CNBC has the details.
It didn't take much for the mortgage market to plunge into a deep freeze.
As temperatures fell across the country last week, so did mortgage applications, down 12.8 percent from the week before, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. That includes an adjustment for the Thanksgiving Day holiday, but the shortened week still played a role in the drop.
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Here's the story from CNBC.
The U.S. economy grew faster than initially estimated in the third quarter as businesses aggressively accumulated stock, but underlying domestic demand remained sluggish.
Separate data showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week, a hopeful sign for the labor market recovery.
Gross domestic product grew at a 3.6 percent annual rate instead of the 2.8 percent pace reported earlier, the CommerceDepartment said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had expected output would be revised up to only a 3.0 percent rate.
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Here's the story.
A New York-based investor is paying about $140 million for the Renaissance hotel on Wacker Drive, one of the biggest downtown casualties of the real estate crash.
Carey Watermark Investors Inc. is buying the 553-room Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel from the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, which repossessed the property last year from its previous owner, Chicago-based private-equity firm Walton Street Capital LLC, according to people with knowledge of the transaction.
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CNBC has all the details.
Sales of new U.S. single-family homes recorded their biggest
increase in nearly 33-1/2 years in October, suggesting the housing
market recovery remains intact despite higher mortgage rates.
The Commerce Department said on Wednesday sales jumped 25.4 percent to a
seasonally adjusted annual rate of 444,000 units. It also said new home
sales fell 6.6 percent in September.
The release of both the
September and October reports was delayed because of a 16-day partial
shutdown of the government last month.
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The Chicago Reader has the story.
Conversely, the less money an area generates in property taxes, the less money flows into its TIF accounts.
Thus, the program that's intended to help the poorest of the poor neighborhoods largely benefits richer ones, like the near-west- and near-north-side communities Alderman Burnett represents.
Through 2010, the city spent about $197 million in TIF dollars on various projects in the 27th Ward.
In contrast, the city spent about $7.9 million in Alderman Anthony Beale's far poorer south-side 9th Ward.
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Check out the story from Chicago Now.
It's as if there is an invisible wall running through the middle of Chicago, along Western Avenue all the way south of Montrose. When buyers of million dollar homes specify their search criteria they will often specify that they want to stay east of Western Avenue - or if they specify Ukrainian Village, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Roscoe Village, or St. Ben's those neighborhoods technically stop at Western Avenue so again you are staying east of Western. And it almost doesn't matter anyway because over the last 7 years there have been very few homes above $1 MM for sale west of Western anyway as you can see in the map below. It's pretty dramatic isn't it?
In this map I just looked at home sales west of Ashland to reduce the data points and the sales for each of the last 7 years are color coded. In fact you can turn on or off any particular year by checking different boxes at the bottom of the map. And you can go here to see a full sized version of the map: Million Dollar Homes West Of Ashland.
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