KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday December 31 Housing and Economic stories

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Buying a hillside house? Be careful - (www.ocregister.com) As the winter season ushers in heavy rains for Orange County, so too does the risk for geological problems – like landslides, flooding and general shifts in the foundation. From Yorba Linda to Laguna Beach, the county has its share of hillside homes – they sit on bluff tops, viewing the crashing waves below and are nestled into the foothills of mountains, boasting gorgeous, wooded canyon views. With the winter comes rain and heavy rains can lead to landslides--something that could impact many hillside homes in Orange County like these Laguna Beach homes. Get a copy of your property’s grading plan to understand how the tract was cut. The home could sit on cut soil, fill soil or a combination of both – which may create instability. Talk to your city – request property records. Look for cracks in walls, driveways, windows. Look for leaning trees and fences. If you live in a flat area, check out FEMA flood zones at msc.fema.gov. Homeowners and home shoppers itching for that perfect view, however, need to educate themselves on the land their home sits on or they'll be saddled with sticky geo issues. If you don't maintain and understand your property, it "can become your own worst enemy," said professional geologist and realtor Michael Lewis. "Do not wait until you are in escrow to exercise your discovery period," Lewis said. "With so much information available online and easy access to many city and county files – it is much easier now to make an educated decision about your land and home purchase and you can go into your negotiation of price holding all the same cards, and maybe more, than the seller has." When shopping for a home or maintaining the one you live in, things like cracked driveways, sagging slopes and cracked window panes should raise a red flag for you.

China's Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs - (www.nytimes.com) Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility. Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room. Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said. Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.

Candians worried about clear title to US foreclosures - (www.nationalpost.com) As the Canadian dollar flirted with parity and the U.S. housing bubble burst, many Canadians headed south of the border to pick up a property bargain. A number of these properties had been subject to foreclosure. Questions have been raised recently about the conduct of some foreclosures and a number of banks have halted foreclosures while the transactions are investigated. “Worst case scenario is people who have already bought a foreclosure,” says David Altro of David A. Altro & Associates, a member of the Florida bar and a Quebec notary. “If they are anxious that the title isn’t good, hire a lawyer to do a title examination to see whether the foreclosure action was properly done.” If you are still contemplating the purchase, check the title carefully. “Make sure you pay to have the title checked. Some of these foreclosed properties did not have clear title to begin with,” says Carol Bezaire, vice-president, tax and estate planning at MacKenzie Financial in Toronto. “The house was in [the seller’s] name but the title was held by someone else.”

NY Brokers Prepare for Wall Street's Bonus Season - (www.nytimes.com) In real estate, this is the season to obsess about the bonus season. Wall Street bonuses, in the pre-housing-crash years, were a major economic engine driving sales in the city from January through the spring. They can be a broker’s bread and butter — brioche with brie, really, when you’re talking about multimillion-dollar bonuses and multimillion-dollar apartments. But since the economy melted down, bonuses have been up, down and spinning all around. Anticipation has had brokerages and developers panting one minute and totally depressed the next. And the speculation this year over bonuses has been unusually intense; the question of Congress’s extending or eliminating Bush-era tax breaks that have been in place for much of the last decade has only fueled conjecture. Will bonus payouts come early this year so the recipients can avoid potential tax increases?

Time For Real-Estate Watchdogs To Start Howling Again - (blog.niemanwatchdog.org) You might not know it from reading the news, but the nation’s housing prices are in free fall again. For the many Americans who have (or had) most of their wealth tied up in their homes, the consequences of this will be profound. The effect on nationwide consumption will inevitably be severe. In fact, there are some not inconceivable scenarios in which the housing market could just take the economy down with it again. Despite the fact that the nation is officially in a period of economic recovery, the latest data show that home prices are diving. One recent survey pegged the decline at 0.7 percent per month; another found prices down 5.8 percent between August and October. One analysis found home values will likely drop more than $1.7 trillion this year, on top of the $1.05 trillion drop in 2009. That would bring the loss in wealth to $9 trillion since the June 2006 market peak, when the housing stock was valued at about $24 trillion. And many market analysts expect prices to drop 10 percent or more in 2011.