This articled was written by Shashank Shekhar and appeared at www.RealtyTimes.com.
Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, must be tearing out what's left of his hair.
He has increased the Federal Reserve's balance sheet to an all time high of almost $3 trillion, primarily through bond purchases.
Unfortunately, mortgage rates haven't declined as much as he would have hoped.
He is frustrated that the lower yield on mortgage backed securities are not being passed onto borrowers in form of lower mortgage interest rates.
He recently said the situation is "unfortunate" and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York conducted a workshop to examine the issue.
Imagine the 30-year-fixed-rate-mortgage interest dropping below 3 percent?
That would generate another wave of refinancing, helping homeowners across nation save hundreds to thousands of dollars each year, while boosting the economy.
Bernanke hoped the savings would increase consumer spending and provide the economy and employment with a much needed boost.
Why the 30-year-fixed mortgage rate should be 2.75%
The spread between so-called primary and secondary rates is about 1.1 percentage points, compared with less 0.7 percentage point in March and an average of about 0.5 percentage point years before the credit crisis, according to Bloomberg.
Primary rates are what lenders charge borrowers and secondary rates are what lenders are paid when they sell the loans on the secondary market. If the spread was at the pre-credit crisis level of 0.5 percent, mortgage rates to borrowers would decline by 0.6 percent.
Today, the current average 30-year-fixed mortgage rate is just below 3.40 percent, which means the rates should be at or below 2.80 percent.
Some say the higher spreads today reflect bank profiteering.
In early December, a study from the New York Federal Reserve Bank reported that banks earn about $5 per $100 in loans they originate today, up from $4 in 2009 and $2 from 2005-2008.
Why mortgage rates aren't lower
Banks have their own explanation for the disparity.
Bernanke concedes, higher fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other banking industry changes are contributing to higher spreads. Banks today also experience the added cost of longer processing times.
Banks understand that low mortgage rates won't last forever. That makes them reluctant to add more staff, which would increase their fixed costs. Short-staffing results in longer loan processing time and, again, time is money.
Tighter underwriting guidelines also contribute to longer processing times. Banks analyze many more income, asset and credit documents then they have in the past.
Mortgage industry officials also say that rising litigation expenses, federal and state investigations and new regulations contribute to a cost structure that is difficult to predict.
"Until we have a rational, articulated plan where institutions know they can extend credit in a way that protects them as well as the consumer, I think we're going to see these spreads stay wide," said David Stevens, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Critics say banks have too much business and too little competition. The law of supply and demand rules. With more business than they can handle, there is little incentive for them to reduce rates.
Once these low mortgage rates begin to rise and refinancing business dwindles, the spreads could narrow. Few complain about a 3.5 percent mortgage rate, but economic and employment gains would be greater if banks made smaller profits and allowed rates to fall below 3 percent.
That's Bernanke's goal.
Only time will tell whether banks will make it so.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Dream Houses
This article was taken from www.nytimes.com:
We can happily live with disagreements of taste when it comes to art, or poetry, or music. I listen to Abba on my iPod, you listen to Brahms on yours, and everybody’s content. But architecture is different. If I build a Zaha Hadid deconstructed-boomerang house across the street from your mock-Tudor raised ranch, you’re going to have to look at it whether you want to or not. And if Donald Trump pulls down a few 19th-century brownstones to put up the 110-story gilded-glass Trump Basilisk, we’re all going to have to look at it, even if it kills us.
It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?
These are the sort of reflections prompted by Alain de Botton’s latest book, “The Architecture of Happiness.” De Botton, a young author of briskly selling meditations on such themes as status anxiety, travel and the life-changing power of Proust, here turns his attention to architecture, pondering the question of just what are the elusive qualities that make one building beautiful and another hideous.
The answer used to seem obvious enough: a beautiful building was one that realized certain abstract ideals of symmetry, proportion and harmony. It was all a matter of following the rules for the “classical orders” laid out in Roman times by Vitruvius and promulgated anew during the Renaissance by Alberti and Palladio — rules specifying, for instance, precisely how a Doric column should taper as it ascends to the architrave.
But in the 18th century this classical consensus began to break down. Horace Walpole struck a blow by building the world’s first Gothic house, a picturesque pile on the banks of the Thames, which he called Strawberry Hill. Before long, de Botton notes, architects were boasting “of their ability to turn out houses in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Tyrolean or Jacobean styles, or in any combination of these.” One aristocratic couple resolved their own clashing tastes by commissioning a house split down the middle, Palladian classical in the front, Gothic revival in the rear.
The possibilities became even more dizzying with the introduction of new materials and building technologies. As the role of engineering became ever more prestigious, a seductive idea arose: perhaps architectural excellence could be reduced to function. To this way of thinking, the most elegant bridge was the one that spanned the greatest distance with the lightest material.
Taking the new functional aesthetic into the home, however, did not prove an entirely happy experiment. Le Corbusier famously described the ideal house as a “machine for living,” but his own domestic masterpiece, the Villa Savoye, was deemed “uninhabitable” by the couple who commissioned it. “It’s raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp,” Madame Savoye wrote the architect. “What’s more, it’s still raining in my bathroom.”
Such functional problems don’t make Le Corbusier’s immaculate geometries any the less thrilling. As John Ruskin observed, we don’t want our buildings merely to shelter us; we also want them to speak to us. But of what? De Botton has an answer. Great buildings, he says, “speak of visions of happiness.”
This claim is bolder than it sounds. Architecture, after all, consists mainly of abstract forms. A building by Santiago Calatrava may suggest a dove taking flight, but that’s a far cry from expressing an ideal of the good life. Think of music, though. A movement from a late Beethoven quartet manages to convey a sense of joyous resignation, perhaps because its abstract tonal structures mirror the dynamics of our emotional lives. Mightn’t architecture work the same way?
De Botton thinks so, and he makes the most of this expressionist theme on his jolly (and handsomely illustrated) romp through the world of architecture. He writes eloquently of how different architectural features hint at aspects of human flourishing: how, say, pointed Gothic arches “convey ardor and intensity,” whereas their rounded classical counterparts “embody serenity and poise.” His visions of happiness range from the ordered complexity of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to Richard Neutra’s sleek modernist pavilions in the Hollywood Hills, which speak “of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future.” Wherever he casts his eye, what he sees, in material form, are the lineaments of gratified desire.
Like de Botton’s previous books, this one contains its quota of piffle dressed up in pompous language. Sometimes the effect is (intentionally?) humorous, in a Woody Allen-ish sort of way. Taking shelter from a London downpour, de Botton ducks into a McDonald’s, where the harsh lighting and sounds of French fries bubbling in vats of oil remind him of “the loneliness and meaninglessness of existence in a random and violent universe.” When a gaggle of noisy Finnish teenagers arrives, he flees to the nearby Westminster Cathedral, whose sublime interior repairs his delicate soul.
Focusing on happiness can be a lovely way to make sense of architectural beauty, but it probably won’t be of much help in resolving conflicts of taste. In a liberal society, there is as much disagreement on what constitutes the best life as there is on what constitutes the best built environment to live it in. Curiously, among the many dozens of buildings pictured in de Botton’s book, the one that crops up most frequently is a house that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. True to its creator’s character, it is mercilessly austere: cubic in form, with stone floors, lacquered metal doors and naked light bulbs. It makes Philip Johnson’s Glass House look cheesy and suburban. The Wittgenstein House is a thing of beauty. But I don’t think even de Botton would be terribly happy living in it.
We can happily live with disagreements of taste when it comes to art, or poetry, or music. I listen to Abba on my iPod, you listen to Brahms on yours, and everybody’s content. But architecture is different. If I build a Zaha Hadid deconstructed-boomerang house across the street from your mock-Tudor raised ranch, you’re going to have to look at it whether you want to or not. And if Donald Trump pulls down a few 19th-century brownstones to put up the 110-story gilded-glass Trump Basilisk, we’re all going to have to look at it, even if it kills us.
It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?
These are the sort of reflections prompted by Alain de Botton’s latest book, “The Architecture of Happiness.” De Botton, a young author of briskly selling meditations on such themes as status anxiety, travel and the life-changing power of Proust, here turns his attention to architecture, pondering the question of just what are the elusive qualities that make one building beautiful and another hideous.
The answer used to seem obvious enough: a beautiful building was one that realized certain abstract ideals of symmetry, proportion and harmony. It was all a matter of following the rules for the “classical orders” laid out in Roman times by Vitruvius and promulgated anew during the Renaissance by Alberti and Palladio — rules specifying, for instance, precisely how a Doric column should taper as it ascends to the architrave.
But in the 18th century this classical consensus began to break down. Horace Walpole struck a blow by building the world’s first Gothic house, a picturesque pile on the banks of the Thames, which he called Strawberry Hill. Before long, de Botton notes, architects were boasting “of their ability to turn out houses in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Tyrolean or Jacobean styles, or in any combination of these.” One aristocratic couple resolved their own clashing tastes by commissioning a house split down the middle, Palladian classical in the front, Gothic revival in the rear.
The possibilities became even more dizzying with the introduction of new materials and building technologies. As the role of engineering became ever more prestigious, a seductive idea arose: perhaps architectural excellence could be reduced to function. To this way of thinking, the most elegant bridge was the one that spanned the greatest distance with the lightest material.
Taking the new functional aesthetic into the home, however, did not prove an entirely happy experiment. Le Corbusier famously described the ideal house as a “machine for living,” but his own domestic masterpiece, the Villa Savoye, was deemed “uninhabitable” by the couple who commissioned it. “It’s raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp,” Madame Savoye wrote the architect. “What’s more, it’s still raining in my bathroom.”
Such functional problems don’t make Le Corbusier’s immaculate geometries any the less thrilling. As John Ruskin observed, we don’t want our buildings merely to shelter us; we also want them to speak to us. But of what? De Botton has an answer. Great buildings, he says, “speak of visions of happiness.”
This claim is bolder than it sounds. Architecture, after all, consists mainly of abstract forms. A building by Santiago Calatrava may suggest a dove taking flight, but that’s a far cry from expressing an ideal of the good life. Think of music, though. A movement from a late Beethoven quartet manages to convey a sense of joyous resignation, perhaps because its abstract tonal structures mirror the dynamics of our emotional lives. Mightn’t architecture work the same way?
De Botton thinks so, and he makes the most of this expressionist theme on his jolly (and handsomely illustrated) romp through the world of architecture. He writes eloquently of how different architectural features hint at aspects of human flourishing: how, say, pointed Gothic arches “convey ardor and intensity,” whereas their rounded classical counterparts “embody serenity and poise.” His visions of happiness range from the ordered complexity of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to Richard Neutra’s sleek modernist pavilions in the Hollywood Hills, which speak “of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future.” Wherever he casts his eye, what he sees, in material form, are the lineaments of gratified desire.
Like de Botton’s previous books, this one contains its quota of piffle dressed up in pompous language. Sometimes the effect is (intentionally?) humorous, in a Woody Allen-ish sort of way. Taking shelter from a London downpour, de Botton ducks into a McDonald’s, where the harsh lighting and sounds of French fries bubbling in vats of oil remind him of “the loneliness and meaninglessness of existence in a random and violent universe.” When a gaggle of noisy Finnish teenagers arrives, he flees to the nearby Westminster Cathedral, whose sublime interior repairs his delicate soul.
Focusing on happiness can be a lovely way to make sense of architectural beauty, but it probably won’t be of much help in resolving conflicts of taste. In a liberal society, there is as much disagreement on what constitutes the best life as there is on what constitutes the best built environment to live it in. Curiously, among the many dozens of buildings pictured in de Botton’s book, the one that crops up most frequently is a house that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna. True to its creator’s character, it is mercilessly austere: cubic in form, with stone floors, lacquered metal doors and naked light bulbs. It makes Philip Johnson’s Glass House look cheesy and suburban. The Wittgenstein House is a thing of beauty. But I don’t think even de Botton would be terribly happy living in it.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Miracle Method to Target Property Managers in Education Campaign
Miracle Method Surface Refinishing is expanding its commercial marketing campaign to educate property management companies on how to recognize quality surface refinishing
and to understand the cost savings vs. replacement of damaged and dated
bathtubs; tile walls and floors, vanities and kitchen countertops and
have units back in service quickly.
Colorado Springs, CO (PRWEB) December 10, 2012
With potential savings of up to 75% over the cost of replacement,
surface refinishing makes good sense for property management companies.
Miracle Method, the nation’s largest surface refinishing company is
expanding its marketing program to introduce its highly reliable process
to this business category. Whether it is called refinishing,
resurfacing or reglazing, they all refer to the process of restoring or
upgrading existing porcelain, cultured marble, tile, fiberglass or
laminate surface to like new.
Colorado Springs, CO (PRWEB) December 10, 2012
“Surface refinishing is not necessarily new to property managers,” says Don Dominick,
VP Business Development for Miracle Method. “What’s new is a proven
process that really works and is guaranteed for one year.” The
challenge, according to Dominick, is to educate property managers
that there is a difference in refinishing processes. The standard,
according to Dominick, has been historically been pretty marginal and is
based purely on the lowest cost, not quality.
Miracle Method’s marketing is
designed to help property managers understand the differences in the
process and learn the questions that need to be asked before hiring a
surface refinishing company, such as:
How much should you spend to refinish a bathtub?
You have to do the math. Paying to have the same tube refinished twice over a 12-month period because the tub peeled costs a lot more than having it done right the first time for just a bit more. In addition, if the new finish failed once, it will likely do so again.
While “acid-etching” porcelain is a common practice, the biggest concern will be whether the acid is properly neutralized before it is rinsed down the drain. If not properly neutralized, the acid can cause damage to plumbing. Hydrofluoric acid is also dangerous to handle. If that’s the process the refinisher uses, make sure they are covered by their own Workman’s Compensation policy.
Is there an alternative to acid etching?
A bonding agent, like Miracle Method’s non-acid MM-4, has proven to be more reliable, and offer greater durability and longevity to the bathtub refinishing process. It creates a molecular bond between the old and new surfaces. Unlike hydrofluoric acid, bonding agents can be used on fiberglass, acrylic, cultured marble and laminate surfaces to ensure the new coating will stick.
A warranty is only as good as the contractor giving the warranty. Be sure to check out the strength and reputation of the contractor! Miracle Method has been in business for over 32 years and has over 125 locations across the country.
Quality refinishing is a craft
that requires the proper materials, extensive training and experience to
provide consistent, high quality results… and high quality results will
save money in the long run. All surface refinishing, however; is not
the same and cheaper isn’t always better. Like any maintenance “quick
fixes,” a company will often wind up paying more when the first attempt
fails.
Miracle Method has become the
preferred refinisher to property managers, homeowners, hotels, hospitals
and colleges and universities for over 32 years. To see pictures of
Miracle Method's work and to learn more about the company’s refinishing
process, visit Miracle Method's web site at http://www.miraclemethod.com or call (888) 271-7690.
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