McMansions swell the real eastate market as homebuyers think small

Ten years ago, when their grandchildren were young and visiting often, Frank and Rosemary Santoloci bought a brand new five-bedroom, four-bathroom home on four acres in Sparta.

There was ample room to play indoors, swim in the pool and and spend time outdoors.

But now the boys have gown up and don’t come over as frequently, so last spring, the couple put their home on the market. The house sold within four months — after they cut the price.

The Santolocis are among the lucky ones.

There is a glut of these McMansions on the market in the suburbs throughout New Jersey, real estate agents and analysts said.

Certain homebuyers once prized these large houses, tucked away on a few acres of land and featuring half a dozen bedrooms, grand entranceways, and three-car garages.

But in the face of the economic collapse, declines in personal wealth, a tight housing market, and a shift of what prospective homeowners want, all that has changed.

Major demographic changes could also make the market shrink even further in the next five years, as baby boomers retire and look to downsize. The generation behind them is smaller and has less money and a desire to live closer to urban centers.

“We definitely have an oversupply of inventory for the so-called McMansions,” said Mary Pat Spekhardt, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Sparta who worked with the Santolocis.

“Houses are staying on the market double the time that they used to, and everyone is frustrated,” she said. “We can’t make buyers, though, that’s the problem. We market, market, market the house and make the house stand out, but the buyers are few and far between.”

In New Jersey, it would take 14.6 months to sell the current inventory of houses listed between $600,000 and $1 million, according to real estate analyst Jeffrey Otteau, president of Otteau Valuation Group. The only houses that are selling are those with unique features, like an inground pool or a media room in the basement, agents said.

And the issue is only going to get worse.

A Bright Spot in the Condo Market

EVEN here — in a city that has been one of New Jersey’s most fertile breeding grounds for condominiums — construction has been virtually at a standstill since construction financing dried up several years ago.

“Nobody seems willing to take a chance on putting up anything but rentals anymore,” an exasperated Hudson County developer said last month.

But Martin Brady, the vice president for sales at the Marketing Directors, a company that markets both condominium and rental buildings in Manhattan and New Jersey, said the appetite for condos was growing stronger in Hudson County because developers had adjusted to more “value-conscious” buyers.

“The right product — efficiently sized, well priced, with amenities and finishes that are beautiful but not over-the-top — is well received,” Mr. Brady said.

Toll Brothers’ new 1450 Washington building here — a 156-unit building named for its street address — may be a case in point. Toll, which has a history of successes in Hoboken, started construction in August 2010, when sales pace for condos was generally at its weakest.
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“We’ve already sold a third of the units,” said Benjamin D. Jogodnik, a senior vice president of the Toll Brothers City Living division, recently, “and we don’t have a formal sales office open yet.” (A sales office is set to open on Nov. 10 at the nearly complete building, called 1450 Washington, which is its address.)

There are signed contracts for 45 units, and deposits in advance of signings on another 8.The condo, expected to open for occupancy in March, is part of Toll Brothers’ waterfront complex in northeastern Hoboken. It stands across the street from the Hudson Tea building, a onetime factory that was a rental until Toll converted it to condos in 2006, and just east of Harborside Lofts, another factory building converted to condos, in 2007.

Hudson Tea and Harborside Lofts were priced near the top of the scale at the time they were created. At Harborside Lofts, which is now entirely sold, studios started at $450,000 and penthouses ranged up to $2.5 million.
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“Since then the economy has shifted — obviously,” Mr. Jogodnik said. “We studied the market very carefully before designing a product that would appeal to the group in the widest section of the pyramid of today’s buyers.”

In neighboring Jersey City, said Mr. Brady of Marketing Directors, 47 contracts have been signed since July at a new building at Liberty Harbor, the community being developed by Peter Mocco in slow phases on a 28-acre site adjacent to the historic Paulus Hook and Van Voorst neighborhoods.

The Liberty Harbor units are “efficiently designed, 650 to 700 square feet, with hardwood floors, granite counters, stainless steel appliances, priced from the high $200,000s to the low-to-mid $300,000s,” Mr. Brady said.

When condo construction virtually ceased in Hoboken, Mr. Brady said, finished condos slowly continued to sell — even at the priciest level. The 38 condos on upper floors of the W Hoboken Hotel originally sold out quickly in 2008 when asking prices were set at $1.7 million. A number of those sales then fell apart, and about a dozen units were put back on the market.
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As for 1450 Washington, prices for studios start in the low $300,000s; one-bedrooms in the high $300,000s; two-bedrooms in the low $600,00s; three-bedrooms with a minimum of 1,500 square feet in the mid-$900,00s. On higher floors in the two-tiered building, prices are somewhat higher.

U.S. Homes in Foreclosure Average 611 Days Late on Payments

U.S. homeowners facing foreclosure were a record 611 days late paying their mortgages on average as legal disputes delayed bank repossessions, Lender Processing Services Inc. said today.

That was up from an average 599 days in July and 478 days in August 2010 for homes that had received a notice of foreclosure and weren’t sold or repossessed by banks, according to the Jacksonville, Florida-based real estate data company.

“You’ve got this bunching up in the later stages of the process,” Herb Blecher, senior vice president for analytics at Lender Processing Services, said in a telephone interview. “The bottlenecks are still there.”

The time to resolve mortgage delinquencies has grown from a year ago, when banks delayed filings after claims of “robo- signing,” or pushing through documents that weren’t verified, spurred investigations by attorneys general in all 50 states.

Foreclosures take longest in so-called judicial states, which require court approval to seize properties, led by New York, where the average home was in the process for 767 days. It was followed by Florida with 757 days, New Jersey with 708, Hawaii with 681 and Washington, D.C., with 676, Lender Procession said. The shortest averages were in Wyoming at 398 days, Nebraska at 407, Alaska at 411, Idaho at 416 and Arizona at 418.

An Apple Tree Grows in Suburbia

Used to be, developers built high-end suburban communities around golf greens.

The hot amenity now? Salad greens.

In a movement propelled by environmental concern, nostalgia for a simpler life and a dollop of marketing savvy, developers are increasingly laying out their cul-de-sacs around organic farms, cattle ranches, vineyards and other agricultural ventures. They’re betting that buyers will pay a premium for views of heirloom tomatoes—and that the farms can provide a steady stream of revenue, while cutting the cost of landscaping upkeep.

Forget multimillion-dollar recreation centers—”our amenities are watching the cows graze and the leaves change,” says Joe Barnes, development principal for Bundoran Farm, a 2,300-acre development set amid apple orchards and cattle pastures outside Charlottesville, Va.

To be sure, the shaky economy has taken a toll on some of these developments, including Bundoran Farms, where the developers are moving ahead with new financial backers after a co-owner of the acreage went into foreclosure. Still, Bundoran’s developers say they have sold 19 lots, which run from about $250,000 to more than $1 million, in the past 10 months. And new communities centered on agricultural development are in various stages of planning and construction in cities from coast to coast, including South Burlington, Vt., Hayes, Va., Boise, Idaho, and Stockton, Calif.

“Agriculture is the new golf,” says Ed McMahon, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit group focused on land-use planning.
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There are three basic models for incorporating agriculture into suburbia. The most straightforward is to set aside land for a farm, orchard or vineyard within the community. Such ventures may be run by an independent contractor who leases the land, or by salaried farmers who work for the developer. A second model creates community gardens—tilled, irrigated and ready for planting—throughout the development. Residents can claim a plot and get their hands dirty. Or new-home buyers might be might be offered a choice of irrigation systems and planter boxes that would allow them to turn their own yards into mini-farms. A final model involves creating edible landscaping throughout common spaces—fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, cabbage and lettuce—and allowing residents to pick whatever they can use. Many of the new developments incorporate more than one of these visions.

The trend has its roots in the growing distaste for prototypical suburban sprawl: mile after mile of look-alike homes broken up by the occasional park. The sustainability movement, with its emphasis on conservation, preservation and local food production, has helped, too. Then there’s the fact that the U.S. already has thousands of golf-course communities, so developers looking to set their subdivisions apart need a new marketing hook.

“We’re not trying to be suburbia,” says Harold Smethills, a principal of Sterling Ranch, a planned development southwest of Denver that will feature a 4-H livestock ranch and hundreds of acres of community gardens.

So again, what is affordability? Are we talking about an economic issue here or a moral one (right to the American Dream)?

From the Record:

Big homes, big lots making N.J. even more unaffordable

New Jersey’s problem with suburban sprawl is getting worse, according to a new report.

Development of big homes on big lots and zoning that favors businesses have made it tougher for lower-income residents to afford to live in higher-income suburban towns today than it was in 1970, a study by Rowan University found.

All this occurs despite the long effort to push towns to add affordable housing and adhere to “smart growth” initiatives and zoning rules, the report says.

“Municipalities are making it almost impossible to build apartments and town houses that are affordable to middle-class New Jerseyans,” said Adam Gordon, spokesman for Fair Share Housing Center, which paid for the study. “Middle-class families cannot afford a 3-acre home.”
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The report says development of large suburban lots holding just one or two homes an acre dominated the state since 1986, while the construction of more affordable apartments, town houses and smaller single-family developments tapered.

Before 1986, 58 percent of residential development was in cities and already built-up suburbs. Since then, two-thirds occurred in rural and less compact areas, the report says.

The report also says municipalities have focused on industrial and commercial development, which pays tax dividends, rather than multi-unit apartments and town houses that bring in more school-age children.

“Municipalities want as few households as possible on any given piece of land,” said Tim Evans, research director for New Jersey Future, a non-partisan research group that helped produce the report.

Purchases of New Homes in U.S. Probably Held Near Record Low

Purchases of new houses probably held close to a record low in April, showing the real-estate market remains a weak link in the U.S. expansion, economists said before a report today.

New homes sold at a 300,000 annual pace last month, the same as in March, according to the median forecast of 75 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Purchases sank to a 270,000 pace in February, the weakest in 48 years of data.

The prospect that foreclosures will keep driving down property values means that buyers may continue to shun new houses in favor of previously owned dwellings, hurting builders like D.R. Horton Inc. Unemployment at 9 percent, stagnant wages and credit restrictions add to the headwinds, signaling a housing recovery will take years to unfold.

“Until that overhang of existing homes works its way down, new-home sales will remain depressed and construction as well,” said Steve Blitz, a senior economist at ITG Investment Research Inc. in New York.

The Commerce Department’s report is due at 10 a.m. in Washington. Estimates in the Bloomberg survey ranged from 280,000 to 320,000.
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Douglas Yearley Jr., chief executive officer at Toll Brothers Inc., the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, last week said the spring home-selling season has been “disappointing” and that “people are still scared.”

New Home Sales Up From Record Low

Sales of new homes increased in March from a record low a month earlier, a small boost for a struggling part of the U.S. economy.

Sales grew 11.1% on a monthly basis to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 300,000 in March, the Commerce Department said Monday. Results for the previous two months were revised upward, but February remained the worst month on the government’s records, which go back to 1963.

Economists cautioned against concluding that the new-homes market is on the rebound.

“Even with this improvement, the data on new home sales has remained in a very depressed range,” over the past year, wrote J.P. Morgan economist Daniel Silver. While sales of previously occupied homes have shown modest improvement over the past year, the market for new homes is faring far worse, he noted.

“It is not hard to have a large percentage increase in sales when you are coming off the lowest level since records started being kept,” wrote Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors, in a note to clients. “We need to more than double the March sales pace to reach decent sales levels.”

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had predicted the March sales rate would rise 14.8% to an annual rate of 287,000. Sales, however, were down 21.9% from March 2010.

Coming off the worst year for new home sales on record in 2010, the housing market continues to struggle to recover from a painful bust.

With demand soft, prices have been weak. The median sales price for a new home sold last month was $213,800, up 2.9% from $207,700 a month earlier, but down 4.9% from the same month last year.

From Reuters:

U.S. new home sales up, market still seen weak

Sales of new U.S. homes
rose in March and the number of properties on the market was
its lowest since the 1960s, but further gains will be hampered
by stiff competition from a glut of previously owned houses.

Single-family home sales rose 11.1 percent to a seasonally
adjusted 300,000 unit annual rate, the Commerce Department said
on Monday, up from 270,000 in February. Economists had expected
a 280,000-unit pace.

Despite last month’s rise, new home sales are just bouncing
along the bottom.

The market for new homes is being squeezed by competition
from previously owned homes and a deluge of foreclosed
properties, even though inventories in March fell to 183,000
units — the lowest since August 1967.

“The rebound in new home sales was encouraging, but the
March sales pace merely brings us back to the underlying trend
and indicates that housing continues to bounce around
historical lows,” said Omair Sharif, an economist at RBS in
Stamford Connecticut.

From Time:

New Home Sales: Slightly Better Than Horrible

It is interesting what registers as good news these days in the housing market.

People are making a big deal out of today’s new homes sales number as perhaps finally the sign that the housing sector is rebounding. On Monday, the Census reported that new housing sales rose 11% in March. This was greeted as generally good news. Nationwide, 29,000 new homes were sold and it puts the market on pace to clear 300,000 homes in 2011. It’s the first month that new home sales have jumped, and they were up in the double digits. So this is good news, no? Not really.

The March numbers were up from February. But February’s sales pace of 270,000 was the lowest on record since the Census began tracking the number in 1961. So beating that number is a little clearing the first round in whatever is the opposite of limbo. What’s more, on a year over year basis, March sales were actually down 22% from a year ago. And that might be the more important number. Despite the fact that the Census says it seasonally adjusts the number, new housing sales seem to always jump in March, perhaps because of the better weather. Perhaps because people are often looking to move in during the summer. New home sales even jumped in March in 2008, which was an all-round horrible year for housing and the economy. Based on that, last month’s jump, which was smaller that others, isn’t that meaningful.

U.S. New-Home Sales Unexpectedly Decline to Record-Low 250,000 Annual Pace

Purchases of new U.S. homes unexpectedly declined in February to the slowest pace on record and prices dropped to the lowest level since December 2003, adding to evidence the industry is floundering.

Sales decreased 16.9 percent to a 250,000 annual pace, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News projected a gain to a 290,000 rate, according to the median estimate. The median price fell 8.9 percent from the same month in 2010.

Builders are struggling to compete with existing homes as foreclosures add to the overhang of unsold properties and drive down values. The figures underscore the Federal Reserve’s view that the housing market “continues to be depressed” even as the rest of the economy improves.

“We’ve got this tug of war going on where we’ve got this very weak housing sector and a manufacturing sector that’s doing fine,” said Brian Jones, an economist at Societe Generale in New York, whose 240,000 forecast was the lowest in the Bloomberg survey. “The new and existing home sales numbers were abysmal. You could say that part of it was attributable to unusually harsh weather.”

From MarketWatch:

Dismal home-sales data tell us nothing new

Financial markets overreacted to the news Wednesday that U.S. sales of new homes fell about 17% in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 250,000, a record low and quite a bit worse than the 290,000 rate expected by the MarketWatch survey of top forecasters.

As of 11 a.m., an hour after the new-homes sales report was released, U.S. stock markets were down about 0.6%, while U.S. Treasury yields dropped. It wasn’t a huge move, but more than the economic data deserved.

The housing numbers from the Commerce Department are notoriously unreliable on a month-to-month basis and should not be used as the sole reason for any investment decision.

In February, the standard error on the monthly data was 19.1%. That means government statisticians are 90% confident that the real level of home sales in February was somewhere between 192,000 and 312,000. Sales might even have risen in February, for all we know.

What did the sales report tell us that we didn’t already know? Very little. We know home building and home sales are extremely weak. Home builders are depressed. So are many home owners, who owe more than their house is worth. Home prices have been falling modestly since the government’s main effort to prop up the market ended last fall with the expiration of the home buyer subsidy.

It’s possible that the awful sales data show that housing is weakening further, but the other evidence from other sources don’t confirm that. Home builders actually are a little more upbeat than they have been.

Many analysts believe housing has more or less hit bottom and hasn’t come back to any significant degree.

Based on the history of such bubbles, it’s likely to take years before home construction, home sales and home prices recover fully. Nothing reported on Wednesday changes that prognosis.

Christie’s Atlantic City Revival Seeks Halt to 30% Casino Plunge

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is bucking voter skepticism and pushing ahead with his plan to revive the Atlantic City gambling resort, where casino revenue has plunged the most since the first one opened in 1978.

Christie, a first-term Republican, took control of the tourism district in the 48-block-long coastal city of 40,000 last month and relieved the 11 casinos there of some regulations. He redirected gaming fees to clean up and promote the area, and provided tax breaks to help restart construction of the $2.5 billion Revel casino that stalled in 2009.

The intervention may come too late, even with Revel opening in 2012, said Dennis Forst, a gaming analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Gambling revenue in Atlantic City, the second-largest U.S. casino market, is down 30 percent from 2006. Older betting parlors may close as Sands Casino Resort in Pennsylvania, Dover Downs in Delaware and other rivals draw gamblers from Philadelphia and New York, he said.

“Outside competition is only going to increase,” he said during an interview in New York. “Atlantic City had 30 years to work this out, to make themselves indestructible, and they’ve wasted all of those years,” said Forst, who has covered the industry for 40 years. He received top rankings of analyst polls in the Wall Street Journal and Institutional Investor and Forbes magazines, according to KeyBanc.
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New Jersey is seeking to halt a drop in the 8 percent tax on casino revenue that funds programs for seniors and the disabled. The industry gives another 1.25 percent of revenue to the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, which helped fund $1.8 billion of projects since 1984, including airport expansion and housing for casino workers.

Atlantic City’s gambling houses employed 33,272 as of last month, down from more than 45,000 in 2004, according to state data. The 8 percent gaming tax netted the state $260.9 million in 2010, down from more than $400 million in 2006.

A Thaw in the Condo Market

LAST month a few strong blips indicated a quickening pulse on the New Jersey condominium market. Or maybe just a pulse.

There were 15 sales in four weeks at one building in Jersey City, 6 at another, 5 at a Hoboken building where sales had been lagging — even a premarketing sale at a town house development in Livingston.

Portents of a spring revival? Or a mere minitrend that will melt with the last of the snow?

“Ha! That’s the $64 million question, now isn’t it?” said Dean Geibel, the chief executive of Metro Homes, who described February as the best month in two years for his two buildings — Gulls Cove in Jersey City and Metro Stop in Hoboken.

“This is not an uptick in prices,” Mr. Geibel added. “But the increase in sales is still huge, because it has been so slow for so long. It raises the question, ‘Is there going to be a traditional spring market with a widespread uptick?’ ”
…
Why would the sales heat up in February? Ms. Ferrara suggested that one reason might be concern over mortgage rates’ climb beyond 5 percent, and over their potential to rise significantly, and fast, when the economy improves. About 60 percent of recent buyers at Crystal Point are employed in finance, she said, and therefore probably likely to keep a close watch on trends.

Also, she added, a tight rental market in New Jersey is probably a factor. The statewide vacancy rate is at a low 6 to 7 percent, according to market analysts; price breaks and other incentives have largely been abandoned; and monthly rates are starting to rise.

“In the rent-versus-buy scenario,” Ms. Ferrara said, “when people take tax benefits of ownership into account, we are now seeing some urgency of people deciding to buy.”
…
Meanwhile, condominium prices remain depressed. Over the last year, the average price in Jersey City dipped by 13 percent, to $467,297, according to a Marketing Directors analysis.

Developer, agent ordered to pay $7 million for Florham Park, NJ, house sliding down hill

Finding that a developer and his construction agent violated state consumer fraud laws, a judge Friday ordered the pair to pay $7 million to a scientist who contracted in 2006 to buy a luxury home in Florham Park that is slowly sliding downhill and can’t be occupied.

Superior Court Judge W. Hunt Dumont in Morristown found that Joseph Natale, a principal in JDN Properties of Florham Park LLC, and his construction agent, Randy DeLuca, founder of Deltrus LLC, engaged in “unconscionable commercial practices” to the detriment of former scientist Dr. Humayun Akhtar and his wife, Yosria.

The judge’s award is made up of the $1.6 million cost of the 4,400-square-foot home on Beacon Hill Drive in Florham Park; $519,560 in tax, insurance, utility and other costs the Akhtars have incurred on the property they have never occupied; and $740,906 in legal fees.

The total award comes to $7,094,111 because the judge found that since fraud occurred, under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act, he would impose triple damages, exclusive of the legal fees.

The judge found that architectural specifications were not followed when the home was built. Based upon testimony he heard during a proceeding known as a “proof hearing,” the judge learned that soil conditions were not suitable to support the weight of the home and concrete footings were placed just 18 inches in the ground instead of the required 3 feet.

Numerous cracks have appeared and at least part of the house is in long-term danger of collapsing, the judge noted.

While the home was still in the process of being finished, the Akhtars first learned it was deteriorating when a plumber visited in 2006, noticed cracks, and concluded “the house is sliding down the hill,” the judge said.

Condo owners allege Siena has structural ‘defects’

Raniya Kassem owns a condominium on the fifth floor of Montclair’s luxury high-rise complex The Siena, but it’s been about a year and five months since she has resided there.

Kassem said she moved out of the South Park Street building on May 12, 2009, on the advice of an expert who tested the air in her condo and discovered mold spores. The mold had grown in the cavity of her bedroom wall as a result of persistent water leaks in her brand-new dwelling unit, Kassem said.

The leaks were discovered long before she packed her bags and left. Two days after she bought the 962-square-foot condo for $441,000 on July 22, 2008, Kassem discovered “a huge bubble in my ceiling in the bathroom” and her condo’s windowsills were wet. Later she would also find water had saturated one bedroom wall.
…
Eventually, Kassem, 37, started feeling ill, experiencing respiratory symptoms and developing rashes. She began to use an inhaler. Then one day she called in an environmental testing service to evaluate the air quality in her room and she learned about the mold. The consultant advised her to sleep elsewhere until the problem was remediated.

“I left that night to live with my parents” in Roseland, she said. After three weeks passed and Kassem retained an attorney, she moved back into The Siena, with the developers agreeing to put her up in another condo on the fifth floor.

But when that unit sold, they moved Kassem again — this time to a unit on the seventh floor.

“I bought a home and I don’t have a home,” she said. “I have a closet full of stuff I never unpacked.

“I am a first-time homebuyer and man, this has not been a pleasant experience at all. You think about the American dream of owning your own home. After buying at The Siena, I don’t believe in that anymore. It has been nothing but heartache for me.”

Her neighbors on the building’s fifth floor, Vin Forbes and Carlton Schultz, have a similar story.

Forbes said he and his partner moved into their unit, for which they paid $616,900, at the end of January 2008. Weeks later, on Feb. 14, he notified the building’s management of water leaks inside his new two-bedroom condominium. Work crews arrived.

Builders Probably Began Work on Fewer U.S. Houses in Sign Recovery Delayed

Builders in the U.S. probably began work on fewer homes in September, a sign the residential real estate market will be slow to recover from the worst recession since the 1930s, economists said before a report today.

Housing starts fell 3 percent to a 580,000 annual rate, according to the median estimate of 71 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Building permits, a proxy of future production, were little changed, the survey showed.

Mounting foreclosures, near record-low home sales and a lack of jobs will make it difficult for housing, the industry that precipitated the economic slump, to rebound. Broadening foreclosure moratoria caused by faulty documentation at some of the nation’s biggest banks also raises the risk the mending process will be delayed even more.

“Builders are faced with weak new-home sales, competition from foreclosures and, if anything, uncertainty around the foreclosure environment has increased,” said Michelle Meyer, a senior U.S. economist at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York. The housing outlook is “deteriorating,” she said.

The Commerce Department’s report is due at 8:30 a.m. in Washington. Survey estimates ranged from 550,000 to 624,000. Starts plunged to a record-low 477,000 pace in April 2009 after reaching a three-decade high of 2.27 million in January 2006.

Builders Move Beyond McMansions in New Jersey

Faced with the prospect that New Jersey’s buildable open space could be gone by midcentury, developers are turning to projects that tap into existing infrastructure, use vacant buildings and emphasize the vertical over the horizontal.

A report released in July by Rowan and Rutgers Universities found that, after comparing aerial photos of the state, the years from 1986 to 2007 were New Jersey’s most sprawling period, when unprotected land was developed most rapidly.

When development ground to a halt in mid-2007 as the housing market collapsed, New Jersey had more acres of subdivisions and shopping malls than it had of upland forests and was down to its last million acres of developable land, according to the report, called “Changing Landscapes in the Garden State.”
…
“What will trigger denser development is that there’s no space left, and what is left no one can build on,” said David Henderson, a principal at HHG Development Associates, a Trenton company that focuses on sustainable building practices. According to the Rowan and Rutgers report, New Jersey is poised to become the first state to develop every acre of unprotected land, a milestone researchers predict will happen “sometime within the middle of the century.” But whatever the imperative, a number of untraditional projects seem to be finding acceptance with home buyers.
…
One answer to sprawl is to build up rather than out. In 2004, Toll Brothers and Pinnacle paid $76 million for a 24-acre former Maxwell House coffee factory on the Hoboken waterfront and razed the 11 original buildings. In their place rose two 12-story luxury condos with ground-floor retail shops and a new street grid that connected the public to the waterfront, which includes a park and a waterfront walkway.
…
Residential building permits in urban and suburban town centers in 15 regions across the country more than doubled from 1990 to 2008, particularly in the New York metropolitan area, where redevelopment in urban areas made up half of all new residential construction, according to a study, “Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions,” released by the Environmental Protection Agency in January. The increases were particularly sharp in the last five years, with the trend continuing even in 2008, as the residential housing market weakened.

“I don’t see that McMansions are going to be the way of the future,” said Jacqueline Urgo, president of the Marketing Directors, a marketing and residential sales agency. “Opulence is out. It’s smart living that people are looking for.”
…
“This is the way things are heading. It’s all about affordability and sustainability today,” said Thomas Troy, a principal of Sharbell. “A lot of the shine around the McMansion is gone.”

Morris County NJ development dips to historic lows

The new towers in Morristown are up, awaiting restaurants and residents.

The New York Jets are ensconced in their shiny new headquarters in Florham Park awaiting the arrival of new playmates from BASF when that company’s latest U.S. headquarters is built.

And in 2009, just 33 single-family house lots were registered with the Morris County Clerk’s Office.

That number of recorded house lots is a record low, according to the Morris County 2009 Activity Report issued recently by the county planning board.

It took 10 years to reach that bottom, the report said, 10 years of land-use restrictions, water-use concerns and an economic slowdown that rivaled the Great Depression and doubled the county’s unemployment rate in a year.

It’s not all gloomy.
…
“I think our timing is right,” said Mayor John Sheridan. “I think the economy has bottomed out.”

That’s also the opinion of Rutgers University Deans James W. Hughes and Joseph Seneca in a recent report on the state’s economy.

“Real estate development will probably hit its cyclical bottom in 2010,” Hughes and Seneca wrote. They warned “the industry will still continue to be constrained by a lack of demand in its many dimensions, tepid private-sector employment growth, corporate cost-cutting and efficiency efforts, small business stuck in survival mode, stifled household formation, and consumer retrenchment following an era of overconsumption.”

But “even in distressed economic environments,” they said, “new opportunities always emerge.”
…
No matter how it’s reported, 2009 was a slow year for development in Morris County:

– New preliminary subdivision plans reviews by the county planing board dropped to seven, down from 16 in 2008 and down 58 from 2000.

– The number of new townhome or multi-family units contained in plans before the county board dropped to 243 last year, down from 427 in 2008 and 2,371 in 2000.

– The number of new site plans for commercial development dropped to 81 in 2009, down from 88 in 2008 and from 113 in 2000.

– Thanks only to one Mount Olive subdivision that calls for 232 units did the number of residential building lots contained in new subdivision applications hit 256. Without that one project, the number would have been 22.

“After two years of growth starting in 2002,” the report said, “there has been a slow decline (despite fluctuations in the economy) in new development applications from 2004 to 2009.”
…
While Morris County has the most vacant office space in the state — 28 million square feet, of which 15 million square feet is considered Class A — Peters said all is not lost. Her agency’s latest newsletter said that more than 1 million square feet of that space has been leased since January, including 677,405 square feet since March.