Sunday, January 31, 2010

The Strongest and Weakest Housing Markets - Kiplinger.com

Note Great Falls, MT was No. 10!

The Strongest and Weakest Housing Markets - Kiplinger.com

The Strongest and Weakest Housing Markets

Ten places where home prices are rising, and ten places where prices are tumbling.

By Pat Mertz Esswein, Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

December 2009

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The housing market is showing some signs of recovery. Sales are up and prices have stabilized after falling for three years. The ten metro areas that enjoyed the greatest home-price increases over the past year (through June 30, 2009) largely missed the housing boom and didn’t indulge in subprime-lending excesses.

With no boom, these cities had no need to bust. Instead, their housing markets have plugged along at 4% annual price appreciation, below the national average of 6% annually between 1968 and 2008, according to the National Association of Realtors. Most of these areas are relatively small, with populations less than 200,000.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Hints of a Rebirth for Commercial Real Estate? - Kiplinger.com

Hints of a Rebirth for
Commercial Real Estate?

Investors are taking an interest in commercial real estate, primarily apartment and office buildings. Retail space -- not so much.

By Jerome Idaszak, Associate Editor, The Kiplinger Letter

Laura Kennedy, Researcher-Reporter, the Kiplinger letters

January 28, 2010

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Bargain hunters are starting to sniff around commercial real estate markets, though retail real estate remains under a heavy cloud.

Apartment and office buildings in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco and Boston are sparking a bit of interest -- a signal that the bottom is nearing.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Linked In, Logged On - The Benefits and Potential Pitfalls of Social Networking Applications

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/acec/engineeringinc0110/#/14

Saturday, January 9, 2010

KPAX - Missoula, Montana - News, Weather, Sports - - KPAX Home Missoula News, Missoula Weather, Missoula Sports, Montana News, Montana Weather, Montan

KPAX - Missoula, Montana - News, Weather, Sports - - KPAX Home Missoula News, Missoula Weather, Missoula Sports, Montana News, Montana Weather, Montana Sports | Missoula firm makes optimistic move

Thursday, January 7, 2010

WGM Group Finds a New Home

With the help of the Small Business Association and the Historically Underutilized
Business Zone (HUBZone) program, WGM Group Inc. purchases new office building.

Brent Campbell, president of WGM Group, Inc., has announced that WGM recently purchased a new office building. WGM will be moving January 18th from its current location to 1111 East Broadway in Missoula. WGM is an locally owned and operated, community-centered land use planning, engineering, and surveying firm that has been building better communities, safer roads, and healthier places to live, work, and play in the Northwest for over 40 years.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Broadening the Tax Revenue Base

by Gary London

This recession has laid bare some longstanding problems in our private and public sector financial system. If jurisdictions are allowed to broaden their tax revenue base, the effect would be the encouragement of the kinds of higher density, mixed-use development needed in most communities.

Cities and other local jurisdictions have traditionally focused on retail for sales taxes, hotels for transient occupancy taxes, or TOT, and tax increment financing (property taxes) through redevelopment as the major tax sources to pay for their “general fund” operations. It is unusual for these revenue sources to decline, yet each source is dramatically down. Some of this tax revenue will eventually return. Alarmingly, some may not.

I want to focus on the alarms going off.

The “Great Recession” has set in motion two trends that may influence consumer behavior for a long time. Economists refer to these habit breaking events as structural changes. The first and largest trend is consumer spending. In the past three decades, personal consumption expenditures have risen from less than two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product (total value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. in one year) to nearly 72 percent. In the same time period, personal savings fell from more than 10 percent of disposable income to about 1 percent. This increased consumption and reduced savings, coupled with an increased willingness to accept higher levels of debt and risk, likely helped fuel the last two asset bubbles: the dot-com stock and housing price bubbles. It’s the bursting of the housing price bubble and decline in perceived wealth that may trigger the second change in trends: households’ inability and/or unwillingness to tap their home equity to supplement their consumption.

http://londongroup.com/2010/01/05/broadening-tax-revenue-base-would-help-cities/

Building Sustainable Communities in the Northern Rockies

Sunday, January 31, 2010