Burning Down a Breuer

At 2:15 am Sunday morning in St Paul, Minnesota, Chris Larson set fire to Chad Bogdan’s Marcel-Breuer-designed 1962 Kacmarcik house. Or something that looked a lot like it. The two-bedroom house was unoccupied at the time. 

First, a tube of smoke spiraled out of the house. A moment later, the roof was on fire. By the time the walls started collapsing, the conflagration may have been close to 2,000 degrees, or so said the guy on the fire truck, and he should know.

The building shouldn’t have burned so quickly. It was one of about 100 homes drafted by the well-known Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, who later designed the Whitney Museum of American Art. And as a matter of taste, he had specified incombustible materials: white concrete block for the walls, red ceramic tile for the floors.

Actually, the whole story is not as jaw-dropping as it sounds; both arsonist and owner did have a good time. How did that happen?

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On a sad note, I want to pay respect to my great friend Don who we lost last Saturday due to cardiac arrest. He was a kind, generous and big-hearted gentleman, an architect, fellow barbecuer (I nearly said "fellow architect") and fine yacht cabinetry builder, and he will be missed, very much so. Thank you for your wonderful friendship, Don, and Godspeed.

Photo ©NYTimes

It caught my eye: Modernist Hotel Signs in Miami

Seems lately I'm in Miami on a daily basis. With all that driving around a lot of architecture catches your eye, but you can't observe it in detail when you have a client in the car.

But recently I took my new camera with me, to take photos of hotel signs I had seen before. These signs of Miami Modern glamour from the 40s and 50s ("MiMo") I found on a stretch of Biscayne Boulevard (aka US1) in the 60s and 70s:

...and my favourite, for the absolutely priceless detail in the fountain as well as that lovely name:

Front elevation of the Vagabond Motel, designed ca. 1953 by Delano Hotel architect B. Robert Swartburg and currently waiting to be remodeled:

Did I overlook any beautiful ones you know of? Send them in please!

Update on 21 May 13: Biscayne Times has a great piece on the Biscayne Boulevard Miami Modern Historic District (yes, it is quite a mouthful). And more on the Vagabond Motel – did I mention that I love the fountain? – and its planned rehab at curbed.miami.
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Photos © tckaiser

Nothing beats being On Site

Modern communication, blessing and curse – always within reach, auto-uploads to Dropbox, instant feedback, blogging from the coffee-shop, sharing photos instantly, Skype conferencing, pushing privacy limits.

What falls by the wayside? I don’t mean intonation, facial expressions and haptics, but those can get lost too.

What gets lost is the big picture, the overview, the impression – which, astonishingly enough, is not the sum of all things recordable and transferable via LTE. To quote architect Dieter van Everbroeck: "Good architecture is always about the site". Or being on site.

I got an interesting lesson the other day: 

A very attractive house by a respected modernist architect came to market. The client who was most interested in it lives a few thousand miles away, he could not come down for weeks to see it. But he expressed great interest, so I drove over and previewed the house.

The MLS photos were gorgeous images done by a professional, mine were snapped with a smart phone on a rainy day. And neither ones are lying.

But my preview also showed a bit more real life than the listing photos. My overall impression of the house and the area was such that the client, after discussing it at length over the phone and seeing my photos, dropped the property from his list.

There was nothing wrong with the house. But only experiencing the property in situ gave a complete picture, including wear and tear and pros and cons and surroundings.

The take-away: Do not rely on impressions that can be pulled from the web – nothing beats standing on the site, hearing, feeling and sensing it.

Did you ever have a similar experience as mine? Care to share?
 

South Florida Housing Market, 1st Quarter 2013

Crazy.

Really – if you don't have a lot of time, you don't need to read any further. For a bit more of an analysis, stay a little.

At least in the Tri-County region – encompassing the coastal area from Jupiter to Homestead, excluding the Florida Keys – it feels, as a colleague said during a viewing this week, "like 2005 all over again".

Not a fond memory, indeed.

What is happening is uncommonly tight inventory with rising prices:

     20.6% decrease in available single family homes
     8.9% decrease in inventory (absorption of available homes in months)

     18.9% increase in median list prices
     25.7% increase in sold homes
     24.8% increase in median selling prices
     18.6% increase in median selling prices per sf 

     (all changes year-over-year for single family homes)

What are the main reasons behind the low inventory?

• Underwater sellers: certainly they are not putting their houses up if they don't have to. With recent price increases, they hope the market will come to them. And the WSJ estimates 22 percent of home owners with a mortgage owe more than their home is worth
• Lack of equity: many home owners rely on the equity from their home to make a down payment on their next property. With fewer owners seeing equity in their houses, they may not have enough money to move up
• Investors: many of them do not flip – that market is pretty much cleared out for now – but renovate and rent out
• Banks slowing down foreclosures: with tighter rules in the foreclosure process, banks are moving at a slower pace in foreclosing. They also lean more towards short sales and loan modifications
• Builders are building less: Housing starts were at record lows from 2009 through 2011 so there’s less inventory being added to the market. A rebound in the new-home market has only recently started to occur. 

So why is this development not really good?

• South Florida needs a new housing bubble like a sharp pencil in the neck
• Unreasonable price increases attract speculators (vs. users)
• An overheated market seriously hampers the region's attraction to "hard" buyers (those who live and work here)
• Lack of inventory discourages "casual buyers" (vacationers, snow-birds, second home buyers), which are also vital for Florida real estate
• The fallout of the last crisis is still lingering, and the economy is not ready to handle the next debacle
• Sellers may not resist "greed is good", and start racing to the top again
• Contrary to the overall belief, real estate agents make less money and close less transactions in overheated than in normal healthy markets

But I suppose asking for cool heads to prevail is about as efficient as offering the fox in the hen-house a marzipan egg.

What is your opinion – are you selling or buying sooner, later, or not at all now?
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Photo: Train wreck at Gare de L'Ouest, Paris, 1895. Source: wikimedia

Revolutionary Real Estate Service Takes Off

In an enlightened twist to traditional real estate services, a boutique brokerage firm in South Florida added a revolutionary service for potential buyers: FACAFUNDS (Future Appropriation of Clients' Advanced Funds).

The boutique firm, Kaiser Associates, Inc, has successfully specialised in an unusual niche in South Florida: the market for contemporary and mid-century modern architecture. A second division of the office focuses on buyer representation in triple-net investments.

Founder and principal Tobias Kaiser, an affable German with a US Master’s degree and 22 years experience as an independent broker, explains his newest client service which is to be introduced today:

“When a buyer contacts a real estate broker, client and broker sort of sniff each other out and then establish property criteria and a price corridor. Often though, these criteria are a moving target."

"Consequently, clients have to constantly adjust their budget and their expectations, which can be very frustrating for both parties.”

Kaiser goes on: “With FACAFUNDS, select clients now have the possibility to transfer all of their earmarked acquisition funds into our escrow account – even before we identify one or more matching properties. The funds stay in the designated account until either we have found a property or until they are earmarked for other purposes and cleared out by the client or by us.”

Typical acquisition budget flow in a FACAFUNDS application; here a nightly refresh cycle.

Only select clients will be invited to participate in the program, and fees for the service are kept on purpose at an affordable monthly 0.9999% of the parked deposit to cover all sorts of expenses.

“FACAFUNDS is not meant to generate a profit for the brokerage while the funds – with a minimum US$130,000 – are parked, which can be as long as 13 years ” explains Kaiser. “Any profit is generated through the acquisition, or when the funds are transmogrified and withdrawn by the authorised parties”, which only include the client and the broker, whoever comes first.

“With FACAFUNDS, the question ‘It’s 11 pm - do you know where you money is?’ has become obsolete. The client has total budget transparency as long as the funds stay in the account, and to a certain extent even after they are gone.”

As much as the new service sounds like a forehead-slapper for consumers and dead-simple to imitate by brokerages, title companies or attorneys, it should be noted that working closely with loan experts from Madoff Bank NLC, Kaiser has spent considerable time and espresso to develop FACAFUNDS, virtually ensuring it will be a huge success for someone.

If you are interested in learning more about Kaiser Associates, Inc. and their FACAFUNDS program, contact them here.

©Pookeeboo Real Estate Times, April 1st, 2013.

Preservation Efforts: In Vain?

When one looses two important modernist architectural works in one week, one must wonder how effective efforts to save threatened properties ever can be. 

The last week of February brought two major losses: James Fitzgibbon's Paschal house in Raleigh, NC and Richard Neutra's Cyclorama building in Gettysburg, PA.

Not that everyone was asleep at the wheel. 

Quite in contrast, the Paschal house, on the National Register of Historic Places, was demolished by the heirs after an eight-year effort to work out a solution; the Cyclorama was destroyed after what the non-profit Triangle Modernist Houses describes as a valiant ten-year fight against the National Park Service.

But as I mentioned before before, preservation starts with the owner, not the buyer.


Paschal house in Raleigh, NC:

Cyclorama at Gettysburg, PA:

Photos: Paschal house by Raleigh NewsObserver, Cyclorama by TMH

Review: The 2012 South Florida Housing Market

A brief look at the 2012 market for Single Family Homes (condominiums, townhomes, and commercial properties not included here) in the three counties Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade confirms what market participants - buyers, sellers and certainly every active Realtor – know:

Inventory continued to shrink, asking prices went up, so did selling prices – in some market segments dramatically so – and: if you snoozed you loosed (impressed by my rhyming talent?).

Step by step:

Relative inventory: expressed in months, it indicates the time it would take to sell every property at the current absorption rate if no new homes came to market. This benchmark fell substantially in 2012: 38% in Palm Beach, 29% in Dade and 39% in Broward county, on average from 8.2 to 5.3 months.

Absolute inventory: the number of homes available for sale dropped 23% in 2012, from 19,319 to 14,824, with the highest decline in Broward county.

Southeast Florida total housing inventory 2009-2012

Median asking prices: increased 22% in 2012. However, different from the airlines, sellers were not able to actually turn the full price hikes into reality - with several exceptions, see below.

Median selling prices: a plus of 19% (absolute) and 14% (price per square foot under air) during 2012 are substantial enough, but don’t show the whole picture – the good and the great locations, especially waterfront, Bayfront (Miami-Dade) and oceanfront, pulled these numbers up, with hefty annual increases exceeding 27% in some segments.

Days on market: measures how long a property spends on the Multiple Listing Service until it goes into contract. To be taken with a grain of salt, as some sellers re-list their property over and over again attempting to make it appear “fresh”. Never mind that is has been for sale forever (1,918 days in one case, a record in my observation). 2012 saw a DoM drop of 11%, in line with the diminishing inventory. As some of my clients know first-hand, even five to ten days on the market for an interesting well-priced house in a good area is not uncommon.

The modern market: as this database is much smaller (approximately 2% of the overall market) and contains perhaps 95% of the market, not 100% as above, the numbers have to be regarded with a bit of caution. But in general, the modern market mirrors the overall SFH market, only on a substantially higher price level, absolute and per square foot. Inventory, especially under $600,000, continued to get very tight in 2012; asking prices per square foot under air rose 20%, selling prices by 13%.

Advice to sellers for 2013: if you consider selling soon, it’s a very good time to start the process in the first half of the year. Prep your house, best with professional help, and be very realistic in your pricing right from the start. Don’t be greedy if you want a speedy sale.

If you do have a modern home you consider selling, I urge you to contact me for a free consultation, especially tailored and targeted to the modern market.

Advice to buyers for 2013: Prep yourself and do your homework up front: define what you want, where you want it, and know your price corridor. If you finance, before even looking at the first house you should have a (free and recent) mortgage pre-approval in hand (not a pre-qualification). Be ready to act on a moment’s notice, and be loyal to your Realtor if you found a good one: that element alone can make the difference between a great purchase or something resembling a root canal without anaesthesia.

Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear from you - call or email me anytime please!