Category: Active adult communities
About 60 million Americans live in buildings controlled by home owners associations (HOAs), according to the Community Association Institute. Now, as the real estate crunch moves into a new phase with more strapped owners who can't make their mortgage or maintenance payments, HOAs are being forced to foreclose to protect their interests.
The problem is worse in older condominium associations, especially those that have been poorly run. Suddenly facing large maintenance bills some HOAs have to send out hefty assessment notices, but unfortunately many owners are not in a position to pay.
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Published on June 3, 2008
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Category: Retirement Real Estate
May 30 -- For as complicated a question this is, it is amazing how strong the opinions are. The one thing that is clear is hindsight - if you lived in the markets hardest hit by the housing crisis over the last 2 years (Phoenix, Las Vegas, South Florida, and parts of California), renting would have been the superior option. Your living costs would have been lower, and you wouldn't have lost any capital.
Articles in the New York Times and Seekingalpha.com explored the issue this week. The Times article on "Committed Renter Decides to Buy" used the concept of rent/purchase ratio to try to get a handle on the question. The ratio is basically the price of a typical house divided by the annual rent - and the higher the number the more you should consider renting.
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Published on June 3, 2008
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Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
Thousands of retirees are having to postpone their planned moves to retirement communities – a different kind of housing crunch victim. Many have selected the active adult community or CCRC of their dreams, only to find a big catch – they can’t sell their primary residence, which is how they…
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Published on June 3, 2008
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Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
Probably you get a lot of newsletters from your financial advisors. We confess we don’t pay too careful attention to most of them, but recently a newsletter came in from Vanguard that we thought was particularly helpful. Although the focus of this site is primarily to help you choose the…
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Published on May 20, 2008
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Category: Retirement Real Estate
May 20 -- The National Association of Realtors announced that home prices slid over 7% in the first quarter of 2008 compared to the year earlier period. Although sales volume is down as most buyers continue to stay on the sidelines, there is one category of sale that is hot right now - foreclosures.
In Southern California almost 38 percent of overall sales in April were from foreclosures. These increased sales will probably benefit the overall real estate market, including homes in active adult communities. The sales gains are clearly coming from lower prices - as banks take action to get non-performing assets off their books, prices go down. In fact there are reports that certain funds are taking big positions in buying foreclosed properties, often for cents on the dollar.
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Published on May 20, 2008
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Category: Active adult communities
May 13 — A report from Arizona State University’s Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness brought some welcome good news to the Arizona market for active adult communities recently. The school found that price drops in the area of over 30% helped spur increased sales in retirement communities among snowbirds…
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Published on May 13, 2008
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Category: Retirement Real Estate
New home sales fell 8.5% in March, according to the Commerce Department. The vacancy rate for homes is at 2.9%, the highest level recorded since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1956. Over 18 million U.S. homes were empty in this year's first quarter. Sound like bad news?
Not everybody thinks so. There are those who believe that the bottom of the real estate market is either here, or will be here soon. The optimists, on whose side Topretirements rests, believe that the mismatch between inventories (still way too high), demand (pathetic), and prices (still too high in spite of very big reductions in some markets) will eventually be resolved and the real estate market will return to equilibrium.
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Published on April 29, 2008
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Category: General Retirement Issues
April 21 - You know there is a movement afoot when both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times offer up features on retirement communities during the same weekend.
The Journal's article was excerpted from a book by Andrew Blechman called "Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias". In it Mr. Blechman wonders why a couple that he is friends with have decided to move to The Villages, the giant active adult community of 75,000 souls near Ocala, Florida. He describes in great detail what The Villages is all about - endless activity at a reasonable price in pretty good weather. In our opinion
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Published on April 21, 2008
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Category: Active adult communities
April 15 -- Imagine a town where a surprising number of residents have 2 golf carts - and only 1 car. Where the supermarket and high school have special golf cart parking lots. And where 72 of the 80 motor vehicles reported stolen last year were golf carts. That's Peachtree City, Georgia, one of America's largest planned communities -a perfect active adult community for many.
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Published on April 15, 2008
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Category: Active adult communities
April 9 -- For Sequoya, moving into a 55+ community in Yuma was "... boy what a mistake!" Similarly, Kimojimo "tried (a community in FL), lasted 9 months, and couldn't WAIT to get out!" Yet Bill55, who worked for years for Del Webb, "... met countless people who had no intention of living in an adult community. But for one reason or another they decided to give it a shot and I would see them around the community day after day taking part in all sorts of activities. At least 95% of those people said that moving there was the best decision of their lives!"
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Published on April 9, 2008
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