Praying for profit: Enter the word “church” in the keyword search box on commercial real estate listing site LoopNet and hundreds of properties will pop up for sale, from historic churches in rural areas to mega-churches in urban ones. As The Wall Street Journal reports, many churches have little choice but to sell because they’re in or near foreclosure, often because they’re struggling with declining membership and high maintenance costs. Other churches, however, are flourishing and selling their current facilities to move to larger ones elsewhere. Increasingly, as church leaders become more sophisticated, a third path has arisen: Teaming up with real-estate companies to redevelop their property to include mixed uses on the land. Read the full story.
The game has changed: Private equity and hedge fund firms have bought more than 100,000 troubled mortgages at a discount from banks and federal housing agencies, emerging as aggressive liquidators for the remains of the mortgage crisis that erupted nearly a decade ago, The New York Times reports. As the housing market nationwide recovers, this is a dark corner from which banks, stung by hefty penalties for bungling mortgage modifications and foreclosures, have retreated. Federal housing officials, for the most part, have welcomed the new financial players as being more nimble and creative than banks with terms for delinquent borrowers. But the firms are now drawing fire. Read the full story.
Summer bump: U.S. home prices rose at a solid pace in July, as would-be buyers competed for a diminished supply of available housing. The Associated Press reports the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index climbed 5% in July from a year earlier. That’s up from a 4.9% annual pace in June. Home prices rose in all 20 cities included in the index over the past 12 months. San Francisco posted the biggest gain of 10.4%, followed by Denver with 10.3%. The Case-Shiller index covers roughly half of U.S. homes. The index measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average. The July figures are the latest available. Read the full story.
