Otteau: Contracts soared in May

From the Otteau Group:

Home Sales Continue to Accelerate in May

Home purchase contracts in New Jersey soared for yet another month in May, recording a 23% increase compared to one year ago. Given that the pace of sales rose by 22% in May-2012, purchase demand has expanded by an astounding 51% over the past 2 years. Home sales have experienced a double-digit increase in 4 out of 5 months this year, for a YTD gain of 18%.

This entry was posted in Employment, Housing Recovery, New Jersey Real Estate. Bookmark the permalink.

26 Responses to Otteau: Contracts soared in May

  1. Fabius Maximus says:

    Friskies

  2. scribe says:

    If I’m second at 11 AM, you all must be at the beach.

    My nephew is moving into his new house in the vicinity of Syracuse this weekend.

    They did a “hard close” on a house that was vacant – elderly couple where the husband had died and the wife was in a nursing home. My nephew and his wife were in an apartment, and their lease expires tomorrow. So the whole family up there and my brother from NJ are helping them move this weekend.

  3. anon (the good one) says:

    our Democracy: All staged by competing corporate agendas and further amplified by the media.

    @MotherJones: “People who truly represent sharp, fundamental change are very rarely elected national leaders.” http://t.co/0z0kJvlMfm

  4. grim says:

    The ev experiment begins!

  5. Anon E. Moose says:

    Anon [3];

    “People who truly represent sharp, fundamental change are very rarely elected national leaders.”

    Been under a rock since 2008? Ever heard of “Hope” & “Change”? And then 2012?

    I can only attribute it to chemical enhancement – you have enough to share?

  6. anon is like a lobotomized schabadoo. Which I guess would make him Keith Olbermann.

  7. anon (the good one) says:

    @KeithOlbermann: I can see Jackie Gleason’s nostrils http://t.co/6HdKeniEAo

  8. Now that I think of it, anon is more on the level of bi. Just a pluperfect idiot.

  9. grim says:

    Put on 100 miles already, just today.

    Gas is dead.

  10. Anon E. Moose says:

    Paging Lib;

    Libtard in Union says:
    June 25, 2013 at 1:25 pm

    Moose.

    I’m with you. It’s gonna be a fun car. I plan on putting the most un-green bumper sticker I can find on it. Maybe a few pro gun and tea party stickers as well.

    Anyone know where I can get this one?

    http://mag.audubon.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/magazine_slide_and_article/photos/editors_note.jpg

    The eagle has landed.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/98202924@N04/9170962530/
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/98202924@N04/9168788325/

    I’m going to have to insist the GTG to exchange possession be after Aug 1.

  11. Anon E. Moose says:

    Grim [9];

    Drive it in good health.

  12. Comrade Nom Deplume, Halfwit dumbass says:

    [3] anon,

    For once, I agree with Mother Jones.

  13. Comrade Nom Deplume, Halfwit dumbass says:

    [10] moose

    Unless I am in OCMD, I have to come to that GTG!

  14. Comrade Nom Deplume, Halfwit dumbass says:

    Today, the Deplumes put an offer in on a house. 31K under ask. I expect to get rejected but someone has to set the low bar.

  15. 250k says:

    Anyone ever do battle with springtails? Record June rainfall must have brought the water table up so high, our garage floor is perspiring. Constant small pools of water coming up. Gutters are cleaned, nothing else we can do short of multi-thousand dollar drainage project. These damn springtails are just everywhere, especially in the bathroom over the garage. We did put new mulch in this year but total cheap-guy one inch of it so its not really staying constantly wet though day after day of rain, what can we do?

    Anyway, if anyone has any ideas, let me know. Also, if anyone can recommend a waterproofing expert, that would be great too. We have no basement under the garage slab and we have not found any water issues in the basement so far but we have to figure out how to get the garage floor dry.

    Why did we ever buy a house?!?!?

  16. NJCoast says:

    Buddy Guy killing it at the Basie. 76 years old and already downed a good part of the Remy Martin XO in the dressing room.

  17. Njescapee says:

    Love Buddy Guy he sure can sing and play that strat

  18. Lobotomized Schabadoo says:

    Clot, you’re a genius.

  19. grim says:

    Record June rainfall must have brought the water table up so high, our garage floor is perspiring. Constant small pools of water coming up. Gutters are cleaned, nothing else we can do short of multi-thousand dollar drainage project.

    Cut a sump in the corner of your garage nearest a location you can discharge. Open the floor, dig down and survey the situation. I suspect you may be bailing out water as you dig. Install the sump basin on a bed of crushed stone, and surround the basin with crushed stone before you lay down new concrete at the rim. Before you install the basin, drill a dozen or so half inch holes on the bottom of the basin to let the ground water perk up through the bottom.

    Install a standard sump pump, plumb it to your leaders, street, otherwise, but it’s got to go far, you can’t just discharge to the soil near your home.

    I suspect this may be seasonal rain/surface water trapped between two layers of soil/rock, otherwise you’d have had an incredibly damp and musty basement.

    Take a look here – perched water table is the situation

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pdJ4nQKxLWQ/TZy2bYOuowI/AAAAAAAAAAw/62e8_NQi2tg/s1600/water+table.gif

    You may be able to pump it out faster than it can drain through a spring or percolate down.

    The problem is, no telling how big this thing is, and how active the flow, if this is a big seasonal spring, no amount of pumping is going to drain the thing.

    Probably worth the shot, I don’t expect this experiment would cost you more than $250 and a few hours on the weekend.

  20. 250k says:

    grim (19) , thanks for the suggestion. might just attempt this. No gas or water lines at the garage but still a little nervous about what I would find.

    I still might try to find a drainage expert to come on site because I know a few of the downspouts are not bringing the water the standard distance away from the foundation (4 ft I think?) and I am wondering if some of the extensions into the yard/away from the house need to be roto-rootered. I am sure 90% of the service cos I would call will tell me I need all new gutters but I suspect I just need to repair how the gutters transport the water away from the house.

    A contractor I trust told me no matter what we are told, do NOT let anyone talk us into an intercept drain at the entryway of the garage as it would get clogged to quickly. The water is not pooling anywhere near the garage doors anyway.

    Last interesting note, Hurricane Irene. We bought the house just before this storm that flooded 50% of the homes in this area but we had not yet moved in. When we could finally get through to check on the house and basement, we were mystified. Totally dry. Neighbors next door were flooded. Not a drop by us (and we confirmed power was out in the area so sump pump could not have been working). We figured we were safe but I guess record rainfall means no one is safe. And it seems we are trending towards record rainfalls on a regular basis…

  21. 250k says:

    http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/28/real_estate/mortgage-rate/index.html?iid=Lead

    Scary times hit mortgage shoppers
    “Homebuyers got blindsided by an interest rate hike of more than half a percentage point Thursday, the biggest increase in more than 26 years. Now, many shoppers don’t know whether they should scramble for a loan or wait on the sidelines. ”

    (I read the CNBC ARM article a few days ago but don’t think this one was posted.)

  22. grim says:

    I assume you saw my major (multi thousand dollar) drainage project:

    https://njrereport.com/images/found1.jpg

    The new perimeter drains worked for the first time (that I noticed anyway) with the recent rains. Drains and sump were surprisingly dry for the first year and a half. My major issue was dampness due to the clay soils, not necessarily a high water table or poor drainage however. The amount of rain recently has made a tremendous difference.

    I still might try to find a drainage expert to come on site because I know a few of the downspouts are not bringing the water the standard distance away from the foundation (4 ft I think?)

    Not even close to adequate. If you have curb cores, replace the piping to get the water to the street or to a catch basin if the town allows (I can show you a picture of where they allowed us to tap into it, so that we weren’t discharging water to the street). If you can’t go to the street or storm sewer, next best is as far as possible on your property, lowest point that will not impact your neighbor. Most expensive option is going to be a detention basin/dry well. Discharge 4 feet from the house, at the surface? That’s a big problem that is easy to correct.

    A contractor I trust told me no matter what we are told, do NOT let anyone talk us into an intercept drain at the entryway of the garage as it would get clogged to quickly.

    Does your driveway slope towards your garage? If so, I’d absolutely recommend linear drains. Just do a simple calculation, what’s the total square footage of your driveway? Multiply that times the 9 inches of rain we just got. How many thousands of gallons of water are we talking about? A 30 by 50 two car driveway and 9.2 inches of total rain in June is 8600 gallons of water, and that is just the driveway, not including the roof and other land immediately surrounding the house. Besides, a couple of screws and you can take the grates off the linear drains and clean them out. I would not use narrow slot drains, but they aren’t common around here anyway.

  23. Lobotomized Schabadoo says:

    Re 19. MIL had same problem. Water table rose plus her house was across the street from a stream. Pump fixed it.

  24. Comrade Nom Deplume, Halfwit dumbass says:

    Anon (the left one), you get your news from far left sources. here’s something to chew on.

    http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/27/politics/irs-targeting/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+%28RSS%3A+Politics%29

    Curious to know how this gets spun. My prediction is that the counterspin will allege that the “targeting” of progressive groups on a BOLO list wasn’t to slow them down. Werfel admits that. We will hear that the BOLO list was to put Tea party in the breakdown lane and MoveOn in the fast lane. No proof of the latter has been alleged, but we will know more once we get deep into the weeds.

    For now at least, the Thinkprogress narrative has been blown out of the water by no less than Werfel. And rather than laying the issue to rest, the revelation that groups with progressive and occupy in their names were on the list but not subjected to extra processing raises a legitimate question about the reason for their inclusion.

  25. Ccb223 says:

    Great blog u have here Grim. I have a question for the board.

    I have a second home in Florida that is slightly under water…didn’t think I could refi but got a letter from existing lender that said i qualified for a HARP loan and given that the rate on the property is at >7% I pursued it. They offered me 4.8% but I found these other guys online (proficio bank) who offered me 4.25% so went with them…this was in late March. The underwriting process has been a nightmare….asked me for so much information, often times duplicative and unnecessary that it has taken months to get to the finish line. I knew credit standards had tightened but this was ridiculous….this is even with them telling me that I was a shoe in (annual income is almost twice the size of the loan I am trying to refi and credit score is very good, high 700s across the board). Then I found out that proficio bank was basically acting as a broker and had found quicken loans to be the new lender….so quicken had to now also put me through the underwriting process….incredibly more paperwork and more delays. Of course rates jumped in the meantime, which sucks. Locked in a new refi rate of 4.75% a few weeks ago (thankfully because rates have jumped more since then). I was about to set a closing date and quicken loans suddenly had my loan “under audit” and not only will they not tell me why but they won’t tell me how long it will take to get this resolved. I feel like I am being held hostage, the skeptic in me thinks that they are just waiting for my 30 day lock to expire so they can bang me with an even higher rate. What can I do? I have been at this for months so ideally don’t want to go through anybody else, particularly since rates are higher now. Any advice would be much appreciated. Has been a terrible experience.

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