bubbleinfo.com

(Hat tip to PC!) The owner said that he had offers, hopefully this is heading to escrow:

With its octagonal design that’s part Jetsons, part Bond, John Lautner’s Chemosphere House is considered a masterpiece of California Modernism. Perched on concrete poles, the home is reached via an inclined cable railway. Wiki link.

Lautner ingeniously solved the problem of the 45-degree slope by siting the entire house off the ground atop a 50-foot (15 m) concrete pillar that rests on a massive concrete pad 20 feet (6.1 m) in diameter and 3 feet (0.91 m) thick, buried into the rocky hillside. Halfway up the pillar, eight angled steel “spokes” — bolted onto bosses formed onto the surface of the column — splay out and up, supporting and stabilizing the outer rim of the house, and the center of the pillar also houses the utility cables and pipes.

Lautner provided access from the driveway up the steep hillside by installing a funicular, which terminates at a short sloping gangway that leads up to the entrance. The house is octagonal in plan and lozenge-shape in section, and is often described as a “flying saucer”.

From HW:

Bank of America completed more short sales than it unloaded previously foreclosed homes every month for the last year and a half.

In May, BofA completed roughly 9,000 short sales compared to 7,000 REO, said David Sunlin, the bank’s real estate management executive. With the introduction of the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives program in April 2010, lenders received the first guidelines for these transactions.

Since then, banks find it easier to collect necessary documentation and reduce the time it takes to close these transactions. Recent guideline changes to HAFA could push numbers higher in 2011.

BofA completed more than 95,000 short sales in 2010, more than double the prior year, Sunlin said.

“HAFA is dead on. It’s a lot easier to qualify now for HAFA than it was in 2010. All I need is a hardship affidavit and one water bill. We’re trying to make it as easy as possible,” Sunlin said.

Justin Rand, Citigroup senior vice president of loss mitigation, said his bank used to take an average 120 days from when the property was listed to when it closed. That since dropped to 83 days.

There remain some setbacks, however. Real estate agents in the audience at HousingWire’s REO Expo in Fort Worth, Texas, complained of having an offer from a buyer at what the property listed at, only to lose the deal when the bank’s appraisal came in afterward. Sunlin suggested these buyer-side agents send in their own information with the servicer for a better chance of reconciling the appraisal.

“Valuation is an inexact science. The offer may be a full to list, but not to the appraisal. When you submit your own short sale deal, send your own BPO,” Sunlin said.”If you put your facts out there, you can at least make your case.”

Other agents said those working on the other side of the deal do not send in offers or document packages correctly, regardless of any certification. Both Sunlin at BofA and Rand at Citi said their banks are considering recommending agents to the homeowner.

“We would love to get into a system where we’re recommending agents for a short sale,” Sunlin said. “But (the) homeowner has their rights, they’re going to select who they want to select, and that’s going to be the biggest constriction.”

As lenders continue to tweak imperfections, demand will rise.

Chris Saitta, CEO of Equator, which provides a technology platform to process short sales for the largest lenders, said servicers completed short sales on 4% of their portfolios to 16% today.

“There is a steady but slow increase in REO, which equals a steady, slow increase in short sale,” Saitta said.

Hat tip to DB for sending this along, from the latimes.com:

UCLA forecasters have seen the future of California’s housing market, and it looks like this: more apartments near the coast, fewer McMansions in the desert.

That prediction is based on several factors, including expectations that rising fuel prices will encourage people to live closer to jobs along the Southland coast and in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The state’s population is also skewing younger, meaning there will be more demand for urban rental units and less demand for suburban cul-de-sacs, according to the quarterly economic forecast released Wednesday by UCLA’s Anderson School of Business.

“The incremental demand for housing is moving more into multifamily housing,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist with the forecast. “Many of the younger generation have been buffeted by the boom and bust in the housing market, and see value in living closer to work.”

That’s bad news for the state economy, however, for two reasons. One is that construction of multifamily homes requires less labor than construction of single-family homes. Second, areas such as the Inland Empire and Central Valley that were hit hardest by the housing bust won’t get a construction boom to help pull them out of the economic doldrums.

This means “there is an even larger structural unemployment problem in California than we originally thought,” Nickelsburg wrote in the forecast. “Not only do we have excess construction, real estate and support skills, but some of those that will be demanded will be in the wrong geography.”

California won’t start adding a significant number of building permits until 2013, forecasters say, which is one of the reasons the state’s unemployment rate will stay above 10% until the middle of that year. Nonfarm employment in the state won’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014, and construction employment won’t reach those levels until at least 2021.

“In a typical recovery, you get a bounce-back in housing and hiring of a lot of construction workers,” Nickelsburg said in an interview. “We’re not seeing that this time, which definitely slows the recovery, and slows economic growth.”

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The REO list price is at the end:

From cnbc.com:

Imagine you are 22 years old, getting married, and struggling to find a new home.

It helps when Daddy steps in.  Just ask Petra Ecclestone.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ecclestone’s father, Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, has bought his daughter a 56,500-square-foot mansion (plus the 17,000-square-foot attic) that Candy Spelling has had on the market for $150 million, the highest U.S. home price ever.

No word on what it actually sold for, and Spelling isn’t talking.

Interview with Candy Spelling about selling the house:

There are several thoughts here:

1. Open houses are powerful tools when used within a specific marketing strategy.
2. Getting the price right is easier in the newer tract neighborhoods.
3. Demand is fine - buyers are ready, willing, and able – and will pay a fair price.
4. Most sellers are 5% to 10% too high on their initial list price, and then don’t adjust quickly. 
5. The summer season will be over by mid-July (4 weeks away).

There is very little chatter in the media about specific market details – just vague numbers that always seem to sound bad. Does N.A.R., or other influential industry leaders, try to educate the participants – both clients and agents?  Why doesn’t somebody roll out real facts, and solutions?

It’s because they are gripped with fear, and scared they might say the wrong thing – and at this point, they really don’t know what to say.

Anybody with a microphone is too far removed from the day-to-day action to really know what’s happening, and won’t investigate.

I’m going to keep laying out the basics, in hopes that somebody is listening: