you live where summer rainstorms are common, Mother Nature might provide enough to keep everything happy. If you live in a dry climate, or are facing drought conditions, you’ll need to do more if you plan to keep growing. For those of us dealing with water shortages, making the most of every drop becomes even more urgent. But you still have options. You can cut back on the size of your garden and look for varieties that thrive in naturally arid regions. While crops like broccoli and beans can be water hogs, peppers , squash , Swiss chard and tomatoes , especially ‘Early Girl’, ‘Sweet 100’, ‘Brandywine’ and ‘Burbank Slicing’, can handle less-than-regular watering once they’re established. Of course, herbs such as oregano , rosemary , thyme and lavender are staples of a drought-tolerant garden. Or maybe this is the summer you s...

Banks are once again giving out jumbo loans. Loans that are at least $417,000 or more, are once again in vogue in the mortgage market, according to a Bloomberg report. Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. /quotes/zigman/239557/delayed /quotes/nls/wfc WFC +0.11% , J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. /quotes/zigman/272085/delayed /quotes/nls/jpm JPM +0.06% and Bank of America Corp. /quotes/zigman/190927/delayed /quotes/nls/bac BAC -0.30% are all increasing their efforts to win over wealthy home buyers but are still keeping credit tight for everyone else, according to media reports. Banks need loan growth to compete and are aggressively seeeking out the jumbo loan home buyer, say analysts. Applications for jumbo mortgages that were $729,000 or more were up 4.9% in March, compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, applications for loans of less than $150,000 fell by 21%, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association . The average purchase application loan amount reached $280,500 in th...

Average U.S. rates on fixed mortgages fell this week for a second straight week as the spring home-buying season has gotten off to a slow start. Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday the average rate for the 30-year loan declined to 4.21 percent from 4.29 percent last week. The average for the 15-year mortgage eased to 3.32 percent from 3.38 percent. Mortgage rates have risen almost a full percentage point since hitting record lows about a year ago. Warmer weather has yet to boost home-buying as it normally does. Rising prices and higher rates have made affordability a problem for would-be buyers, while many homeowners are reluctant to list their properties for sale. Roughly a third of homeowners owe more on their mortgage than they could recoup from a sale. Data released Tuesday showed that U.S. home prices rose at a slightly slower pace in the 12 months that ended in March, a sign that weak sales have begun to restrain the housing market's sharp price gains. Rea...

17 images <div class="gallery loaded"><a href="http://curbed.com/archives/2014/04/30/an-1892-frank-lloyd-wright-house-now-wants-just-775k.php"><img src="http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/5360f0a2f92ea1704c0050f2/1019-Chicago-ave-18.jpeg" width="499" height="333"></a><br /><a href="http://curbed.com/archives/2014/04/30/an-1892-frank-lloyd-wright-house-now-wants-just-775k.php" style="font-size: 9px; text-align: center;">Click here to view the full photogallery.</a></div> Over in the Chicago suburbs, an early design by "America's architect" Frank Lloyd Wright asks $775K, which may seem cheap for a 2,661-square-foot four bedroom by a master—particularly a house that, as Curbed Chicago writes, "utterly oozes Wright's Prairie charm"—though if one considers the several other FLW spreads to have hit the market in the last year or so, i...

U.S. housing starts rose but below market expectations and building permits fell in March, pointing to underlying weakness in the housing market that could persist despite improving weather. The Commerce Department said on Wednesday groundbreaking increased 2.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 946,000. February's starts were revised to show a 1.9 percent rise rather than the previously reported 0.2 percent fall. Economists polled by Reuters had expected starts to rise to a 973,000-unit rate last month. "Given the weather, housing is still disappointing," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Florida. Compared to March last year, starts dropped 5.9 percent, the biggest decline since April 2011. While a brutally cold winter weighed on home building in December and January, activity has also been hampered by shortages of building lots and skilled labor as well as rising prices for materials. A report on Tuesday showed h...

First-Quarter Home Sales Spike In Westchester | The Chappaqua Daily Voice

Freddie Mac chief economist Frank Nothaft just published a blog on their websites laying out where the housing market is headed this spring . And like Fannie Mae , the outlook is rosy compared to winter . And while the three main facts backing up Nothaft are listed here, there are many more intersting point mentioned on the Freddie Mac blogpost. Nothaft writes, "as we move to a purchase market, how does the overall housing market stack up?" "Housing is stronger today than at any point since the Great Recession began and hit bottom in 2009," he said. A few points from Nothaft that prove housing is going to keep trending upward: 1. Home sales are up 13% since their low point. Expect home sales to increase about 3% in 2014 as the purchase market continues to evolve. 2. Housing starts are up 50% since they bottomed out. Expect almost 20% growth for this sector in 2014, which will begin to help ease tight inventories in many markets. 3. House Pri...

During my 25 years as a designer, I have compiled a list of habits I’ve observed in the decorating and design world. Habits that I believe need to be broken. Many of these may have begun as good intentions — but we all know where that path leads! I’ve assembled 12 of those habits here. I’ve struggled with each and every one of them personally and feel I have come out on the other side a better designer for it. Although each lesson is valuable, in the hierarchy of habits to be broken, there is none more important than No. 12. Hugh Jefferson Randolph Architects Save to Ideabook Email Photo 1. Foyer neglect. Mama always said you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And she was right. Don’t let your entry hall fall prey to lack of attention. How to break this habit? Most of us with attached garages never use our foyers — and it shows. So use it. Showcase a favorite object that has a story behind it. This will immediately set a personal tone in your h...

When Housing Prices Become Fish Stories, the Economy Suffers | Chappaqua Real Estate | Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor

Since the dawn of time, humans have built shelters in the wilderness to protect them from storms and dangers lurking in the dark. Society may have changed, but the yearning persists -- with urbanites in particular seeking to escape the stresses of city life and rekindle their connection with nature. Increasingly, these little hideouts have evolved from simple shacks to sophisticated examples of ultra-compact architecture. Some of the most exquisite of these are featured in Rock the Shack , a new book spanning the world of beautiful bolt-holes, classy cabins and luxurious lairs. Squish Studio, Canada This sharp-edged studio in a breathtaking location in Canada's Newfoundland is part of a small artist community where painters, filmmakers, sculptors and other creators are chosen to spend between two weeks and four months. It's the brainchild of architect Todd Saunders , who wanted the buildings to act as beacons on the coastline: "I wanted the studios to ...

Move Inc. and the National Association of Realtors have filed a lawsuit against Zillow and former Move Chief Strategy Officer and realtor.com President Errol Samuelson for alleged breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and misappropriation of trade secrets. Samuelson unexpectedly resigned from Move and joined Zillow as the portal giant’s chief industry development officer on March 5. The complaint, filed today, comes as Zillow announced it had hired another prominent Move exec, Curt Beardsley , as its new vice president of industry development. Beardsley assumed Samuelson’s industry relations role at Move after Samuelson’s departure. Beardsley is not mentioned in the complaint. NAR subsidiary Realtors Information Network (RIN) and Move subsidiaries RealSelect Inc. and Top Producer Systems Co. are also plaintiffs in the suit. In addition to Zillow and Samuelson, the complaint names “Does 1-20″ as defendants. “At Move, we take our trade secrets and intellectual property ex...

Chappaqua NY Weekly Real Estate Report 2/27/2014 Homes for sale 104 Median Ask Price $1,264,500.00 Low Price $469,000.00 High Price $19,900,000.00 Average Size 4297 Average Price/foot $363.00 Average DOM 103 Average Ask Price $1,677,196.00