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"2012 will give us the tightest year of apartment vacancies in recorded history," writes Karl...
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Sunday, January 8, 2012, 8:47 AM ET"2012 will give us the tightest year of apartment vacancies in recorded history," writes Karl Smith. The ensuing higher rents are obviously a boon to single-family housing as buying becomes cheaper than renting, but Smith sees the chance of a "transformative boom" in multifamily building that will not only charge the economic recovery, but alter the look of our cities.
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Entry level at 25-40K.
Clean, happy shelter.
Opportunity to maintain/build equity.
Like dorm rooms, but a mortgage contract.
Perhaps convert all the old bricks and mortar schools, libraries and hospitals that are quickly in obsolesce.
Integrated retirement living with extended services is taking off.
The Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself has said this is an uneven recovery. I agree with the banking oligarchs key servant. While we all can say that things are getting marginally better, the income inequality is widening to historic proportions. High wages jobs are being changed for minimum wages in the service sector. Just look at the BLS data, the retail trade is leading the "recovery".
These structural changes are impacting the root of our system and our society as a whole. You see young people living with their parents well beyond their college years. I have seen the frustration of people wanting to work, and can't find anything. These are incalculable costs......
Living in my mobile home seemed like a good idea in 2002, now I wish I had the luxury of shopping around for apartment rents.
Before the sale, the 2nd owner, Hometown America, was trying to increase revenue by selling or renting to own mobile homes with the lot. Even among us poor people (I make $13.94 an hour in a cushy government job), owning our own homes has been more difficult since the summer of 2007 (when I had to choose between gas for my car to get to work and the other bills). Hometown America even accepted T.I.N.'s and that didn't help them.
Since the AMC Reit was only incorporated June 7, 2011 (in Maryland but company headquarters based in Addison, Texas), I imagine their first order of business will be to increase the rent as soon as possible and to take anybody who will pay regardless of history. We will then become a real trailer park, but as long as the reit is returning money, the company won't care.
Not sure why an Reit would buy this park, this and most of the property around it (that's been for sale since I moved in in 2002) is zoned light industrial, and, because the guy upstairs has a sense of humor about these things, we are a stones throw from a toll way, which has increased our flooding during the winter and spring storms (on the flood map we are next door as it were to the official FEMA flood plain).
*all the info listed may be googled or binged for accuracy.
Could you take in a boarder?
My wife and I faced our reality a year ago, and now live in a space 1/3 of the size of where we lived in 2010. I am now framing out the basement to add a "mother in law" apartment as I get the funds to do it (nearly every construction technique I need to know is on YouTube).
And the fun part is that in all of this "downsizing" I have never awakened and said "....poor me, my life sucks, I am miserable because I can't live in my fancy old house....."
I'm happy as a summer clam.
I can't figure out what the true valuation of the property is, even looking at the Dallas County tax appraisal website, but from what little i can find through other sites (http://bit.ly/wB3Qsd) market price has been increased not through improvements, but through increased valuation {by Dallas County, who is desperate for revenue?} even though the property itself has not been improved, but by sales of the property alone; and this property is surrounded by property that has been for sale (through various REIT's) since I moved here in 2002.
I would question whether this property value is being manipulated in a similar fashion to what caused the original financial mess: one entity flipping to another on the promise that 'some day' something will happen here.
In the mean time, the tenants who live here continue to pay more for less. It is possible to price a mobile home tenant off a lot, all I have to do is let my credit go just as a brick-and-mortar home owner does and mail the keys for my mobile home back to Green Tree Servicing. I declared bankruptcy for my two lone credit cards (both acquired by Chase beforehand), and I'm still young, I can rebuild.
1) Expenses - you are clearly focused on spending less that is good.
2) Income - if the expense side of the equation is no longer working then you have to increase your income. If you are young then learn a trade or do something that will increase your value in the marketplace.
Everyone I know that is successful works a lot more than 40 hours a week.
Use the place only for shelter, shower and a stove. Determine to work 80 hours a week. Make it your passion for the next three years to make more money and save every nickel until you can change your life circumstances.
Clearly you are smart, literary and circumspect enough to find this blog and write on it...It may take a little time to get your head around beating back your circumstances, but once you do, nothing can stop you.
Also old buildings and flood/storm/fire damaged buildings will be torn down at a faster rate to capitalize on the cheap land/ rents phenomenon.
Since it takes about 18 months for a blueprint to be turned into rentable units and with our semi-legal "open border" policy the demand will only build faster.
Buy anything related to apartment construction and conversion in 2012.
That would be $REM (mortgages), $XHB and $GE (financing).
This is a no-lose situation for those who keep their eyes open!
Disclosure: I am long in CIM.
Check out Ryan Avent's "The Gated City" which describes all the zoning regulations and land use laws that essentially make dense development impossible in many of American cities.
Who let the clowns out?
Varan, please keep to the topic. Take your partisan crap to a political forum. I thought you were more intelligent than that.
Think he's going to win Indiana again?
Think he's going to win Virginia again?
Think he's going to win Nevada?
Florida?
The real question is how many libs in congress and senate the conservatives can bring down.
Then, what conservatives do when they do get power...that's the real challenge.
The people who get your vote by pretending to be conservatives are neither conservative nor liberal, just run of the mill wannabe plutocrats worshiping at the altar of wealth.
Perhaps we should just let the clowns enjoy their circus and stick to making money...