Australian Real Estate Blog
From the category archives:
Ms Albrechtsen of The Australian (House of cards built with good intentions | The Australian and Not Everyone Should Own a Home - WSJ.com) is right to a degree – but she fails to take a further step back to the land use regulations – and in how artificial scarcities created by restricting fringe land supply and inappropriate infrastructure financing – provided the “scarcity foundation” for these urban housing bubbles to get underway.
residential architect’s Project of the Year exhibits a startling originality that elevated it above the rest of the winners. “There’s stuff in here I’ve never seen before,” marveled a judge, and the other jurors agreed. “It brilliantly reinvents the everyday,” added another. Architect Matthew G. Trzebiatowski, AIA, designed the project as his own house and studio in Phoenix. He reimagined the typical live/work paradigm, sinking a two-level office space into the ground and topping it with a loft for himself and his wife, Lisa, a psychologist. No internal connection between home and studio exists; instead, an exterior stair leads from the residence down into a shaded courtyard. From there you enter the office’s mezzanine level, where you descend a coiled steel stairway into the main work area. “There’s something very comforting about having that big separation between the live and work space,” Trzebiatowski says
Grow your own home
Engineers and plant scientists from Tel Aviv have taken the application of tree shaping to the next level, designing everything from streetlamps to houses. “A home built from trees, the researchers said, would be a natural storm protector. “After earthquakes and after tsunamis the only structures that still survive are trees,” said Yaniv Naftaly, director of operations at Plantware, a company founded in 2002. Naftaly told LiveScience the same sturdiness should apply to tree-made homes. Eshel and TAU colleague Yoav Waisel are working with Plantware to commercialize the leafy designs. The team found that certain tree species grown aeroponically (in air instead of soil and water) have roots that don’t harden. Once the malleable, so-called soft roots grow long enough in the lab, they are molded around metal frames in the shape of a playground or park bench.” Read more of this story at msnbc.msn.com
AND THEY’RE FOR SALE Two houses with garages that are on the market in Manhattan and Brooklyn, from left: 11 East 128th Street, priced at $4.2 million, and 1230 Dean Street in Crown Heights, listed at $1.195 million.
MILLIONS of New Yorkers compress their lives into small spaces and yearn for things that their friends in the suburbs don’t think twice about: an extra bedroom, a patch of grass, a little distance between themselves and the neighbors. read more
It would appear the worlds Central Bankers had a “confusing time” at their annual retreat at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA – if this article from the Financial Times Bankers caught between hope and despair is any guide.
Let’s hope the “Hole” wasn’t too big between hope and despair!
The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand) article Leaky homes and the housing bubble - New Zealand news on Stuff.co.nz (Saturday, August 9) provides an excellent example of how too many economists and property commentators appear unfamiliar with the “Law of Supply and Demand” and the nature and phases of urban property bubbles.
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IN THE early 1990s the mining town of Newman in Western Australia was in a deep slump. Its population had dwindled to 3,000 from a peak of 15,000 in the 1970s.
Thanks to extraordinary demand (and prices) for commodities, primarily from China, migration has since been reversed.
The population is nearing 11,000 and no tour of the local streets is complete without pausing at a home that was recently sold for A$800,000 ($770,000), having fetched A$80,000 just a few years ago. Read more
To get a sense of the downside of a “housing bubble” - California is the best current example.
Within his April 8th article The Housing Abyss is Deep, Dr. Housing Bubble Blog sets out the current situation within that State.
Within his amusing April 5th article The Housing Mess is Getting Ugly he explains (from a recent article “Cosmetic surgery business sags as purse strings tighten - Los Angeles Times) - how the “California girls” are now looking……..well…… saggy.
It would appear that it’s not only the girl’s anatomy’s that are sagging in California.
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A CELEBRATION of diversity is a common thread that appears to bind most local government brochures, literature and mission statements. The flyers that councils regularly send out to residents informing them of their rates at work, rarely fail to remind burghers of their municipality’s eclectic population mix of the administration’s pledge to uphold and foster its commitment to cultural diversity.
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