Everybody needs a roof over their head – even local businesses. Jonathan Lansner, a veteran reporter at The Orange Country Register, details how to cover the story of real estate locally and nationally.
Megan O’Matz and John Maines of the Florida Sun Sentinel found a way to quantify the number of bank-owned abandoned houses in foreclosure. Using data to determine who owns the properties, Megan and John found the proliferation of vacant, often untended properties is partly fueled by ownership uncertainties.
The Census Bureau released its quarterly-housing survey on Monday, and the headline is that the rate of U.S. home ownership has dropped to 1997 levels in our stagnant post-recession economy. That statistic alone can spark a number of business and finance stories, and the report (indeed the entire Census housing portal) offers plenty of fodder [...]
Part of the fun of reporting is following a sort of mental breadcrumb trail to generate new ideas and angles. In pondering Facebook’s upcoming IPO, it’s natural to contemplate a look at possible local IPOs. (Keep an eye on a good IPO calendar, like this one from NASDAQ.) That led me to mosey around the [...]
Residential real estate is still a buyers’ market, as Thursday’s report on existing home sales showed; a slight dip from the month before was attributed to a slowdown in investors snapping up vacant home. Five years into the bust, it’s hard to see when the gridlock caused by millions of vacant foreclosures, established home buyers [...]
The tornado alerts have waned for the time being after last weekend’s deadly storms. But given the track record so far this year, and severe spring weather outlooks from AccuWeather and other forecasters, it’s probably a good idea to determine how you’ll cover any outbreaks from a financial point of view. Storms, flooding, high winds, [...]
Instead of rewriting national reports on unemployment and home prices, why not craft something that’s different and more relevant to your readers? Jon Lansner, The Orange County Register’s prolific real estate writer, demonstrates that in a recent blog about home builders’ confidence. Rather than rehash the national stats released by National Association of Home Builders/Wells [...]
When Baltimore’s high property tax rates became a central topic in last summer’s mayoral election, reporters at The Baltimore Sun sought novel ways of examining the issue. The rates are “far and away, the highest in Maryland,” so it was not a new story, said reporter Scott Calvert. In order to explore new territory and [...]
Source development and a good bit of preliminary reporting helped result in Edward Robinson unearthing a real estate trend article about the private equity market yielding “awesome” gains from converting foreclosed single-family homes into rentals. Robinson, a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets for the last 10 years, heard from his private equity sources last summer [...]
This Smart Money article caught my eye the other day: “Time share prices plummet to $1.” The market for those slices of property ownership is so bad that people are trying to give them away, and according to the article, 48 percent of owners are behind on their annual maintenance dues by at least a year. [...]
