Hire Locally Will Become the Law in San Francisco New York Times “Under the ordinance, city contractors and subcontractors working on city-financed construction projects worth $400,000 or more would be required to hire at least 20 percent of their workers from San Francisco. The requirement will increase by 5 percent each year until it reaches [...]

…then beggars would ride. The old children’s nursery rhyme seems to have some resonance in this current housing market. Two recent report from Housing Giants and Professional Remodeler offer semi-conflicting reports about where the housing market is going and Americans’ views of what home ownership means. Housing Giants reports that demand is going up for [...]

Marketing Tips for Green  Homes EcoHome “Energy efficiency, water savings, and health issues are the three green hot buttons that most consumers respond to, a panel of industry experts told attendees during the Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in Chicago. But officials of Pulte Group, American Standard, and USA Today also said that buyers not [...]

Saving Costs Residential Architect “Now more than ever, architects who hope to increase their market share must respect their clients’ limits. More importantly, they need a clear understanding of costs, a process flexible enough to adjust as the project evolves, and the creative know-how to do more with less.” Pending Home Sales Rose 10.4% in [...]

We recently talked about smaller home construction outlasting the current recession. Obviously finances are a concern for many people right now (think of the heating bills on those McMansions!) and a smaller footprint just makes sense. An article called “Downsizing the American Dream” on USA Today gave some more specifics: According to leading architect Sarah [...]

The New Water Cooler BUILDER “Builders are slowly revising their perceptions about social media being time consuming to sustain and difficult to track. Builders that dip into these waters also realize that social media don’t sell houses, at least not in the traditional ways other advertising and marketing do. Social media’s power lies in its [...]

We often think of homebuyers as consisting of couples or families, but there’s a new brand of buyer out there and she has often has purchasing power to burn. According to MSN Real Estate, single women now account for a quarter of home sales, and that number has risen since the mid-90s. So what are [...]

Green Building Goes on a Budget Wall Street Journal “Casa Feliz is one of a growing number of affordable-housing projects nationwide that have been built “green”—that is, with nontoxic materials, highly energy-efficient appliances, and features such as green roofs and solar panels. Thanks to tax credits designed to attract private capital and aggressive cost-cutting on [...]

Here’s a question from the Wall Steet Journal: If a city is shrinking and plagued by high unemployment, should it still earn the label of ‘most affordable’? The troubled city of Detroit was anointed that dubious honor on Wednesday by Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC., which released a report comparing the asking prices for four-bedroom, [...]

According to Professional Builder, there’s another reason that houses are becoming smaller and cheaper: first time home buyers. Professional Builder points out that 8.4 million households bought a home between 2007 and 2009. And how many of them were doing it for the first time? 41 percent. That’s a very significant minority. It stands to [...]