Rates for 30-year home loans ticked down for the second-straight week, remaining close to record lows reached over the spring.
But it won’t last forever. Rates will eventually trend upward, Larson said, as the economy starts to turn around and concerns return about how long overseas investors can stomach massive levels of U.S. debt.
“Over the longer-term, there’s going to be general upward pressure on interest rates across the spectrum,” he said. “Mortgage rates will be caught up in that.”
To prop up the housing market and help the economy revive from the worst recession since the 1930s, the Federal Reserve is spending $1.25 trillion on mortgage-backed securities, which has driven down rates on home loans.
from Jay Robertson | President of First Capital
Monday, September 14, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
IRS to mine payment data on mortgages
WASHINGTON -- The Internal Revenue Service will expand a program designed to catch tax cheats that searches for inconsistencies between mortgage payments and income.
After prompting from an IRS auditor, the agency will study whether it should make greater use of data on mortgage-interest payments provided to it by banks. The IRS currently uses such data to send notices to non-filers who it believes should have filed a return.
The data could also be used to target for audits individuals who don't file tax returns, or who report less income than they paid in mortgage interest, according to a letter released Monday by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
The IRS move will expand a regional research project on mortgage interest to a nationwide level by December 2011. Such initiatives, called Compliance Initiative Projects, typically involve examination of a small number of tax returns to evaluate new enforcement strategies.
Howard Levy, a tax attorney with the Cincinnati firm Voorhees Levy, said mortgage-interest data might be the best source of information the IRS has on small-business owners, such as roofers or carpenters, who are paid in cash and don't report all their income to the IRS.
"That [IRS Form] 1098 might be one of the few trails IRS could pursue to find out if there is income coming in," Mr. Levy said.
One Republican lawmaker cautioned Monday that the IRS plan could snare taxpayers who have coped with job losses by borrowing or using savings or retirement accounts to make their house payments.
"We shouldn't presume that these struggling families are tax cheats just because they continue to make their mortgage payments despite losing their income," said Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.), the ranking minority member on the House Oversight Subcommittee.
Highly paid former employees of investment banks who lost their jobs in the financial crisis but who, thanks to their savings, are still making their mortgage payments, could also draw scrutiny under the IRS plan, said Tom Ochsenschlager, vice-president for taxation at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
The Treasury inspector general said in a Monday report that tens of thousands of homeowners who paid more than $20,000 in mortgage interest in 2005 either didn't file a tax return or reported income that appears insufficient to cover their mortgage interest and basic living expenses.
The data for 2005 was the latest tax data available when the Treasury inspector general's office began its audit last year.
Based on a sample of these returns, nonfilers and potential under-reporters identified by the inspector general could have owed a combined total of $1.4 billion in tax, penalties and interest, the auditor said.
Banks report data on mortgage interest paid by individuals to the IRS and to the homeowner, using IRS Form 1098.
Write to Martin Vaughan at martin.vaughan@dowjones.com
After prompting from an IRS auditor, the agency will study whether it should make greater use of data on mortgage-interest payments provided to it by banks. The IRS currently uses such data to send notices to non-filers who it believes should have filed a return.
The data could also be used to target for audits individuals who don't file tax returns, or who report less income than they paid in mortgage interest, according to a letter released Monday by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
The IRS move will expand a regional research project on mortgage interest to a nationwide level by December 2011. Such initiatives, called Compliance Initiative Projects, typically involve examination of a small number of tax returns to evaluate new enforcement strategies.
Howard Levy, a tax attorney with the Cincinnati firm Voorhees Levy, said mortgage-interest data might be the best source of information the IRS has on small-business owners, such as roofers or carpenters, who are paid in cash and don't report all their income to the IRS.
"That [IRS Form] 1098 might be one of the few trails IRS could pursue to find out if there is income coming in," Mr. Levy said.
One Republican lawmaker cautioned Monday that the IRS plan could snare taxpayers who have coped with job losses by borrowing or using savings or retirement accounts to make their house payments.
"We shouldn't presume that these struggling families are tax cheats just because they continue to make their mortgage payments despite losing their income," said Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.), the ranking minority member on the House Oversight Subcommittee.
Highly paid former employees of investment banks who lost their jobs in the financial crisis but who, thanks to their savings, are still making their mortgage payments, could also draw scrutiny under the IRS plan, said Tom Ochsenschlager, vice-president for taxation at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
The Treasury inspector general said in a Monday report that tens of thousands of homeowners who paid more than $20,000 in mortgage interest in 2005 either didn't file a tax return or reported income that appears insufficient to cover their mortgage interest and basic living expenses.
The data for 2005 was the latest tax data available when the Treasury inspector general's office began its audit last year.
Based on a sample of these returns, nonfilers and potential under-reporters identified by the inspector general could have owed a combined total of $1.4 billion in tax, penalties and interest, the auditor said.
Banks report data on mortgage interest paid by individuals to the IRS and to the homeowner, using IRS Form 1098.
Write to Martin Vaughan at martin.vaughan@dowjones.com
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Home sellers frustrated as short-sale deals collapse
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
Scores of homeowners who thought they'd cut a deal with their banks to sell their houses for less than their unpaid mortgages are seeing those agreements fall apart months later, contributing to the mounting foreclosures that threaten the housing market's recovery.
The sales of homes for less than the amount owed the bank, known as "short sales," have been widely viewed as an alternative that could help slow the foreclosure epidemic. In theory, delinquent homeowners escape a mortgage they cannot afford, and lenders, although taking a loss, avoid the even costlier process of completing a foreclosure.
Instead, many homeowners are watching potential buyers walk away as months pass while they deal with lenders' lengthy delays, lost documents and unreturned calls, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Not all the snafus are lenders' fault; inexperienced real estate agents who fail to turn in complete paperwork also are causing holdups, as are severely underpriced homes.
The problems have become such a kink in the market's recovery that banks and the federal government are launching new efforts this month to simplify and speed up the shortsale process.
Just 23% of short-sale offers that homeowners receive from potential buyers actually close, according to a February study of 1,300 real estate agents by Campbell
Communications. More than 90% of agents cited a slow response from the lender as the reason short sales were lost.
"The delays are quite extensive and a real problem. It's a serious issue," says Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com. "You're seeing a lot of short sales go bust, and it's contributing to the crisis because it's one of the reasons foreclosures continue to mount."
Jorge DeMattos, 45, just completed the short sale on his home in Pembroke Pines, Fla. — a process he and his real estate agent, Edward Goldfarb, say took 17 months and eight separate offers.
DeMattos began pursuing a short sale after he was laid off two years ago and his income plunged from $46,000 to $26,000 a year.
Chase Bank, his mortgage servicer, rejected the first offer, which was $14,000 over what was then fair market value, according to Goldfarb.
On the next seven offers, the bank took months to respond. Each prospective buyer got tired of waiting and canceled the contract. The eighth offer, accepted in May, was $24,000 less than the first one that Chase rejected in February 2008, Goldfarb says.
"Chase made it very difficult. I had to stop paying the mortgage. It was so frustrating," says DeMattos, who now lives with his sister in Kissimmee, Fla. "We would put the paperwork in, and they would never give a definite answer. Buyers waited for months."
DeMattos says he owed $355,000 on his mortgage. The short-sale price was $225,000.
Christine Holevas, a Chase spokeswoman, says earlier offers on the home weren't accepted because they were significantly below the appraised value and the homeowner didn't send in updated financial information.
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-08-04-short-sales-mortgages_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
Scores of homeowners who thought they'd cut a deal with their banks to sell their houses for less than their unpaid mortgages are seeing those agreements fall apart months later, contributing to the mounting foreclosures that threaten the housing market's recovery.
The sales of homes for less than the amount owed the bank, known as "short sales," have been widely viewed as an alternative that could help slow the foreclosure epidemic. In theory, delinquent homeowners escape a mortgage they cannot afford, and lenders, although taking a loss, avoid the even costlier process of completing a foreclosure.
Instead, many homeowners are watching potential buyers walk away as months pass while they deal with lenders' lengthy delays, lost documents and unreturned calls, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Not all the snafus are lenders' fault; inexperienced real estate agents who fail to turn in complete paperwork also are causing holdups, as are severely underpriced homes.
The problems have become such a kink in the market's recovery that banks and the federal government are launching new efforts this month to simplify and speed up the shortsale process.
Just 23% of short-sale offers that homeowners receive from potential buyers actually close, according to a February study of 1,300 real estate agents by Campbell
Communications. More than 90% of agents cited a slow response from the lender as the reason short sales were lost.
"The delays are quite extensive and a real problem. It's a serious issue," says Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com. "You're seeing a lot of short sales go bust, and it's contributing to the crisis because it's one of the reasons foreclosures continue to mount."
Jorge DeMattos, 45, just completed the short sale on his home in Pembroke Pines, Fla. — a process he and his real estate agent, Edward Goldfarb, say took 17 months and eight separate offers.
DeMattos began pursuing a short sale after he was laid off two years ago and his income plunged from $46,000 to $26,000 a year.
Chase Bank, his mortgage servicer, rejected the first offer, which was $14,000 over what was then fair market value, according to Goldfarb.
On the next seven offers, the bank took months to respond. Each prospective buyer got tired of waiting and canceled the contract. The eighth offer, accepted in May, was $24,000 less than the first one that Chase rejected in February 2008, Goldfarb says.
"Chase made it very difficult. I had to stop paying the mortgage. It was so frustrating," says DeMattos, who now lives with his sister in Kissimmee, Fla. "We would put the paperwork in, and they would never give a definite answer. Buyers waited for months."
DeMattos says he owed $355,000 on his mortgage. The short-sale price was $225,000.
Christine Holevas, a Chase spokeswoman, says earlier offers on the home weren't accepted because they were significantly below the appraised value and the homeowner didn't send in updated financial information.
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-08-04-short-sales-mortgages_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
Friday, February 20, 2009
Foreclosure Halt
A few of the larger lenders in the mortgage industry are putting a stop to home foreclosures while the Obama Administration develops a plan to help the struggling homeowners.
President Barack Obama outlined in his speech in Arizona on Wednesday his much-anticipated plan to spend at least $50 billion to prevent foreclosures.
Arizona is one of the states hardest hit by the crisis.
It contained outlines of a foreclosure-relief effort but few details.
Though lenders have beefed up their efforts to aid borrowers over the past year, their action hasn't kept up with the worst housing recession in decades.
More than 2.3 million homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year.
Government-controlled mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and major banks JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp. said Friday they are halting foreclosures through March 6.
New York-based Citigroup Inc. said it will extend until the administration has completed the details of the loan modification program or March 12, whichever is earlier. Citi's action expands on a similar effort it started in November.
The banks' pledges apply to owner-occupied homes, not those owned by investors.
Fannie Mae said it was suspending all foreclosure sales and evictions for occupied properties, while Freddie Mac said its suspension would apply to properties with up to four units and noted that the ban would not apply to vacant properties. Both Fannie and Freddie had suspended foreclosure sales during the winter holidays and halted evictions from foreclosed properties through the end of this month. Together, they own or guarantee around half of U.S. home loans.
Fannie and Freddie have developed systems to determine which loans need to be modified.
To qualify for those programs, borrowers have to be at least three months behind on their home loans.
The top executives of Bank of America, and Citi announced their intention to halt foreclosures under questioning Wednesday by House lawmakers.
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's chief executive, detailed his plans in a letter to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who released it Friday.
"We stand ready to work with you to put the appropriate processes in place, including a national modification standard, to reduce the incidence of foreclosure and to encourage long-term, sustainable home mortgages," Dimon wrote.
Information from CAR
President Barack Obama outlined in his speech in Arizona on Wednesday his much-anticipated plan to spend at least $50 billion to prevent foreclosures.
Arizona is one of the states hardest hit by the crisis.
It contained outlines of a foreclosure-relief effort but few details.
Though lenders have beefed up their efforts to aid borrowers over the past year, their action hasn't kept up with the worst housing recession in decades.
More than 2.3 million homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year.
Government-controlled mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and major banks JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp. said Friday they are halting foreclosures through March 6.
New York-based Citigroup Inc. said it will extend until the administration has completed the details of the loan modification program or March 12, whichever is earlier. Citi's action expands on a similar effort it started in November.
The banks' pledges apply to owner-occupied homes, not those owned by investors.
Fannie Mae said it was suspending all foreclosure sales and evictions for occupied properties, while Freddie Mac said its suspension would apply to properties with up to four units and noted that the ban would not apply to vacant properties. Both Fannie and Freddie had suspended foreclosure sales during the winter holidays and halted evictions from foreclosed properties through the end of this month. Together, they own or guarantee around half of U.S. home loans.
Fannie and Freddie have developed systems to determine which loans need to be modified.
To qualify for those programs, borrowers have to be at least three months behind on their home loans.
The top executives of Bank of America, and Citi announced their intention to halt foreclosures under questioning Wednesday by House lawmakers.
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's chief executive, detailed his plans in a letter to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who released it Friday.
"We stand ready to work with you to put the appropriate processes in place, including a national modification standard, to reduce the incidence of foreclosure and to encourage long-term, sustainable home mortgages," Dimon wrote.
Information from CAR
Friday, January 30, 2009
Market expected to be flooded with REOs
It is very likely that mortgage lenders will be putting their increasing supply of repossessed homes up for sale in the next few months.
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, 10 percent of home loans was either delinquent or in the foreclosure process at the end of September. Plus, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw repossessions grow nearly 25 percent to 15,196 homes from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2008.
Lenders may have to reduce the principal balance on loans to do more than slow down the foreclosure process for many borrowers.
Source: Inman News, Matt Carter (01/26/09)
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, 10 percent of home loans was either delinquent or in the foreclosure process at the end of September. Plus, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw repossessions grow nearly 25 percent to 15,196 homes from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2008.
Lenders may have to reduce the principal balance on loans to do more than slow down the foreclosure process for many borrowers.
Source: Inman News, Matt Carter (01/26/09)
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Daring Design - The Elrod House
The Elrod House epitomizes John Lautner’s go-for-broke philosophy
By Allison Engel
An apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright early in his career, John Lautner eschewed the cool, severe geometry of his midcentury minimalist peers. Instead, he spent a lifetime as an iconoclast, alternately overlooked or miscast by critics. Several of his best-known projects — including the iconic Googie coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard — have been wrongly celebrated as Atomic Age or Hollywood kitsch.
"Lautner’s fascination with new shapes and structures had nothing to do with Space Age futurism, or movieland glamour, or virtuoso engineering, but came from his determination to humanize the spaces of the built world and create an endlessly varied organic poetry. This was a profoundly serious agenda," wrote Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, in a foreword to the book that accompanied a retrospective exhibition of Lautner’s work at the Los Angeles museum last July.
Only after he died in 1994 did Lautner’s original designs start to receive attention and recognition as an influence on current architecture luminaries — such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid — whose work displays an organic, earthy bent.
One project that contains many Lautner hallmarks — a difficult site, a modest entrance concealing a soaring space, rooms that flirt between inside and out — is also one that represents the contradictions between his designs and how they were originally perceived. The Elrod House on Southridge Drive in Palm Springs, built in 1968 for interior designer Arthur Elrod, is memorable for its enormous domed concrete roof, with wedge-like sections cut out to accommodate skylights and provide indirect light.
Designed to shield the home from the intense desert sun, the roof rests on curved concrete walls. Black slate tile floors add drama, as does an indoor-outdoor swimming pool and boulders massed in the living room. When Lautner saw rocks exposed on the 23-acre site from grading, he directed the contractor to dig 10 feet deeper, uncovering massive rocks that would became an integral part of the interior design.
The general public knows the house primarily as the ultimate bachelor pad from the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds are Forever and as a location for Playboy photo shoots. Instead of a realization of Lautner’s emphasis on the relationship between space and nature, for most of its existence, the house was considered a symbol of Hollywood excess.
During Lautner’s lifetime, critics and the public seemed not to know what to make of his oddly shaped, back-to-nature structures. The longtime Los Angeles resident retained a deep longing for the north Michigan woods of his youth, designing homes that were alternately cave-like and open to the sky. In a career that spanned 55 years, he backed up his daring designs with extraordinary feats of engineering. (As he was said to have put it, "You’re wasting your time if you don’t know how to hold up the roof!")
Faced with impossible sites, harsh climates, or both, Lautner time and again invented solutions. In the Elrod House, for example, the pavilion-like living room originally was ringed with floor-to-ceiling glass arranged in a zigzagged curtain wall. Shortly after the house was built, a desert sandstorm broke the panes. Lautner reacted with something even more outrageous: He installed two 25-foot-wide hanging glass curtain walls that retract to open up the living room completely to the outside at the touch of a button.
The 8,901-square-foot house is now praised for its relationship with its mountain landscape and its sense of drama. Contemporary critics, warming to Lautner’s designs, consider the home one of the architect’s most important works. The curators of Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner, the Hammer Museum retrospective, looked at 300 of his projects and selected 50 to feature in the exhibition. Of those, they gave six projects particular emphasis, commissioning videos that were projected next to newly built large-scale models of the structures. One was the Elrod House.
The exhibit, which closed at the Hammer in October, moves to Glasgow, Scotland, in March; heads to Florida International University in Miami in October; and runs at Palm Springs Art Museum from Feb. 20 to May 23, 2010.
Beguiled by the home’s audasity, a real estate investor who divides his time between Hermosa Beach, Palm Springs, and West Hollywood admired it for a year before buying it in 2003. Since then, he has brought back some of the project’s original staff to care for the treasure. The owner later purchased the two adjacent Southridge houses (both architecturally significant), creating a portfolio of unusual houses that he is preserving in a way that also honors their use as lived-in spaces, ones made available to friends, family, business associates, and for special occasions.
The owner felt a special bond with the Elrod House; Lautner is the favorite architect of his father, an aeronautical engineer.
The main floor includes a kitchen, hidden from the living room by a long, curved wall. The generous master bedroom (originally only of only two in the house) features a bar and refrigerator tucked behind walls of exotic wood, with carefully matched grains. Elrod was a wizard at organization, wanting everything in its proper place, and Lautner obliged by filling multiple closets with row after row of pullout Lucite drawers. The closets are lined with cork so that jewelry or other accessories can be pinned up.
The sunken tub in the master bath is exposed to the outside, with only a glass wall standing between the T-shaped tub and a tidy row of bamboo. The area is unprotected but private, thanks to the remote site and the natural screening of a boulder.
A guest house and servants quarters, reached down a spiral staircase from the pool deck, was added two years after the main house was built.
Gardens around the house interweave formal and casual plantings: a moss area, fern patch, bamboo garden, paths of crushed rock ringed with cactus, and perennials that Elrod used to make potpourri to give to house guests. In a room carved into the cliff face, his many bins for dried flowers remain, with his hand-lettered labels: arrow, tansy, cornflowers, bergamot, roses.
The current owner managed to get a tour of the house in 2002 and couldn’t get it off his mind. "I walked out muttering, ‘That’s the best expression of space I’ve ever encountered,’" he says. "I muttered for over two months and began writing offers."
He bought the house from supermarket magnet Ron Burkle, who had poured millions into the house during the years he owned it.
"I give Burkle full marks," says the current owner. "He did all the thankless stuff you never see, basically renovating all the mechanical systems and furnishing it in a manner that’s true to the space." Lautner visited the house during that restoration and approved of the work.
Even at $5.5 million he paid for the house, the owner thinks it was undervalued. "You’ll never find the site again. You’ll never get the approvals again. And you had true simpatico between the client, architect, and contractor — something impossible to count on and critical to the best results."
He hired a contractor; housekeeper; pool man; manager; and Ricardo Flores, the son of the man who installed and maintained the original Lautner landscape. The staff also cares for the two other Southridge properties he bought: the former Steve McQueen house designed by Hugh Kaptur and "Boat House" designed by Michael P. Johnson for race-car driver James Jeffords.
As for the Elrod House, the owner says he discovers "fantastic sight lines and subtle design details" every time he stays in the house. "I really love the space," he says. "At the end of the day, environment impacts mood. And one of the best ways to shape mood is good design."
This article appears in the February 2009 issue of Palm Springs Life
link to article:
http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/February-200/DaringDesign/index.php?previewmode=on
link to article:
By Allison Engel
An apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright early in his career, John Lautner eschewed the cool, severe geometry of his midcentury minimalist peers. Instead, he spent a lifetime as an iconoclast, alternately overlooked or miscast by critics. Several of his best-known projects — including the iconic Googie coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard — have been wrongly celebrated as Atomic Age or Hollywood kitsch.
"Lautner’s fascination with new shapes and structures had nothing to do with Space Age futurism, or movieland glamour, or virtuoso engineering, but came from his determination to humanize the spaces of the built world and create an endlessly varied organic poetry. This was a profoundly serious agenda," wrote Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, in a foreword to the book that accompanied a retrospective exhibition of Lautner’s work at the Los Angeles museum last July.
Only after he died in 1994 did Lautner’s original designs start to receive attention and recognition as an influence on current architecture luminaries — such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid — whose work displays an organic, earthy bent.
One project that contains many Lautner hallmarks — a difficult site, a modest entrance concealing a soaring space, rooms that flirt between inside and out — is also one that represents the contradictions between his designs and how they were originally perceived. The Elrod House on Southridge Drive in Palm Springs, built in 1968 for interior designer Arthur Elrod, is memorable for its enormous domed concrete roof, with wedge-like sections cut out to accommodate skylights and provide indirect light.
Designed to shield the home from the intense desert sun, the roof rests on curved concrete walls. Black slate tile floors add drama, as does an indoor-outdoor swimming pool and boulders massed in the living room. When Lautner saw rocks exposed on the 23-acre site from grading, he directed the contractor to dig 10 feet deeper, uncovering massive rocks that would became an integral part of the interior design.
The general public knows the house primarily as the ultimate bachelor pad from the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds are Forever and as a location for Playboy photo shoots. Instead of a realization of Lautner’s emphasis on the relationship between space and nature, for most of its existence, the house was considered a symbol of Hollywood excess.
During Lautner’s lifetime, critics and the public seemed not to know what to make of his oddly shaped, back-to-nature structures. The longtime Los Angeles resident retained a deep longing for the north Michigan woods of his youth, designing homes that were alternately cave-like and open to the sky. In a career that spanned 55 years, he backed up his daring designs with extraordinary feats of engineering. (As he was said to have put it, "You’re wasting your time if you don’t know how to hold up the roof!")
Faced with impossible sites, harsh climates, or both, Lautner time and again invented solutions. In the Elrod House, for example, the pavilion-like living room originally was ringed with floor-to-ceiling glass arranged in a zigzagged curtain wall. Shortly after the house was built, a desert sandstorm broke the panes. Lautner reacted with something even more outrageous: He installed two 25-foot-wide hanging glass curtain walls that retract to open up the living room completely to the outside at the touch of a button.
The 8,901-square-foot house is now praised for its relationship with its mountain landscape and its sense of drama. Contemporary critics, warming to Lautner’s designs, consider the home one of the architect’s most important works. The curators of Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner, the Hammer Museum retrospective, looked at 300 of his projects and selected 50 to feature in the exhibition. Of those, they gave six projects particular emphasis, commissioning videos that were projected next to newly built large-scale models of the structures. One was the Elrod House.
The exhibit, which closed at the Hammer in October, moves to Glasgow, Scotland, in March; heads to Florida International University in Miami in October; and runs at Palm Springs Art Museum from Feb. 20 to May 23, 2010.
Beguiled by the home’s audasity, a real estate investor who divides his time between Hermosa Beach, Palm Springs, and West Hollywood admired it for a year before buying it in 2003. Since then, he has brought back some of the project’s original staff to care for the treasure. The owner later purchased the two adjacent Southridge houses (both architecturally significant), creating a portfolio of unusual houses that he is preserving in a way that also honors their use as lived-in spaces, ones made available to friends, family, business associates, and for special occasions.
The owner felt a special bond with the Elrod House; Lautner is the favorite architect of his father, an aeronautical engineer.
The main floor includes a kitchen, hidden from the living room by a long, curved wall. The generous master bedroom (originally only of only two in the house) features a bar and refrigerator tucked behind walls of exotic wood, with carefully matched grains. Elrod was a wizard at organization, wanting everything in its proper place, and Lautner obliged by filling multiple closets with row after row of pullout Lucite drawers. The closets are lined with cork so that jewelry or other accessories can be pinned up.
The sunken tub in the master bath is exposed to the outside, with only a glass wall standing between the T-shaped tub and a tidy row of bamboo. The area is unprotected but private, thanks to the remote site and the natural screening of a boulder.
A guest house and servants quarters, reached down a spiral staircase from the pool deck, was added two years after the main house was built.
Gardens around the house interweave formal and casual plantings: a moss area, fern patch, bamboo garden, paths of crushed rock ringed with cactus, and perennials that Elrod used to make potpourri to give to house guests. In a room carved into the cliff face, his many bins for dried flowers remain, with his hand-lettered labels: arrow, tansy, cornflowers, bergamot, roses.
The current owner managed to get a tour of the house in 2002 and couldn’t get it off his mind. "I walked out muttering, ‘That’s the best expression of space I’ve ever encountered,’" he says. "I muttered for over two months and began writing offers."
He bought the house from supermarket magnet Ron Burkle, who had poured millions into the house during the years he owned it.
"I give Burkle full marks," says the current owner. "He did all the thankless stuff you never see, basically renovating all the mechanical systems and furnishing it in a manner that’s true to the space." Lautner visited the house during that restoration and approved of the work.
Even at $5.5 million he paid for the house, the owner thinks it was undervalued. "You’ll never find the site again. You’ll never get the approvals again. And you had true simpatico between the client, architect, and contractor — something impossible to count on and critical to the best results."
He hired a contractor; housekeeper; pool man; manager; and Ricardo Flores, the son of the man who installed and maintained the original Lautner landscape. The staff also cares for the two other Southridge properties he bought: the former Steve McQueen house designed by Hugh Kaptur and "Boat House" designed by Michael P. Johnson for race-car driver James Jeffords.
As for the Elrod House, the owner says he discovers "fantastic sight lines and subtle design details" every time he stays in the house. "I really love the space," he says. "At the end of the day, environment impacts mood. And one of the best ways to shape mood is good design."
This article appears in the February 2009 issue of Palm Springs Life
link to article:
http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/February-200/DaringDesign/index.php?previewmode=on
link to article:
Friday, January 23, 2009
Swindlers find growing market in foreclosures
As home values across the country continue to plummet, the authorities say a new breed of swindler is preying on the tens of thousands of homeowners desperate to avoid foreclosure.
Until recently, defrauders tried to bilk homeowners out of the equity in their homes. Now, with that equity often dried up, they are presenting themselves as "foreclosure rescue companies" that charge upfront fees to modify loans but often do nothing to stave off foreclosure. The Federal Trade Commission brought lawsuits last year against five companies representing 20,000 customers, and state and local prosecutors have brought dozens more. In Florida, Attorney General Bill McCollum recently sued a company that he said had more than 600 victims.
"There's no way for the consumer to sort out the legitimate companies," said Mr. McCollum, who added that he had limited resources to fight what he called "a sheer volume question."
The companies under suspicion typically charge an upfront fee of up to $3,000 to help borrowers get lower rates on their mortgages from their lenders. But borrowers often cannot afford the fees, the service can be bogus and, in the worst cases, the homeowners lose their chance to renegotiate with their bank or to file for bankruptcy protection because of the time wasted. There are companies that provide legitimate foreclosure services, but the industry is largely unregulated, making it difficult for homeowners to separate the good from the bad. Some of the fraudulent companies - often run by former real estate agents or mortgage brokers - are local; others are national. Many have official-looking Web sites that suggest that the companies have government affiliations and give homeowners a false sense of security.
Source: By John Leland, The New York Times
Until recently, defrauders tried to bilk homeowners out of the equity in their homes. Now, with that equity often dried up, they are presenting themselves as "foreclosure rescue companies" that charge upfront fees to modify loans but often do nothing to stave off foreclosure. The Federal Trade Commission brought lawsuits last year against five companies representing 20,000 customers, and state and local prosecutors have brought dozens more. In Florida, Attorney General Bill McCollum recently sued a company that he said had more than 600 victims.
"There's no way for the consumer to sort out the legitimate companies," said Mr. McCollum, who added that he had limited resources to fight what he called "a sheer volume question."
The companies under suspicion typically charge an upfront fee of up to $3,000 to help borrowers get lower rates on their mortgages from their lenders. But borrowers often cannot afford the fees, the service can be bogus and, in the worst cases, the homeowners lose their chance to renegotiate with their bank or to file for bankruptcy protection because of the time wasted. There are companies that provide legitimate foreclosure services, but the industry is largely unregulated, making it difficult for homeowners to separate the good from the bad. Some of the fraudulent companies - often run by former real estate agents or mortgage brokers - are local; others are national. Many have official-looking Web sites that suggest that the companies have government affiliations and give homeowners a false sense of security.
Source: By John Leland, The New York Times
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