Best markets to become an owner

While rising home prices have dampened returns of landlords in some markets, other markets still offer many benefits.

And while the increase in home prices have dampened returns of landlords in some markets, other markets still offer many benefits, according to RealtyTrac, which has analysed rental market conditions in 370 main counties in the United States, including the median prices of homes, average rents and unemployment rate.

Major housing markets for investors in rental proipertiesWashington, D.C./Arlington, va. Source: RealtyTrac Act sales house prices data and local multiple listing Services. of the United States Department of Housing and Urban development fair market rents; unemployment data retrieved from Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Labor Department.

For example, the owners in Anderson County, S.C., who rent out a median priced three bedroom home would be averaged returns of 15.3% - well above the average of 10%, RealtyTrac found. This is because the houses here are cheap at a median of less than $70,000, so that rents an average of $900 per month.

Houses a University and several auto parts makers for BMW, Anderson is part of the agglomeration of Greeneville and has a low unemployment rate of 4.3%, meaning demand is expected to continue to strengthen and help to add to future profits.

Related: Buy or rent: what you'll pay in 10 cities

Other sectors which offer to bang owners more for their money, which include County of Woodbury. Median prices of homes in the region, which includes the conurbation of the city of Sioux, were a low $ 84 250 so that rents averaged $914 per month. That translates into a rental return of about 13% to the owners.

While the low unemployment rate is owners a factor must find all in assessing a market, RealtyTrac has also suggested that investors take the demographics of an area has also, especially when it comes to baby boomers and generation y.

"Many individuals in two of these demographic groups are at the heart of the life of great changes that often involve changes in housing, something that smart real estate investors should take into account when you decide when and where to buy or sell," said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.

Markets where these populations are booming should produce solid returns for investors in the future, he said.

Related: Villas for sale, dream Beach

For baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1964, the easy retirement in Florida markets are predictable hot, RealtyTrac found. Some local markets have seen their boomer populations grow by 20% or since 2007.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg - Clearwater, Florida, metropolitan area in top of the list among the markets where rentals boomers are... EH well, booming.

 

Markets millennia, on the other hand, were scattered throughout the country. RealtyTrac cited metropolitan areas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Florida and Atlanta as major markets for rental for this age group.

Several small markets are also good Millennium Paris as Fayetteville, North Carolina and Virginia Beach/Newport City News, Virginia.

First published: 3 July 2014: 3 pm 41 et

Best markets to become an owner

While rising home prices have dampened returns of landlords in some markets, other markets still offer many benefits.

And while the increase in home prices have dampened returns of landlords in some markets, other markets still offer many benefits, according to RealtyTrac, which has analysed rental market conditions in 370 main counties in the United States, including the median prices of homes, average rents and unemployment rate.

Major housing markets for investors in rental proipertiesWashington, D.C./Arlington, va. Source: RealtyTrac Act sales house prices data and local multiple listing Services. of the United States Department of Housing and Urban development fair market rents; unemployment data retrieved from Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Labor Department.

For example, the owners in Anderson County, S.C., who rent out a median priced three bedroom home would be averaged returns of 15.3% - well above the average of 10%, RealtyTrac found. This is because the houses here are cheap at a median of less than $70,000, so that rents an average of $900 per month.

Houses a University and several auto parts makers for BMW, Anderson is part of the agglomeration of Greeneville and has a low unemployment rate of 4.3%, meaning demand is expected to continue to strengthen and help to add to future profits.

Related: Buy or rent: what you'll pay in 10 cities

Other sectors which offer to bang owners more for their money, which include County of Woodbury. Median prices of homes in the region, which includes the conurbation of the city of Sioux, were a low $ 84 250 so that rents averaged $914 per month. That translates into a rental return of about 13% to the owners.

While the low unemployment rate is owners a factor must find all in assessing a market, RealtyTrac has also suggested that investors take the demographics of an area has also, especially when it comes to baby boomers and generation y.

"Many individuals in two of these demographic groups are at the heart of the life of great changes that often involve changes in housing, something that smart real estate investors should take into account when you decide when and where to buy or sell," said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.

Markets where these populations are booming should produce solid returns for investors in the future, he said.

Related: Villas for sale, dream Beach

For baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1964, the easy retirement in Florida markets are predictable hot, RealtyTrac found. Some local markets have seen their boomer populations grow by 20% or since 2007.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg - Clearwater, Florida, metropolitan area in top of the list among the markets where rentals boomers are... EH well, booming.

 

Markets millennia, on the other hand, were scattered throughout the country. RealtyTrac cited metropolitan areas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Florida and Atlanta as major markets for rental for this age group.

Several small markets are also good Millennium Paris as Fayetteville, North Carolina and Virginia Beach/Newport City News, Virginia.

First published: 3 July 2014: 3 pm 41 et

San Francisco Has Become America's Largest Gated Community — And That Is Bad For California

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
California is an earthly paradise. Yet there is something badly broken about the Golden State. At its best, California is America’s America, where the young and adventurous go for a fresh start.

The trouble is that housing in much of California has become so expensive that the young and adventurous have been priced out, leaving its most beautiful stretches to wealthy insiders.

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of visiting the Bay Area, to see friends and to attend a conference. The conference was held in a beautifully-situated resort in Marin County overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, where a small number of low-rise buildings dotted a pristine landscape.

And I thought to myself, as I often do, that it was insane that this land was not instead dotted by massive high-rises housing thousands of people. The beautiful town of Sausalito has a population of just over 7,000 within its 2¼ square miles. But would it be any less lovely if it were home to twice as many people, or 10 times as many even? Or would it be lovelier still if graceful towers full of young families sprouted on land currently devoted to, of all things, golf courses?

Or consider San Francisco, one of the least-affordable major cities in the United States. San Francisco’s population is about 825,000. If it had the same population density as my hometown, New York City, it would instead have a population of 1.2 million. Note that I’m referring to the population density of all five boroughs of New York City, including suburban Staten Island and the low-rise outer reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. A San Francisco of 1.2 million would not be a Blade Runner–style dystopia in which mole people were forced to live cheek-by-jowl in blighted tenements. San Francisco at 1.2 million people would still be only half as dense as Paris, a city that is hardly a Dickensian nightmare.

One of the many benefits of allowing for more housing in a city like San Francisco is that it would likely lead to sharp reductions in carbon emissions. San Francisco is among the greenest cities in the United States, thanks largely to its superb climate. The same goes for San Diego, San Jose, and Los Angeles. The economists Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn have estimated that a San Francisco household spends one-fourth as much on electricity as a comparable household in Houston, as coastal Californians have far less need for air conditioning. To be sure, California does face serious environmental challenges.

For example, that California’s water resources are stretched thin. But redirecting water resources from agricultural to residential uses would make an enormous difference, as would pricing water resources more intelligently. The environmental upside of supersizing San Francisco and other coastal California cities far outweighs the downside.

So what exactly is the problem? Well, the idea of a much denser San Francisco strikes many residents as appalling, not least because they fear that new development would threaten the city’s distinctive architectural character and the gorgeous views afforded by its stringent land-use regulations.

Shutterstock.com

While I love quirky Victorian houses as much as the next bobo, aesthetic considerations can’t justify the fact that San Francisco has become an oversize gated community.

Rents in San Francisco are three times the national average, and they are rising at a fearsome clip. The housing crisis is even more severe in booming Silicon Valley, where the housing stock has barely increased over the last decade, despite the fact that the region has become a magnet for tech professionals from around the world.

When skyrocketing demand meets stagnant supply, the predictable consequence is that housing costs soar and low- and middle-income families find themselves displaced.

Perhaps you believe, as many otherwise intelligent people do, that the law of supply and demand is somehow inapplicable to the housing market. Consider the following. While San Francisco’s housing stock grew by 8.8 percent between 2000 and 2010, for an average annual growth rate just under 0.9 percent, the average annual growth rate of the housing stock in inner Tokyo was 2 percent. The shocking result is that while rents have been rising rapidly in San Francisco, they’ve been falling, albeit slightly, in Tokyo. If anything, San Francisco should be building far more housing than Tokyo, the capital of a country that is aging rapidly and that welcomes a trivially small number of immigrants.

Rather than allow for more housing development, California’s political class has embraced the campaign to raise the minimum wage. The statewide minimum wage is already set to increase to $10 by July 2016, and labor activists have been pushing to raise it higher still. Not to be outdone by Seattle, Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, has called for a $15 minimum wage for local workers to be put in place by July 2018.

Whether or not minimum wage hikes are the best way to raise incomes (I tend to agree with Slate’s Jordan Weissmann on this issue), it’s worth noting that according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, you’d need to earn $29.83 an hour to afford a market-rate one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, or roughly twice Mayor Lee’s proposed minimum wage.

Even the most enthusiastic proponents of minimum-wage increases will generally accept that you’d price some workers out of the labor market at a wage floor twice as high as Seattle’s. Relying solely on minimum wage hikes to make San Francisco housing affordable for local workers will ultimately mean driving all workers who can’t command a high wage out of the local labor market. Does that sound like much of a solution to you?

In The Gated City, Ryan Avent observed that high housing costs in America’s most productive cities had forced large numbers of middle- and low-income households to either accept long, costly commutes, which eat into the ability of families to work and save, or to move to low-cost, low-productivity regions. Over time, this greatly impairs the ability of working- and middle-class Americans to climb the economic ladder.

Moreover, when you move large numbers of people from high-productivity, high-wage regions to low-productivity, low-wage regions, you lower the productivity of the entire country. In other words, the rich homeowners who are fighting development in San Francisco and throughout coastal California are actually making America poorer. That’s not cool.