The Parliament passed a bill regulating property sales to foreigners, rearranged taking into consideration a Constitutional Court decision revoking a previous legislation and was confirmed in Official Gazette.

The new law enables foreigners to purchase real estate up to 10 percent of areas in the zoning plan, not exceeding 2.5 hectares. Foreigners are now able to acquire real estate across Turkey with the permission of governor's offices. Since the details on this permission will be made public with a regulation to be issued within three months, no sales will be allowed in this period. The law also authorizes the Council of Ministers to change the percentage (not more than 10 percent), taking into consideration the significance of towns in terms of infrastructure, economy, energy, environment, culture and agriculture.

Relevant governmental organizations and governor's offices will inform the Housing Ministry within 3 months about the total area of real estate that will be available to be sold to foreigners.

Companies established by foreign citizens or those with foreign shareholdings will be able to acquire real estate in order to conduct the activities stated in their articles of incorporation. This principle will also be applicable to transfers of property so acquired.

A commission will be established at the Ministry of Public Works and Housing that will evaluate offers and requests by public institutions. Its reports will then be submitted to the Cabinet for approval.

Sales of land in areas under protection, designated as irrigation, energy, agricultural, mining, religious or cultural sites or due to their flora or fauna, as well as strategic areas with security considerations, are not allowed. Areas will be designated as such by the Cabinet. The Cabinet reserves the right to alter this limit, taking infrastructure, the economic situation, energy, the environment, culture, agriculture and security factors into account.
Foreign ownership of real estate in military-restricted areas will be possible only by permission from command headquarters that are authorized by the General Staff, real estate in security areas will be purchasable by foreigners only through a special permission of the related governor's office, the legislation states.

Source: MyMerhaba.com

updated 6:33 p.m. ET June 4, 2008

NEW YORK - Renters may be the biggest winners in the current housing slump, especially in places like Florida, Las Vegas and Southern California, that have thousands of vacant for-sale and foreclosed homes and condos on the market.

Apartment vacancies are edging up in many areas of the country as frustrated sellers instead try to rent out their homes and condos in once red-hot housing markets. And that is making it harder for landlords to raise rents. In the toughest markets, apartment owners are even offering lease incentives to snag renters.

This "shadow market" of investor-owned homes and condos accounts for almost half of the rental stock, and attracts displaced homeowners more often than your typical apartment renter.

"What's different now is the degree of excess homes and condos being put on the rental market. The sheer volume is creating more competition for traditional rental markets," said Hessam Nadji, managing director at Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, which analyzed the data for The Associated Press.

After staying relatively flat last year, apartment vacancies bumped up in the first quarter from the end of last year, the research showed. The vacancy rate is expected to rise by a half-percent this year to 6.1 percent as the market absorbs about 3.3 million more rental home and condo units.

Nadji also predicts rent growth nationwide will slow to 3.5 percent from 4.6 percent.

The national trend, however, belies what's happening in the country's most beleaguered housing markets. Areas that experienced explosive condo development and conversions of apartments into condos for sale are finding those units unloaded onto the rental market because developers can't sell them.

Sharp increases in vacancy rates plague most Florida markets where condo development was rampant. In Jacksonville, for example, rental vacancies spiked to more than 10 percent in the first quarter, up from 5.8 percent in the prior year. Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale had the next biggest gains in vacancies.

"As the sale activity for condos and single-family homes declined over the last 24 months, investors decided to rent them instead of trying to sell them at reduced prices," said Ron Shuffield, president of Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors Inc. in Miami.

Since the beginning of the year, the number of rentals on the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale markets combined has risen more than 11 percent to 10,000 from 9,000.

"Our rental activity is about three times what it was three years ago," Shuffield said. "Today, for the first time ever for the firm, we're renting more properties than we're selling."

In San Diego, single-family homes being placed on the rental market are hurting luxury apartment communities, said Rick Snyder, president of the California Apartment Association.

The new supply is preventing some landlords from increasing rents, and other are even being forced to offer freebies like one free month with a one-year lease or upgraded unit fixtures.

"People realize they're getting substantially more value than what they're spending on that rental," said Snyder, who is also president of apartment manager R.A. Snyder Properties Inc.

SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24972314/

(Fortune Magazine) -- In the history of real estate there are a handful of legendary homebuilders - William Levitt, who created Levittown on Long Island, being one, and then there's Eli Broad, who became a billionaire building tract homes throughout the Midwest and Southern California.

Surrounded by the famous Jasper Johns series "The Seasons" in his office 11 floors above Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard, Broad does not miss much. The 75-year-old real estate pioneer has seen bull and bear markets, and in recent years he watched as the company he founded (and cashed out of so he could focus on philanthropy) lost its way. During the bubble, KB Home (KBH, Fortune 500), like many other big builders, blew up its old-line business by going ritzy and building expensive houses. Now KB is among the first homebuilders to recognize the error of its ways, and it is returning to its roots as a purveyor of low-cost, smaller homes. In some cases KB is even using the same façades from the go-go years and then shrinking the house that lurks behind them to be half as deep - and about half as expensive. "If I had to write a headline for housing, it would be back to basics," says Broad. "The right thing to do is just what KB is doing: build starter homes that compete with rentals."

KB's recovery plan is not just a tale of two houses. It is a tale of two CEOs. During the bubble Bruce Karatz, a flamboyant marketer, believed that the public's hunger for McMansions would keep the good times rolling for years to come. It was his successor, Jeff Mezger, a hammer-and-studs operator, who recognized that the world had gone mad and steered KB back to first-time buyers. That strategy shift may prove to be a primer on how the housing market rejuvenates itself after a boom and a bust.
When owning is as cheap as renting

When the real estate market comes back, it will not be with a sonic boom. It is likely to be subtle, below the public's radar. The revival will probably begin in the areas hit hardest by the bust: in Florida, Las Vegas, and the honeycombed tracts that flank the broad freeways east of Los Angeles known as the Inland Empire. (Indeed, home sales in Southern California surged 22% from March to April, hitting their highest levels since August.) Why will housing come back? For a reason as solid as floor joists: The entry-level buyer, for the first time in years, is finding that owning a new house is suddenly just as cheap as renting. "Those first-time buyers got locked out by high prices," says John Karevoll of DataQuick, a research firm that assembles data on the U.S. real estate market. "Now the buying activity that was on hold is starting to come back."

In hindsight, the reason for the current malaise is simple: too few buyers. By 2007 more and more people were frozen out of the market - especially the entry-level buyers, who now account for as much as 30% of new-home sales. They're the twentysomething young professionals who rent until they get married or the first child arrives, and then reach for the American dream of homeownership. From 2005 to 2006 some first-timers rushed to purchase homes they couldn't afford with the help of exotic loans. But another big group of young consumers steered clear and are finally looking to buy. Now that prices of new houses have fallen as much as 30% in areas including the Inland Empire and the outskirts of Phoenix, they are returning- prompting a turning point in the housing cycle. Call it the New Affordability.

Three factors are driving the New Affordability: housing prices, house size, and the government's expanding role in the mortgage market. The experience of Richard Murkey, 28, and his wife, Kayla, 25, epitomizes the trend. The Las Vegas residents started shopping in 2006 but couldn't remotely afford the $300,000-plus prices that modest houses were fetching at the height of the frenzy. "Then, in the middle of 2007, we saw prices dropping, so we started looking again," says Richard, who sells safety products to construction sites. In January the Murkeys went to contract on a four-bedroom, Tuscan-style house at $246,000, more than $50,000 less than that KB model sold for 18 months before. It gets better. KB Home offered a program called "price protection" that guarantees that if the price of your model falls before the closing, KB will lower your price to match it. Result: The Murkeys got a discount that dropped the price from $246,000 to $213,000.

Nor was financing a problem. The Murkeys obtained an FHA-insured loan at under 6%, with a down payment of just 3%. Their mortgage, taxes, and insurance total $1,400 a month, a mere $200 more than the rent they were paying on their three-bedroom apartment. The FHA's role is something that housing bears have mostly overlooked: The FHA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac are now guaranteeing more than 90% of loans to first-time homebuyers. The FHA is providing lending that the private market has stopped making to borrowers with blemishes on their credit records. Both the rates and down payments are extremely low.

Today seven in ten KB customers are getting financing from the FHA. The current rates are below 6%, more than 100 basis points under those on jumbo mortgages not backed by the FHA or Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. (Fannie and Freddie lend less readily to people with past credit problems and hence aren't as crucial to the entry-level market as FHA financing.) Congress has raised the FHA limit to $729,750 in high-cost areas like Los Angeles through the end of 2008. But even if the limits aren't extended, virtually all the houses KB sells are priced for an FHA loan.

The houses themselves are being radically downsized to meet buyers' budgets. At the peak of the last boom, in 2006, KB's customers craved cathedral ceilings, formal dining and living rooms, and fancy wrought-iron railings on windows and balconies. Today's buyers, KB found, are willing to trade size and amenities for far lower prices. But they're extremely specific about what they want to keep. Buyers welcome houses half as big as the models that reigned at the peak, as long as they offer plenty of bedrooms. They also don't miss the formal living and dining rooms if KB provides a "great room" combining the two in one open space that includes a generous-sized kitchen.

Bargain-hunters are drawn to these small houses, which look just like the behemoths built in 2005 and 2006. In Beaumont, a community of tract homes 70 miles east of Los Angeles, the Seneca Springs community is dotted with 4,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom Mediterranean homes that KB built at the peak. But right next to them the company is erecting new houses with exactly the same 50-foot façades- and a big difference you don't notice from the street: They're about half as deep and roughly 2,000 square feet. Those homes preserve the community's curb appeal by keeping the façades looking similar and sumptuous. But purchasers love that the new homes boast five bedrooms, and they especially appreciate the pricetag: about $220,000, vs. $420,000 for the big neighboring homes built at the peak (and that now sell for around $300,000). Over time this New Affordability may swell the ranks of buyers. "What's been killing the market is people who are waiting to buy or incapable of getting financing," says Jonathan Dienhart of Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, a residential real estate research firm.

SOURCE: http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/02/real_estate/
Downsizing_American_Home_Tully.fortune/index.htm?section=money_realestate

Developer offers $400,000 model for each $1.6 million estate purchased

SAN DIEGO - As though Southern California's fine weather and beaches weren't attractive enough, a San Diego developer desperate to clear inventory is offering potential home buyers a buy-one-get-one-free scheme.

In a market beset with foreclosures and plummeting sales following the mortgage meltdown in 2007, Michael Crews Development will give away a row home valued at $400,000 with the purchase of a $1.6 million luxury estate home in the upscale city of Escondido in northern San Diego County.

"We are targeting a niche market of investors who are interested in the opportunity to buy a new home for themselves and get a free rental property or second home for family members," developer Michael Crews said in a statement.

The developer claims the row homes are not shoddy townhouses that are being given away with luxury estate homes. The two-acre Royal View luxury homes with four bedrooms, four baths, up to six car garages, swimming pools would be paired with 2,000 square-foot upscale row houses.

"People don't expect to get what they are getting with the row-homes," said marketing director Dawn Berry. "These are well appointed luxury houses."

Originally the offer was to run for two weeks in May but the developers decided to extend it through June to give potential buyers more time to mull over it.

Since the first advertisement went up nearly two weeks ago, one man has made an offer to buy a Royal View estate home, but chose not to take the free row-home. The developers have a solution for that as well.

"If you don't know what to do with your free home, you could always give it away," Berry said.

That would be welcome help for many a young buyer struggling to get a loan amid tightening credit rules that require larger down payments and established credit histories.

Home sales in San Diego County were down 18 percent in April from a year-earlier, while the number of homes going into foreclosure rose 130 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to DataQuick Information Systems.

SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24955307/

AS HOUSE prices in America continue their rapid descent, market-watchers are having to cast back ever further for gloomy comparisons. The latest S&P/Case-Shiller national house-price index, published this week, showed a slump of 14.1% in the year to the first quarter, the worst since the index began 20 years ago. Now Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University and co-inventor of the index, has compiled a version that stretches back over a century. This shows that the latest fall in nominal prices is already much bigger than the 10.5% drop in 1932, the worst point of the Depression. And things are even worse than they look. In the deflationary 1930s house prices declined less in real terms. Today inflation is running at a brisk pace, so property prices have fallen by a staggering 18% in real terms over the past year.

SOURCE: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11465476

"Why stay in Seoul if the tax laws work against you and you like America? Real estate agents are seeing more customers from South Korea."

Peter Oh, a Seattle real estate agent, is planning to open a showroom to market 21 condominium buildings in the Puget Sound region. But he’s not looking for a storefront location in downtown Seattle, nor is he planning to locate among the many new high-rises in nearby Bellevue across the lake.

Instead, he’s creating a marketing office 5,000 miles away — in South Korea.

“My competition already sold one-third of a building out of a mini-sales center in South Korea,” Oh says, referring to marketing efforts by Shin Young, a developer selling a 334-unit Los Angeles condo building, The Residences @ Bixel.
Oh’s showroom could open as soon as October — not a moment too soon. Oh, of the agency Urban Condominiums, says South Koreans have a pent-up demand for overseas homes, and a particular affinity for real estate in big American cities. Oh already has sold South Koreans 14 homes in The Bravern, a 455-unit luxury tower under construction in Bellevue and expects further response.

South Koreans are benefiting from new, more liberal foreign investment laws back home, but the country isn’t the only new market on agents’ radars, especially not for luxury projects. Jason Press, executive vice president of marketing at New York-based condo marketing company Shvo, has traveled to Seoul, Paris and elsewhere to peddle the company's high-end offerings.

“We recently launched a new office in Dubai, and that’s spurred interest from that region in New York City,” Press says. “We’re associated with luxury international brands, and these are magnets to international buyers.”

Declining prices and a weak dollar have made U.S. property more appealing to overseas buyers, while a weak U.S. economy has forced real estate agents to look farther afield for buyers.

Last year one-third of American agents worked with at least one international buyer, according to the National Association of Realtors. The top five countries supplying international customers were Mexico, Britain, Canada, India and China.

In Dallas, where a $400 million downtown revitalization effort is sprucing up downtown and creating a new arts district, developers of the forthcoming 120-unit Museum Tower luxury condo building are pitching Mexico’s elite. Units in the new tower start at $1 million.

“We’re going to actively market Museum Tower in Monterrey and Mexico City,” says Dan Boeckman, a partner at Turtle Creek Holdings, co-developer of the project with Brook Partners. Boeckman says his firm will not only make presentations in Mexico but also sponsor events likely to attract an elite audience, such as fashion shows.

“We think there should be some European interest, too," he says. "We’re thinking about how to go about it.”

Canadians, meanwhile, are taking advantage of the exchange rate, which gives their dollar — the “loonie” — the kind of leverage it hasn’t seen in years. Five years ago, the Canadian dollar was worth about 70 cents in U.S. currency; now it's worth about $1.01.

Mark Dziedzic, president of property marketer Arizona for Canadians, moved to the Phoenix area three years ago from Canada and now markets property in Phoenix, Scottsdale and Sedona to Canadians.

Outside the Kihei Akahi condo complex on the Hawaiian island of Maui, three flags fly: American, Hawaiian and Canadian. Randy Antonio, an agent with Keller Williams in Maui, says that’s because so many Canadians have bought into the complex, where condos sell in the $500,000 range.

Canadians have been interested in Hawaii since the 1970s, Antonio says, but in recent years the favorable exchange rate has finally made it more affordable for many to buy. Since last year many of his open houses have seen 90 percent Canadian attendance.

Dean Jones, president of Seattle condo marketing agency Realogics, has partnered with Oh, the Urban Condominiums agent, to pitch Seattle-area property to Canadians. Oh got 22 reservations from Canadians during the pre-sale phase of a 39-story condo tower in downtown Seattle after a trip in December.

Jones said some builders are even offering “currency hedges” to Canadians so they can lock in their final purchase at current exchange rates. Dziedzic says some builders in Arizona are using the same strategy.

“Canadians have an opportunity they’ve never seen before,” Dziedzic says.

Agents, of course, have the opportunity too — and as showrooms pop up in Dubai and Seoul, and road shows hit Monterrey and Paris, Americans can expect to see their urban real estate go increasingly global.

SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24882849/

Well, that is the great question in all real estate people's mind in these days.. What is FocusAbacus? And why is there a decade after the great enlargement(even some says boom) of that internet based real estate industry. Here is the enlightment for alls' to refresh your minds. Right after that so called boom, there was the period of resession for both real estate and dotcom industries. And even we can claim that it was not possible to talk about an industry called internet.. To sum up also we were in our really early ages in these days, which make us still young and give us the necessery passion to work for an industry which hosts that much competitor.

In today's world what we have in our hand is something totally different than one decade before; first of all we have a really mature internet world almost all around the earth, a better penetration of mobile devices and pcs, and a good usage of internet for business on our clients' side. Secondly, due to the globalization real estate and properties industry is booming on a global level. As the third reason and almost the most important one, now there is the consious to read that article on your side...

So all those elements when come together let us create the almost best business model for global&local real estate industry, as the new fashion term we also call that glocalization. We are planning to give you the chance of while selling or buying your properties in a global level to reach your customers in their local environment. Which refers to their own stile, own culture and at the top level their own language. But how can we provide that, for the test period it will being provided by local language sides, so for instance when you get in an ad in Italian language your customer from China will be able to read it in her own language of mandarin while your possible future customers from Americas can read in Spanish or Portuguese languages. Yes that is it; your childhood time fairy tale; "babel fish" but for now just for the sake of your business..

What a differentiation; so if you need a recomendation from me do not give that easily spreading secret to your neighbour competitor, not a big possibility but maybe if you are that lucky he won't hear about us..By the way another good news is that FocusAbacus thing also works as an MLSystem, so you will be able to sell a villa from Cotè D'Azur while working in your office on the top of the K2 and you will earn according to your agreement with the system while FocusAbacus is earning absolutely nothing. Literaly meaning of that is free service included in your standart membership as a RE-broker.

I can stay in that article more to let you understand all features of the FocusAbacus but instead I will just tell a last thing, which is the localization of domain names, for instance we are serving to Latin, Spanish and Italian markets by the name Immobiliarsi.com while using Emlak.im for Turkish market. I am sorry but it is difficult to write here Chinese characters :) FocusAbacus.cn and more, I cannot write all the names here because we are serving for now in 20 markets by 14 languages and I hope one of those markets is on your target..

Have a good business day...

Glory and blossoms,
Kerem KOKER, Milano
sO Partner

According to Property Frontiers, when acquiring a real property as a private individual, only one home, a residential property, can be acquired.

Emma Holifield, PR and marketing executive at Property Frontiers, said that the Chinese economy is "overheating" due to trade surplus being high, and too much capital flowing into both the stock and real estate market.

As the government needs to cool down either the stock or real estate market, it is "unlikely that the Chinese government will choose to relax the restrictions on foreign property ownership".

Property Frontiers stated that when property is acquired as a Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise there are no further restrictions on what property can be bought although the assessment can be strict.

According to the results of a recent survey from the Afire organisation, property investors continue their global diversification with a strong eye toward Asia, the US property market remains at the top of their confidence level.

Source: Adfero