A trend in recycling structures not traditionally considered “real estate” is changing how potential home and business owners, not-for-profit organizations, government agencies and the U.S. military view shipping containers.

The use of rudimentary containers to ship cargo began in the late 17th century. By the 1950s, Malcolm McLean of Sea-Land Shipping, pushed by the U.S. military to standardize their design, was building strong, uniform, theft-resistant, stackable shipping containers that were easy to load and unload by truck, rail and ship, and easy to store.

In 2005, an estimated 18 million containers made a combined total of about 200 million trips. Many containers measure 20 feet or 40 feet in length, and a 40-foot-long shipping container offers 304 square feet of floor space.

A trade imbalance has led the containers piling up around U.S. hubs, and storing them increases the cost of doing business.

One response to the problem: Re-engineer the containers. As architects and designers around the world evolve and refine creative reuse, containers are reshaping as disaster-relief shelters, coffee shops, student housing, custom homes, retail towers, even storing physical books after they are digitized.

The U.S. military, for example, has deployed “Containerized Housing Units,” or CHUs (pronounced “SHOOS”): Army and private military contracting companies use the converted shipping containers to house troops, contractors and others.

The units offer hard floors, windows, air conditioners, beds for up to three people, and some are outfitted with refrigerators.

According to the U.S. Army Environmental Command, the first multistory commercial structure built of recycled steel containers on a U.S. Army base opened in Fort Bragg, N.C., in April 2008.

Twelve containers, each measuring 9 feet 6 inches in height, 8 feet wide, 40 feet long and made of 14-gauge steel, form the two-story, 4,322-square-foot 249th Engineers company Operations Building that houses two company detachments.

Living in former shipping containers may have begun as a fringe novelty, but it is far from such these days. Many entrepreneurs are exploring new niches amid the growing assortment of shipping container-based structures.

Alex Klein of Container Home Consultants Inc. has been involved in shipping container conversions for 30 years, while Heather Levin said she appreciates container homes after noticing how much of her hard-earned dollars went to a bank as mortgage loan interest.

Victor Wallace of ContainerHomes.info authored the free downloadable book, “The 30 Most Influential Shipping Container Homes Ever Built!” His website presents extensive tutorials and videos for container conversions and also offers a free download of the book with designs from around the world.

21st Century Homes & Structures builds modular homes and claims it is the “original approved shipping container home manufacturer in New York … certified since 1985.”

That company reports that its modified shipping containers are “eco-friendly, (energy-efficient), hurricane-resistant, pest-free, affordable and green.” The company offers units in sizes ranging from 480 square feet to 1,280 feet, and prices starting at $89 per square foot. That does not include excavation site work and foundations. The company offers turnkey packages and ships throughout the U.S.

An Argentinian-born woman living in California identified by faircompanies.com as “Lulu” (no last name given), was reportedly forced by the recession to downsize, and found and modified a free shipping container. She took a couple of months to gather mostly recycled components to remodel the unit, faircompanies.com reported, and it took another month to convert the original 360-square-foot space into a home for herself and her small daughter.

With hot water on demand from a small camping device, and camping stoves for cooking, Lulu noted that her home features a separate bathroom and second bedroom, and she plans to add a teahouse and a greenhouse.

One New Jersey-based company, Sea Box Inc., offers a 1,000-square-foot, three-bedroom home — the Modular Systems Housing Unit — built from shipping containers. The structure also features a living-dining room, kitchen, bathroom and storage.

For multifamily housing, we can deliver and erect a four-story, 16-unit apartment building, fully furnished and move-in ready, in three days,” according to Robert A. Farber, director of contracts and counsel for Sea Box.

“All of these living quarters will last more than a hundred years, are impervious to pest infestation (termites can’t bite through steel), and can withstand hurricane-force winds that would destroy conventional housing,” he also said in an email message, adding that the company bid for a job to potentially supply tens of thousands of housing units built from shipping containers to New York City in the event of a major natural disaster.

The company offers a range of designs, he said, “including offices, laundry facilities, machine shops, personnel shelters, and even a giant movie screen: 90 feet high.”

Sea Box structures have also been used by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations, he said, and “We’ve sold two-story container configurations, which individually house 2,000 computer servers used to power the search engine Bing.”

By Inman News, Wednesday, March 14, 2012.

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That’s because, of the four states hardest hit by the housing crisis, three — Nevada, Florida and Arizona — have already had their primaries. The fourth, California, has its primary June 5.

“If candidates want to talk about what voters want most, they should focus on housing issues where it’s clearly a pain point for voters. This means that … we probably won’t hear much about housing from the presidential candidates again until the summer,” said Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist, in a blog post.

In order to figure out which states are suffering the most from the housing downturn, Trulia developed a Housing Misery Index that adds together the percentage change in home prices from their peak through fourth-quarter 2011, from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and the percent of mortgages either severely delinquent (by 90 days or more) or in foreclosure as of fourth-quarter 2011, from CoreLogic.

Trulia Housing Misery Index: Top 10 ‘most miserable’ states

Source: Trulia

Foreclosure hotspots Nevada, Florida, Arizona and California were rated more “miserable” by far than other states, according to the index. Among the top 10 hardest-hit states, three — Washington, Georgia and Idaho — will have their primaries within the next week.

By Inman News, Wednesday, February 29, 2012.

Inman News®

In one example, an experienced contractor bought a home to fix up and resell. The contractor looked over the property carefully before he bought it, but he did not have it inspected by an impartial home inspector.

After the contractor took possession of the property, he discovered that the furnace was shot and required replacement. The cost of a new furnace was not included in his renovation budget.

Homebuying is an emotional experience no matter how hard you try to keep it strictly business. You have high hopes that nothing will go wrong and the transaction will close. The appeal of a home could cloud your objectivity about the real purchase price when you consider the work that needs to be done to repair defects and deferred maintenance.

Home and magnifying glass image via Shutterstock.com.

Think again if you’re considering buying a home without having it inspected. This particularly applies to first-time buyers who have little, if any, experience with home defects and repairs. Even professionals can make mistakes when buying homes without having them thoroughly inspected.

In one example, an experienced contractor bought a home to fix up and resell. The contractor looked over the property carefully before he bought it, but he did not have it inspected by an impartial home inspector.

After the contractor took possession of the property, he discovered that the furnace was shot and required replacement. The cost of a new furnace was not included in his renovation budget.

Homebuying is an emotional experience no matter how hard you try to keep it strictly business. You have high hopes that nothing will go wrong and the transaction will close. The appeal of a home could cloud your objectivity about the real purchase price when you consider the work that needs to be done to repair defects and deferred maintenance.

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In some areas, the home-sale market has picked up. One example is California’s Silicon Valley, where job growth is strong. There is far more demand than there are homes for sale, which tends to drive prices up.

In some cases, buyers will waive contingencies in order to outbid the competition. Buying without including an inspection contingency in the purchase contract can be an expensive strategy if you later find defects that are expensive to repair.

The risk is minimized if the sellers provide the buyers with copies of recent presale home inspections done by reputable local home inspectors before they write an offer. However, most home inspection reports recommend further inspections. Diligent sellers take the extra step and have further inspections done, like a roof or furnace inspection. Many do not.

HOUSE HUNTING TIP: A second opinion from a highly regarded home inspector can’t hurt. The reason to have inspections at all is to find out as much as possible about the property’s condition before you go through with the sale. Don’t skip an inspection to save money.

Sometimes, buyers who are satisfied with the report they received from the seller’s home inspector will hire that inspector to do a walk-through inspection based on the seller’s report. This means a second home inspector isn’t involved. But at least the buyers have an opportunity to spend time at the property with the seller’s inspector, ask questions, and find out more about what works and what doesn’t.

Inspection contingencies protect the buyers and, depending on how the clause is written, can allow the buyers to withdraw from the contract without losing their deposit. This is why sellers are often drawn to an offer that doesn’t have an inspection contingency. However, accepting such an offer can create problems.

Inspection contingencies also protect sellers from future legal entanglements with the buyers over items that weren’t discovered before closing. It’s much easier to resolve inspection defect issues before, than after, closing.

Inspection contingencies can create an opportunity for buyers to ask sellers to fix defects, lower the price, or credit money at closing to cover the cost of repair work.

When buyers ask sellers to make concessions after they bought the house “as is” with respect to certain disclosed defects, it can be a deal-breaker. However, reasonable sellers will often attempt to negotiate an acceptable solution regarding newly discovered defects rather than put the house back on the market.

If you’re buying in a competitive market and find you’re losing out because you won’t waive an inspection contingency and others are willing to take the risk, consider having inspections done before making an offer.

THE CLOSING: Make sure to ask permission from the seller through the listing agent.

By Dian Hymer, Monday, January 2, 2012.

Inman News®

Dian Hymer, a real estate broker with more than 30 years’ experience, is a nationally syndicated real estate columnist and author of “House Hunting: The Take-Along Workbook for Home Buyers” and “Starting Out, The Complete Home Buyer’s Guide.”

It will come as no surprise that the most common New Year’s resolutions fall into the categories of getting organized and getting fit — physically and financially.

Financial fitness includes getting your real estate business in order. But you can’t set up your real estate plans for the year in a vacuum. They must be done in context of what’s going on in the market. Here are four predictions about what that market context will look like in the coming year:

1. Even more foreclosures

While I’d like to claim crystal-ball credit for this one, it doesn’t take heightened powers of prediction to foresee an uptick in the rate of home repossessions in 2012. Last fall’s robo-signing debacle and the ongoing legal fallout from it created a massive backlog in the foreclosure pipeline, meaning that banks are taking many months, even years, to actually foreclose on mortgages in default.

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that the additional hurdles New York state courts are requiring banks to leap in the wake of the robo-signing revelations, like additional settlement meetings with the homeowner to see if a modification can be brokered, have created a backlog of foreclosures that it would take 62 years to clear, at the current rate of foreclosure.

It’s pretty clear that in 2012 and beyond, the banks will work through those backlogs. The inevitable result will be an increase in foreclosures.

2. REOs and short sales will become the new normal

If you even know anyone who has house-hunted in the past couple of years, you’ve likely heard tales of the high-drama high jinks — super-long escrows, first-time buyers being bested by investors’ cash offers, banks resistant to negotiating for repairs — that take place in the course of a distressed property sale.

In the coming year, distressed home sales will continue to represent an increasing share of homes on the market. So, buyers will shift from considering whether to buy a short sale to understanding that they must be educated and prepared to do a deal with a seller, a bank (to buy an REO) or a hybrid of the two (to buy a short sale) to access the full selection of homes on the market.

This, in turn, will empower buyers to make smart decisions about what to offer and what to expect on any listing they like, as well as to set smart priorities and make realistic comparisons between listings based on their own personal priorities around timing, certainty and seller flexibility.

3.  So-called ‘smart cities‘ will do well 

This year, a number of housing markets saw double- or even triple-dips in home values. In others, pricing stayed relatively flat. However, in areas where technology powers the economy, home values prospered along with the industry. Silicon Valley real estate, for instance, saw fierce competition among buyers as the young employees of companies that went public like used their newly stocked bank accounts to buy their first homes.

I recently talked with Jed Kolko, chief economist for real estate search site Trulia, and his 2012 forecast was that so-called “smart cities” will continue to have hot real estate markets next year. But Kolko defined smart cities much more broadly than the California tech hubs. Other tech centers like Austin, Texas, and the Massachusetts suburbs of Cambridge, Newton and Framingham all made Kolko’s list, as did Rochester, N.Y. (a town known for its highly educated, highly skilled work force).

4. Consumers will get ‘hopeless’

I mean hopeless in the best of all possible ways. For years, buyers and sellers have been waiting for that singular event to occur that would cause a quick market recovery. But 2012 will mark the fifth or sixth year of the real estate recession, depending on who you talk to. I predict that those consumers who have not already done so will drop unrealistic hopes for a fast return to the heady real estate fortunes of the subprime era.  Instead, people will make their real estate plans based on:

• today’s low home prices, rather than the fantasy of what could happen if the market miraculously came back;
• assumptions of very low, or no, appreciation in home values for years to come; and
• very conservative estimates of their own finances and how they will grow.

As a result, buyers won’t break their necks to hurry and buy before prices uptick; rather, they’ll save and plan to buy when it makes the most sense for their finances. Homeowners will do the same; they will either refi, remodel and be content where they are for the long haul, or decide their homes no longer fit their lifestyles and their finances, divest of them and move on. But the good news is, people will make these decisions based on what is or is not sustainable for their lives and their finances, and not based on inflated hopes about what the market will or will not do.

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Tuesday, December 27, 2011.

Inman News®

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Tara is also the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com. Ask her a real estate question online or visit her website, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

Ring in the holiday season in style with this annual celebration of music, at the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe. This two-day festival features today’s most talented jazz musicians in live evening performances. The Hyatt is located on the shores of beautiful Lake Tahoe, so the setting is spectacular. What an extraordinary way to kick off the holiday season!    

Yet, there are some very shiny silver linings to this whole mess — a handful of ways in which our mindsets, habits, behaviors and approaches to money, mortgage and even life decision-making — have been changed by this real estate market debacle. As I see it, here are the five best things about this otherwise terrible housing recession:

1.  People now buy for the long term. Even Jeff Lewis, that reality TV house flipper extraordinaire, has declared that he’s tapped out of the flipping business for the foreseeable future, trading in his real estate wheeling and dealing for the design business.  

Recently, he mentioned having lost six homes in the real estate market crash. While Lewis flipped homes as his business, just five years ago, many Americans — homeowners and investors alike — took a short-term view on their homes, buying them with the idea that they could count on refinancing, pulling cash out or even reselling them anytime they wanted, at a profit.

Reality check — those days are gone. Now, buyers know they’d better be prepared to stay put for somewhere between seven and 10 years (shorter in strong local markets, longer in foreclosure hot spots) before they buy if they want to break even. And this is causing them to take mortgages they can afford over time, and make smarter, longer-term choices about the homes they buy.

2.  Dysfunctional properties are being weeded out and creatively reused. Municipalities like Detroit and Cleveland are demolishing blighted and decrepit properties in dead neighborhoods en masse, intentionally shrinking their cities to match their shrinking populations. These efforts are also eliminating breeding grounds for crime, and focusing resources on the neighborhoods that have a better chance of surviving and thriving in the long term.

In the so-called “slumburbias” of central California, Nevada and Arizona, McMansions are being repurposed into affordable housing for groups of seniors, artist communities and group homes.

3.  American housing stock is getting an energy-efficient upgrade. The news would have you believe that every American has lost his or her home, walked away from it, or is now renting by choice. In fact, the vast majority of homeowners have simply decided to stay put.

Instead of selling and moving on up, homeowners are improving the homes they now plan to stay in for a long(er) haul. And this generation of remodeling is focused less on granite and stainless steel, and more on lowering the costs of “operating” the home and taking advantage of tax credits for installing energy-efficient doors, windows, water heaters and more. And while the first-time homebuyer tax credit is a thing of the past, the homeowner tax credits for energy-optimizing upgrades are in effect until the end of this year.

4.  People are making more responsible mortgage decisions, and building financial good habits in the process. Buyers are buying far below the maximum purchase prices for which they are approved. They are reading their loan disclosures and documents before they sign them. And, thanks to the stingy mortgage market, they are spending months, even years, in the planning and preparation phases before they buy: paying down their debt; saving up for a down payment (and a cash cushion, so that a job loss wouldn’t be disastrous); being responsible and sparing in their use of credit to optimize their FICO scores; and creating strong financial habits in one fell swoop.

5.  Our feelings about debt and equity have been reformed. Americans no longer use their homes like ATM machines, to pull out cash, pay off their credit cards and then start the whole overspending cycle over again. Many can’t, because their homes are upside down and cannot be refinanced in any event — much less to pull cash out.

Others have been reality-checked by the recession, and are dealing with their non-mortgage debt the old fashioned way: by ceasing the pattern of spending more than they make, and applying the self-discipline it takes to pay their bills off.

Home equity, in general, is no longer viewed as an inexhaustible source of cash. Rather, we see it as a fluctuating asset to be protected and increased — not so much through the vagaries of the market, but through the hard work of paying the principal balance down. Many of those refinancing into today’s lower rates aren’t doing it to pull cash out, as was the norm at the top of the market; instead, they are refinancing into 15-year loans to pay their homes off sooner than planned, or reducing their required payment so their extra savings can be applied to principal.

Of course, it remains to be seen how lasting these changes will be if and when home prices go up and mortgage guidelines loosen up. But since neither of these things look likely to happen in the short term, hopefully there’s a chance that these behavior shifts will become part of a permanent mindset reset for American housing consumers.

From Inman News – By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Tara is also the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com. Ask her a real estate question online or visit her website, www.rethinkrealestate.com.
 

July 1-4, 2011, the fifth annual Red, White, and Tahoe Blue celebration will entertain with 4 days of exciting events. Events include the Community Parade, Rubber Ducky Race, Dunk Tank, Wine & Cheese Event, Community breakfasts, Concerts, Carnival on the Green, Ice Cream Social & Chalk Drawing Contest for kids, and BBQs. The four days of fun, food, education, and entertainment culminate with Lake Tahoe’s most spectacular Fireworks display on July 4th!

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from www.visitrenotahoe.com

Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc, Calif., saw the biggest price decline: down 26.2 percent to $498,250. The market was also one of two to see its inventory rise year-over-year, by 6 percent. The other was Reno, Nev., with a 9.5 percent increase.

Source: Realtor.com

Course                                       Telephone                Holes                         Par

Arrow Creek/Legends           775-850-4653                18                              72

D’Andrea                                     775-331-6363                 18                              71

Kiley Ranch                               775-354-2100                   9                              27

LakeRidge                                  775-825-2200                18                               71

Red Hawk/Lakes                     775-626-6000                18                              72

Rosewood Lakes                     775-857-2892                 18                              72

Sierra Sage                                775-972-1564                  18                              71

Somersett Canyon Nine      775-787-4500                   9                              27

Wildcreek                                 775-673-3100                 18/9                          72/27

Wolf Run                                   775-851-3301                   18                              72

Washoe                                     775-828-6640                   18                              72

There are 9 more courses in Carson City/Douglas County and 15 in Truckee/Lake Tahoe, plus 9 private courses in the Reno/Sparks/Carson City/Lake Tahoe/Truckee areas.

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