You might be prompted to think, “What recession?” when you hear that Essex Skyline at MacArthur Place — the new, “perfect” luxury high-rise apartment twin towers in Santa Ana — is now 56% leased and 50% occupied. Monthly rents at Skyline run as high as $4,500.

Skyline photo by Rose Palmisano
Its new owner, multifamily investor Essex Propery Trust, announced the ramp up progress for the 349 unit complex in its quarterly report to investors. Three months earlier, Skyline was 36% leased and 30% occupied. During the third quarter, Essex started leasing the complex’s second 25-story tower.

Essex earlier this year paid $128 million what was a failed for-sale condominium project and converted the buildings to the Skyline rentals. High-end apartment tracker LuxeListHome.com recently gave the Skyline towers a “perfect” score for overall excellence. (Click on accompanying photos for larger images!)

Essex also reports in Orange County that construction was completed and tenants started moving into Axis 2300 in Irvine, another failed condo project that it flopped to rentals. Essex says 75% of Axis’ 115 units are leased.

Also, Essex reported that it added to its Orange County bet by investing $12.0 million in a 768-unit complex in Anaheim believed to be Madison Park. as a preferred equity interest investment in a related party entity

Overall in Orange County, Essex reported that 96.5% of its 2,037 local apartment units owned for a year or more were filled in the third quarter. Average rent was $1,411 — unchanged from the second quarter

The Irvine Co. has sold 718 homes in and around its Woodbury communities — easily doubling the projected sales pace.

In January, The Irvine Co. debuted six new communities with 649 homes. The developer thought it would take 18 months, at a minimum, to sell the residences in what Irvine Co. homebuilding chief Dan Young called “the worst climate since the Great Depression.”

Expecting to sell 9 homes a week, the Irvine Co. homes have been going at a pace equal to 22 a week. The sales are so strong, Irvine Co has pushed 5 new communities to market.

Young says 5 of the original six are all but sold out. Even one of the second round of developments — Santa Barbara by builder California Pacific — has only one-fifth of its 125 homes remaining.

“We took a big risk, and it paid off,” Young said equating the projects’ somewhat novel, market-research-driven home designs to the hot iPad tablet computers. “You have to offer a compelling reason to buy. You have to know what customer wants.”

One design innovation are “great rooms” that combine family, living and dining rooms. See samples above; click for larger images!

Businesses signed up to use more office space this past summer as building owners continued to drop rents.

Vacancies fell from the prior month for the first time in four years, and the amount of space leased exceeded the amount vacated for the first time since early 2007, Voit Real Estate Services reported.

Kurt Strasmann, Managing Director of Voit’s Orange County brokerage offices, said:

“This marked the first quarter since … 2006 that the vacancy rate has dropped, which is an indication that the market is stabilizing. Additionally, we are finally beginning to see a decrease new available space being added to the market.”

However, that decrease in newly available space accounted for lower vacancy levels, not an increase in leasing activity. Leasing actually declined.
Details of Voit’s third-quarter office report include:

VACANCY:

The vacancy rate was 17.8%, vs. 18.2% in the spring quarter. It was the first time since the spring of 2006 that the office vacancy rate decreased fell from the previous quarter before.
However, vacancies were up from a year earlier. The vacancy rate was 16.5% in the third quarter of 2009.
Foothill Ranch had the highest proportion of empty offices. Thirty-five percent of office space there was vacant, followed by Anaheim Hills (33.8%) and Placentia (28.8%).
Dana Point had the lowest vacancy rate: Just 0.9% of offices there were empty, followed by La Habra (2.6%) and Fullerton (5%).
RENT:

The average lease rate fell 10.7% to $2 per square foot in the past year.
That compares to an average rental rate of $2.06 during the spring and $2.24 in the summer of 2009.
AVAILABILITY:

The amount of office space available for rent (both empty and about to be vacated) was 21.8%, or nearly 4.8% less than the third quarter of 2009.
The office “availability rate” also came down from the previous quarter, when almost 23% of O.C. offices were available.
NET RENTED SPACE (ABSORPTION)

By the end of the quarter, O.C. had 432,837 additional square feet rented out than at the beginning. The amount of rented space went down both in the previous quarter and the previous year.
The reason for the increase in rented space and decline in vacancy was owners put less new space up for rent this past quarter. But new leases actually were down. New leases accounted for just under 2.5 million square feet, vs. just under 2.6 million square feet in the previous quarter.
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When it comes to homebuilding this year, Orange County breaks down into two areas: Irvine and the rest of the county.
Two out of every three Orange County building permits issued this year came from Irvine, according to new figures from the Construction Industry Research Board.

In the rest of Orange County, homebuilding is lagging behind last year’s record-low pace.
A city official said that the Irvine Co. is behind most of this year’s growth, receiving building permits for nearly 700 units at a Spectrum apartment complex last month.

Here’s a breakdown:

Of the 2,328 residential building permits issued in Orange County through August, 1,458 were in Irvine, 870 in the rest of O.C.

Irvine’s pace of issuing building permits increased tenfold this year from 2009 (an 892% increase).
The rest of O.C.: Permits dropped 34% this year so far.

Most of that new development is driven by the Irvine Co.’s Park apartments at the Spectrum. The city of Irvine issued 26 times more building permits for multi-family units this year than in the first eight months of 2009 — 694 of them The Park apartments, according to a city official.

So far this year, Irvine issued 1,055 multi-family permits (apartments and condos), vs. 40 as of August 2009.
The rest of O.C.: Multi-family permits fell 61% this year so far.

Irvine also issued nearly four times the number of single-family home permits this year: 403 vs. 107 as of August 2009.
The rest of O.C.: 641 single-family permits were issued, a 13% decline from 2009.

“Irvine’s where it’s at,” said Eric Tolles, Irvine’s acting director of community development. “The story is … the Irvine Co. is going forward with this big (apartment) project. The Irvine Co. also is continuing development of Woodbury and Portola Springs.”

Tolles noted that the Irvine Co. completed the 1,550-unit Village at Irvine Spectrum apartment complex near the Irvine Spectrum and also finished the first 762-unit phase of the neighboring Park at Irvine Spectrum Center apartments. Last month, the company received permits for 694 units to complete the Park complex.

Until August, Orange County agencies had issued just 7% more building permits than in 2009, O.C.’s slowest year for homebuilding since World War II. But the Irvine Co.’s 694-unit issue last month pushed countywide homebuilding up 63% this year.

The owner of the retail-office plaza at Lennar’s newly restarted Central Park West condo project in Irvine announced that it has sold the parcel, but didn’t provide details of the deal or a reason for it.

One broker said that commercial developer LNR Property LLC actually was bought out by its partners.

Lang Cottrell, a Western regional president for LNR, was quoted in a company news release as calling the deal a ’structured sale’ that enabled the developer to “achieve a profitable sale despite a challenging economy.”

However, Cottrell couldn’t be reached to explain why LNR — which Lennar formed, then spun off on its own — is selling the project or why someone would buy it at a time when most commercial development is on hold.

The parcel — located at the corner of Michelson Drive and Jamboree Road — has city approvals to build a four-story office building with 90,000 square feet of space, plus 20,000-square-feet of shops. Plans call as well for “related structured parking.” The parcel is the commercial component of the 42-acre urban-chic Central Park West site just off the 405 freeway and Jamboree Road.

Photo by Mindy Schauer — click to enlarge
Central Park West, which ultimately will include almost 1,400 low-rise and high-rise condos, reopened for sales for just over a third of those units in May after being mothballed for over two years. Construction on almost 900 of the planned homes are on the back burner until the market improves.

Commercial development likewise is a ways off. With office vacancy rates above 18%, local brokers say construction likely won’t begin on new office buildings for two or three years.

Kurt Strasmann, the Orange County managing director for Voit Real Estate Services, said that LNR’s sale is actually a transfer in which some of its partners bought the developer out.

“It’s a change in control,” Strasmann said. “I think you’re seeing this more and more with distressed assets.”

Strasmann explained that people who have a controlling interest in a property have more at stake and, therefore, want to have ultimate control over the asset.

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If you’re thinking about buying a home, you know it’s more important than ever to have a high FICO score.

The pie at the right shows all the components that make up your score. What steps would you take to bump it up? How would you even know where to start?

“While these general guidelines exist, an individual’s credit score is the result of complex algorithms and their own personal credit profile,” says David Haub, a mortgage broker and business development manager for Map your Credit, a Huntington Beach-based credit rescoring company.

“On top of this, the credit scores that are used by banks and lenders to approve mortgage loans are different from the scores that are available from consumer credit websites,” he says. “While they are based in general on the same factors, the scores do not correlate, which can create confusion for a borrower who thinks they have a certain score only to find out that their mortgage score is lower.”

The credit mapping process is different from credit repair. (Click here for a list of what to stay away from.)

Haub and Joanne Ahmadi, the founder of MFI Credit Solutions, which owns MapYourCredit.com, provide several tips for consumers on improving their FICO scores here. This is what they advise:

1. “Maintain some type of credit activity. Even if you have decided to go to paying cash for everything, pull out your credit card once every six months to fill up a tank of gas or buy a burger. Then make sure you pay off that bill on time.

2. “Do not close any open credit cards. You can cut up the cards or file them away. Just don’t cancel them. The reason behind this is that your score is based on a measurement of how long you have had credit as well as the amount of available credit you are using. By canceling a card you may be impacting your credit history and will definitely be lowering your amount of available credit. You may have a good rationale to close unused cards like monthly charges or concerns over identity theft. So if you must close cards, make sure you are not closing your oldest card or your card with the largest credit limit.

3. “Pay all of your bills on time. While this may seem obvious, there are a good number of people who wait until the last minute to pay their bills and occasionally end up missing a due date. The penalty for a missed due date is a lot greater than the late charge. We have seen this negatively impact scores by up to 30 points.

4. “Pay down debt. As mentioned earlier, a large percentage of your credit score is determined by the amount of debt you owe. If you have the funds available, paying down balances on revolving debt can help you improve your credit score. It also may be sound financially. If you have money sitting in a savings account earning less than 1%, it makes sense to pay down high rate credit that you are paying upwards of 20% interest on. Of course the actual amount you should pay down will vary by each individual borrower and is based on a number of factors including your available funds and your financial circumstances. The credit mapping process takes into account the amount of funds a borrower has to pay down debt and advises them on how those funds should be used to pay down debt and achieve the ideal score. In many cases this does not mean spending all of your available funds nor does it mean paying all outstanding debt to zero.

5. “Seek advice before opening new credit lines or paying off collections. This is a case where timing is everything. Sometimes it is beneficial for a borrower to take immediate action to improve scores and in other cases; it may be more advantageous to wait until your loan closes to take certain steps. It all depends on your personal circumstances and short term and long term goals.

6. “It is never too soon to start thinking of improving your credit. In some cases, a credit map can achieve desired results within a week. Most people see results within thirty days. But there are a few people who require up to six months to improve their credit. It is a good idea for people to know where their credit is and begin taking the appropriate actions to improve and maintain their credit. So even if a consumer is not in the market to buy a new home or refinance their current one, a credit map can give them the piece of mind so that they are prepared.

Haub and Ahmadi say their service provides specific action items and time frames based on the homebuyer’s mortgage credit. It also helps real estate agents fill their pipeline with clients who have the tools to raise their scores, even if they’re a few months away from being able to make an offer. You can see more at MapYourCredit.com.

There is some controversy in the credit industry over rapid credit rescoring as it relates to the bigger picture.

“The credit score is designed to predict risk. If we manipulate it, are we still making a loan that’s at the same level of risk?” asks Gerri Detweiler, personal finance expert for Credit.com., an author and a former mortgage broker.

While the effects of the emphasis on rescoring remain to be seen, Detweiler says she also understands why homebuyers nowadays need help making sure their score is the best it can be. “I do have some sympathy for consumers,” she said, noting that the FICO scoring process, for many, can be “very mysterious.”

Source: Orange county register

23 Straw Flower 4 bed 3 bath 2026 square foot home in Northwood Pointe located the in the Gated community of Canyon View

“With summer in full effect and a perfect time for familes to move Orange County housing inventory grew by the largest amount so far this year, adding an additional 418 homes in the past two weeks and now totals 11,235. The market has not breached the 11,000 mark since the beginning of April 2009. Last year at this time the inventory was at 8,895 homes, 2,340 fewer than today. The inventory has not stopped growing at all this year as more and more pent up homeowners have opted to place their homes on the market at unrealistic levels. The same media reports of median home price increases and year over year increases in the number of closed sales have fooled these pent up sellers into believing that the market has recovered and that it is a great time to take advantage of the market. It is true that agents have tons of buyers in the market that have written many unsuccessful offers thus far and homes that are priced well are receiving multiple offers. The market disconnect lies in the fact that inventory has been increasing on the backs of unrealistic homeowners who have placed their homes on the market at overpriced levels.”

Thomas calculates a “market time” benchmark tracking how many months it theoretically takes to sell all the inventory in the local MLS for-sale listings at the current pace of pending deals being made. By this Thomas logic, as of last Thursday, it would take:

• 3.91 months for buyers to gobble up all homes for sale at the current pace vs. 3.78 months two weeks ago vs. 2.69 months a year ago vs. 5.38 months two years ago.
• Homes listed for under a million bucks have a market time of 3.37 months vs. 10.68 months for homes listed for more than $1 million.
• So, basically, it is 3.2 times harder to sell a million-dollar-plus residence!
• And just so you know, the million-dollar market represents 21% of all homes listed and 8% of all homes that entered into escrow in the past 30 days.

Here’s the recent data, as of last Thursday, for listings; deals pending; market time in months; last Thursday vs. 2 weeks ago, a year ago and 2 years ago (Note: k=thousand; m=million) …

This single story 3 bedroom 2 bath 1,695 square foot home is located on a cul de sac with a king size 7,540 square foot lot. The floor plan is open, airy and bright with vaulted ceilings in most rooms plus skylights and a central atrium. Located in the Northwood community with award winning schools and within walking distant to Castle Park. New Carpet and paint, No Mello Roos and no HOA dues

Open House from 1-4 Saturday and Sunday

For more information on this home please call

Taylor Crary

(949) 500-2691

www.taylorcrary.com

Prudential California Realty