Bonnie's Blog: Hollywood News and Market Info.

FOREST VIEW ESTATES Brand New in Emerald Hills Area!!!

May 28th, 2008 12:02 AM

Hi Hollywood:

I'm so excited to share with you that the developer of the new homes on the corner of Stirling Rd and SW 35th Ave (GLOBAL)has hired me and my group of exceptional realtors to market their fabulous homes for sale at FOREST VIEW ESTATES!!!

Currently finishing Phase I of this gated community which will consist of 31 homes, there are three models available, ranging from 2,800 square feet under air up to 4,200 sq feet under air.

The developer has spared no expense in building these luxury homes... including marble flooring, impact resistant windows and doors, crown molding, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops and European style cabinetry in the kitchen and all baths, double height volume ceilings in the living/dining area and much more.

Prices starting at only $750,000 for a fabulous top-of-the line brand new home. Exceptional value in today's market!!!

We are offering private tours every weekday from 11-5pm and are open Saturdays and Sundays from 1-5pm. For additional information or to set up a personal tour, please call my office at (954)985-8336. Check out the property pictures below:

Living room/dining room view from top of stairs

Kitchen

Master Bathroom

As always please feel free to contact me directly regarding any listed property at Bonnie@BonnieKaufman.com.

I welcome your input, feedback, comments and suggestions.

www.HousesInEmeraldHills.com

www.HomesInHollywoodFlorida.com

Call us for all of your South Florida Real Estate needs. We specialize in all of Hollywood, with an emphasis on Emerald Hills, Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Oaks, and Forest View Estates.

Have a great night!

Posted by on May 28th, 2008 12:02 AMPost a Comment (0)

MARKET REVIEW 5/30/08

May 31st, 2008 1:11 AM

What's new this past week?

In our RE area, Hollywood Hills, Emerald Hills, Oakridge, Mapleridge, Hollywood Oaks, Forest View Estates, and in between.......

SINGLE FAMILY HOMES ONLY/Past 7 days

New Listings: 17

Under Contract: 6

Closed Sales: 10

Expired or off market: 21

Price Reductions: 34

How many homes are for sale?

In Emerald Hills, which includes the Lakes and West & East of 46th Avenue there are currently 66 homes for sale!!!! Lots of competition.

In Hollywood Hills, from Hollywood Blvd to Sheridan St, from 56th Ave to I-95....are you ready for this number? There are 179 homes for sale!! Wow.... ranging from the high $100's (which are few) up to almost $600,000. The average asking price of a Hollywood Hills home these days in about $265,000.

To find out about market info on condo's and townhomes don't hesitate to email me at Bonnie@BonnieKaufman.com, or call directly (954)985-8336.

We are your Hollywood Real Estate Specialists...

Posted by on May 31st, 2008 1:11 AMPost a Comment (0)

MEMORIAL DAY! Reflect ... and Respect. 5/26/08

May 26th, 2008 12:46 AM

Reflect, respect The Boston Globe

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Alice C. Elwell

Globe Correspondent / May 25, 2008

Memorial Day is more than just the unofficial start of summer, or a day off from work, or a chance to shop the sales. It is an opportunity to reflect on and honor the men and women who serve the nation. Some have died in that service, or watched their brothers and sisters die in foxholes beside them. Some sustained injuries that will be with them forever. Many are serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan, the final chapter of their battleground experience not yet written.

Looking back, given how many died in the war in which you served, was it worth it?

What is the most meaningful way a citizen can observe Memorial Day?

Is it possible to oppose a war without disrespecting those who serve

Today, Memorial Day, how do we best honor those who have served? And can we honor them without honoring the violence of war? Globe South asked veterans of four wars what they would like of Memorial Day, how it should best be observed.

Their answer: Grant us a moment of gratitude. It can come through a nod of respect, a handshake, or a thank you. It can be a flag snapping in the breeze, hung out to mark the day. And remember, they say, that Memorial Day is not a celebration. It is a day to remember and honor.

Here are edited excerpts from four who fought - in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and Iraq.

John J. Bowles, 74, of Carver
KOREAN WAR veteran who served in the Army, as private and sergeant, from 1952 to 1968 After the service, Bowles was a roofer and sheet-metal worker. He is a ham-radio operator, and works with the National Hurricane Center, transmitting messages and weather conditions during emergencies.

'I'd do it all over again," said Korean War veteran John J. Bowles. "If they would take me into the service today, I'd go in now."

He joined the military because it was a family tradition. His brother was in the Army, another brother served in World War II, and his father fought in World War I. "The thing to do was to fight for your country," he said.

He doesn't gloss over the consequence of going to war.

"In wars, people got to die; the total was staggering, but what are you going to do? Innocent people die."

He is equally blunt when voicing his position on war protesters - whether it be skeptics on Memorial Day or sign-carrying antiwar activists. "Let them go to another country," he says; soldiers "putting their life on the line" deserve nothing but support.

Bowles believes everyone should serve, and that the draft should be reinstated. "Everybody lives here in this country; why should a few protect everybody?"

Even as much of America opposes the war in Iraq, Bowles is grateful that there is support for the troops. He said he is gratified when he hears about children making posters in school, delivering them to veterans posts.

On Memorial Day, Bowles hopes people will take time out of their day and remember those who lost their lives fighting under the American flag. "They deserve something. There's a lot that haven't come back, and people should respect the dead military people and give them their due respect; they died for their country."

What, exactly, should citizens do to show that respect? "Visit a grave, respect the flag, pay tribute," Bowles said. "I observe Memorial Day like everybody else. I think back and it brings back memories. You live with your memories."

Adrian Haynes, 82, of Middleborough
Mashpee Wampanoag name: Chief Silver Beach
WORLD WAR II Navy seaman, served from 1943 to 1947 in Italy and Africa
After the service, Haynes worked in foundries, drove a truck, and staffed the kitchen of a state hospital. He later started a museum in Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head), and ran a dance hall.

Haynes calls himself an old Navy man who believes war is necessary to stem the tide of fascism and communism. "Tyrants . . . fanatics . . . they can turn a whole country into a threat to independence," he said.

The military service of his colleagues in World War II and after have paid off, he said. "A great change in the culture has arrived. Communism has been wiped out. Fascism has been wiped out. I think we're coming to a new world."

How can Memorial Day honor those who ushered in that profound change? All Haynes wants, he said, is "a little bit of honor." That can be expressed as simply as attending an event that marks that day.

Through the years, Haynes said he has been gratified to look at a crowd at a parade and see a "look of love and respect" on their faces. But other times, he said, he has seen something less, maybe even disdain. Then the person, he said, just "looked away; they're there because someone dragged them there."

Haynes has had his share of adversity. As a Native American, he said, he and his people are neither black nor white, but in their own "Twilight Zone." Still, he is proud to be an American, proud that he served his country. He marches in every parade.

Trained by General George S. Patton Jr.'s Seventh Armored Division, Haynes was part of the Naval Supply Ninth Amphibian Force that took part in the 1944 Anzio invasion in Italy. He would do it again.

"Take the Vietnam War," he said. "Those people decided . . . it was a war for nothing" - and the country should not make the same mistake with Iraq.

Mark O'Reilly, 60, of Brockton
VIETNAM WAR service: Marine corporal 1966 to 1970; wounded twice in combat
Since returning from Vietnam, O'Reilly has taught at Brockton High School, worked as executive director of the Old Colony YMCA, and was chief of staff for Mayor John Yunits.
He is now retired from South Shore Habitat for Humanity.

Mark O'Reilly calls Memorial Day a chance to take stock of our freedom.

"It's a solemn day where we stop and we look around at all the freedoms that we have. We need to remember those freedoms that we have; they weren't guaranteed, they weren't given to us. They were purchased with blood, in most cases," said O'Reilly, a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam in 1967, and was wounded twice in combat.

It's every American's duty to stop and remember, O'Reilly said. "We're really not celebrating the victories of wars; we're not celebrating armistice; we're not celebrating the end of a war; we're not even celebrating. We're memorializing those men and women who have died in uniform defending our rights and defending our freedoms."

O'Reilly makes a distinction between servicemen and leaders. "Warriors don't pick the fight . . . they just fight it," he said. It's the leaders - the congressmen, the senators, and the president - who make the decision to go to war. But during the Vietnam era, that distinction was not made, he said.

He came home from Vietnam to be greeted by a country full of unrest, where veterans were called names. "I came out of Vietnam with one major disappointment and one major regret. The disappointment was the country that I went to defend was not very grateful. My major regret is that I didn't stand up and express that disappointment openly and publicly."

The protesters during those turbulent years owe their right to protest to the very military that upholds freedom, O'Reilly said. "That's the reason our fighting forces are over there [in Iraq], so that we have the right to those freedoms, making choices."

As for today's war in Iraq, he said, "Don't confuse lack of support of the war with lack of support for the men and women who fight; that's what happened in Vietnam."

How does one respect the troops while opposing the war? "It's the Congress and the president who really make the decision to send our men and women to war. Our forces follow orders and go.

"People who are against the war . . . their voices should be against the senators and congressmen who make the decision - vote them out of office."

In the end, O'Reilly feels his service in Vietnam was worth it. It was a personal choice to serve, despite the draft, and one that he does not regret.

Tomorrow, O'Reilly will pause and remember those who died. "The ones I remember," he said, "are the ones who died in Vietnam."

Sergeant Gregory J. Jasinskas, 34, West Bridgewater
IRAQ WAR Army sergeant, deployed in November
When not on duty, Jasinskas is a state trooper out of the Milton barracks.

Although media reports say American soldiers hate being in Iraq, and Americans in general are against the war, Sergeant Gregory J. Jasinskas dismisses those assertions. "Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

Jasinskas, who is on his second tour overseas, the first as a Marine, and now as an Army staff sergeant, believes in the tenets of the American military. Those now serving - "the finest young men and women this generation could produce" - are honoring all service members, past and present, by being on the front lines, he says. "Their service and sacrifice honor all who came before us."

"Fighting for freedom, no matter where it is, what the cost, or when it is happening, is the greatest honor that I can think of. That is what America is about," Jasinskas wrote in an e-mail from Baghdad.

Jasinskas said questions about whether fighting the war is worth it and how people show opposition "are, frankly, offensive to me. It demeans everyone of us that has laid it on the line here to assist the Iraqi people to be free."

His view: "Believe nothing you see on TV; we're doing really good things over in Iraq

Posted by on May 26th, 2008 12:46 AMPost a Comment (0)

Is the Housing Crisis OVER??? 5/12/08 Interesting Article

May 12th, 2008 1:49 PM

The Housing Crisis Is Over

By CYRIL MOULLE-BERTEAUX
May 6, 2008; Page A23

The dire headlines coming fast and furious in the financial and popular press suggest that the housing crisis is intensifying. Yet it is very likely that April 2008 will mark the bottom of the U.S. housing market. Yes, the housing market is bottoming right now.

How can this be? For starters, a bottom does not mean that prices are about to return to the heady days of 2005. That probably won't happen for another 15 years. It just means that the trend is no longer getting worse, which is the critical factor.

Most people forget that the current housing bust is nearly three years old. Home sales peaked in July 2005. New home sales are down a staggering 63% from peak levels of 1.4 million. Housing starts have fallen more than 50% and, adjusted for population growth, are back to the trough levels of 1982.

Furthermore, residential construction is close to 15-year lows at 3.8% of GDP; by the fourth quarter of this year, it will probably hit the lowest level ever. So what's going to stop the housing decline? Very simply, the same thing that caused the bust: affordability.

The boom made housing unaffordable for many American families, especially first-time home buyers. During the 1990s and early 2000s, it took 19% of average monthly income to service a conforming mortgage on the average home purchased. By 2005 and 2006, it was absorbing 25% of monthly income. For first time buyers, it went from 29% of income to 37%. That just proved to be too much.

Prices got so high that people who intended to actually live in the houses they purchased (as opposed to speculators) stopped buying. This caused the bubble to burst.

Since then, house prices have fallen 10%-15%, while incomes have kept growing (albeit more slowly recently) and mortgage rates have come down 70 basis points from their highs. As a result, it now takes 19% of monthly income for the average home buyer, and 31% of monthly income for the first-time home buyer, to purchase a house. In other words, homes on average are back to being as affordable as during the best of times in the 1990s. Numerous households that had been priced out of the market can now afford to get in.

The next question is: Even if home sales pick up, how can home prices stop falling with so many houses vacant and unsold? The flip but true answer: because they always do.

In the past five major housing market corrections (and there were some big ones, such as in the early 1980s when home sales also fell by 50%-60% and prices fell 12%-15% in real terms), every time home sales bottomed, the pace of house-price declines halved within one or two months.

The explanation is that by the time home sales stop declining, inventories of unsold homes have usually already started falling in absolute terms and begin to peak out in "months of supply" terms. That's the case right now: New home inventories peaked at 598,000 homes in July 2006, and stand at 482,000 homes as of the end of March. This inventory is equivalent to 11 months of supply, a 25-year high – but it is similar to 1974, 1982 and 1991 levels, which saw a subsequent slowing in home-price declines within the next six months.

Inventories are declining because construction activity has been falling for such a long time that home completions are now just about undershooting new home sales. In a few months, completions of new homes for sale could be undershooting new home sales by 50,000-100,000 annually.

Inventories will drop even faster to 400,000 – or seven months of supply – by the end of 2008. This shift in inventories will have a significant impact on prices, although house prices won't stop falling entirely until inventories reach five months of supply sometime in 2009. A five-month supply has historically signaled tightness in the housing market.

Many pundits claim that house prices need to fall another 30% to bring them back in line with where they've been historically. This is usually based on an analysis of house prices adjusted for inflation: Real house prices are 30% above their 40-year, inflation-adjusted average, so they must fall 30%. This simplistic analysis is appealing on the surface, but is flawed for a variety of reasons.

Most importantly, it neglects the fact that a great majority of Americans buy their houses with mortgages. And if one buys a house with a mortgage, the most important factor in deciding what to pay for the house is how much of one's income is required to be able to make the mortgage payments on the house. Today the rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is 5.7%. Back in 1981, the rate hit 18.5%. Comparing today's house prices to the 1970s or 1980s, when mortgage rates were stratospheric, is misguided and misleading.

This is all good news for the broader economy. The housing bust has been subtracting a full percentage point from GDP for almost two years now, which is very large for a sector that represents less than 5% of economic activity.

When the rate of house-price declines halves, there will be a wholesale shift in markets' perceptions. All of a sudden, the expected value of the collateral (i.e. houses) for much of the lending that went on for the past decade will change. Right now, when valuing the collateral, market participants including banks are extrapolating the current pace of house price declines for another two to three years; this has a significant impact on the amount of delinquencies, foreclosures and credit losses that lenders are expected to face.

More home sales and smaller price declines means fewer homeowners will be underwater on their mortgages. They will thus have less incentive to walk away and opt for foreclosure.

A milder house-price decline scenario could lead to increases in the market value of a lot of the securitized mortgages that have been responsible for $300 billion of write-downs in the past year. Even if write-backs do not occur, stabilizing collateral values will have a huge impact on the markets' perception of risk related to housing, the financial system, and the economy.

We are of course experiencing a serious housing bust, with serious economic consequences that are still unfolding. The odds are that the reverberations will lead to subtrend growth for a couple of years. Nonetheless, housing led us into this credit crisis and this recession. It is likely to lead us out. And that process is underway, right now.

Mr. Moulle-Berteaux is managing partner of Traxis Partners LP, a hedge fund firm based in New York.

Posted by on May 12th, 2008 1:49 PMPost a Comment (0)

HELLO EMERALD HILLS!!!! 5/7/08

May 8th, 2008 12:12 AM

Hi Emerald Hills:

Do you know your Real Estate Market? I do!! and here are some staggering changes in the last month!!

There are currently 60 homes for sale in Emerald Hills including the Lakes of Emerald Hills.

Prices are ranging from as low as $324,000 up to as much as $1,799,999. A home just went under contract for...... are you sitting down??? $239,900 on N. 44th Avenue. Yes it was bank owned but still.... $239,900 in EMERALD HILLS?

13 if the current listed homes are under $425,000 including a few 4 bedroom, 3 bath homes with 2 car garages AND pools!

There are 16 homes FOR RENT! Rentals for single family homes in Emerald Hills range from $2,400 up to $4,000. Although there is one for $6,000 per mo.

Don't shoot me... I'm just the messenger.... but there is good news. Buyers are out shopping. Our two recent open houses brought about 8-10 buyers which is a big number for a 2.5 hour span.

If you have a 3 bedroom home and want to sell consider your audience... the first time home buyer, the young couple starting a family, the person wanting to move from the FAIRWAYS into a single family home. There is an audience and a buyer for every home. Right now, for the buyer, it's all about price!

Now is the time to sell, market, find your buyer. People want to move before the new school year starts. Check out my seller tips on the home page of my site at:

www.HousesInEmeraldHills.com

If you have a question on a particular home or know of anyone thinking of buying and selling please don't hesitate to refer them to me. We treat all of our clients like family and market every home like it's our own!

Tomorrow I'll unveil my new CASH BACK BUYER LOYALTY PROGRAM!! Check back.

Bonnie

Posted by on May 8th, 2008 12:12 AMPost a Comment (0)