RISMEDIA, May 9, 2008-Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® has named John D’Ambrogio of Rubloff, Inc. (IL) as chairperson of its Advisory Council. D’Ambrogio, is senior vice president/director of Operations & Relocation Services for Rubloff, Inc. and has an extensive background in real estate and relocation. Joining him on the council are the following new members: Marc Krebs (Huff Realty, OH and KY); Judy Alloway (JB Goodwin Realtors, TX); Patrice Kuchulis (The Hasson Company Realtors, OR); and Vicki Caldwell (Rusinak Real Estate, Inc., CO).The council consists of top relocation directors from across the country who are elected by current council members based on industry qualifications and commitment to Leading Real Estate Companies of the World. The group assists in setting strategy and provides feedback for a variety of relocation and business programs for this global real estate network comprised of 700 of the best-known local and regional real estate firms in the U.S. and 37 countries producing over $400 billion in annual home sales.

According to Bonnie Hyldahl, CRP, LeadingRE senior vice president of Network Services, the council provides invaluable leadership to the network. “With active participation from some of the best relocation professionals in the industry, the council supports our efforts to offer the most meaningful, productive programs to our member firms,” Hyldahl notes. “Their daily experiences serving relocating families brings a tremendous level of expertise and helps us in areas that extend beyond the relocation arena and into all aspects of our members’ business.”

Other council members include Maureen Campbell (H. Pearce Company, CT); Maureen McCaffrey (Jack Conway & Co. Inc., MA); Ryan Carrell (Carpenter Realtors, IN); Catharine Pappas (Dickens-Mitchener & Associates, NC); immediate past chairman Sherrie Porter (Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors, Inc., FL); Pandra Dickson (Long & Foster, Inc., VA); and Vice-Chairperson Sharon Michnay (Halstead, NY) will continue to serve on the council.

The following individuals have completed their service on the council: Judy Gray (Cam Taylor Co., LTD. Realtors, Inc., OH); Debbie Robinson (RealtySouth, AL); Brenda Johnston (Phyllis Browning Company, TX); Nancy Chamberlain (Heritage Texas Properties, TX); Allison Harvey (Arizona Best Real Estate, AZ); Linda Hawkins (Winkelmann Realty, CA); and Lora Riddle (Crye-Leike, Inc. TN).

For more information, visit www.LeadingRE.com.

By Sheldon Salnick

By JEFF D. OPDYKE
May 20, 2008; Page D1

Downtown: It’s been among the safest places to hide from the housing downturn.

Much has been made of the way the nation’s real-estate bust is affecting some American cities far more than others. But even within a single metro area, changes in housing prices can show wild variations.

And in big cities, prices in the central cores often fare the best. Far-flung suburbs — where home building exploded in recent years — have more typically gotten hammered. In between is a patchwork of established suburbs and city neighborhoods peripheral to downtown that can be all over the map in terms of price declines — or even increases.

See photos of homes for sale in areas where prices are holding steady.

Consider the San Francisco Bay area. Overall, prices there slid 17% in the 12 months through February, the most-recent data available, and were down 8% over the first two months of 2008 alone, making it one of the worst-performing metro areas in the country, according to the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices. Yet prices within the city of San Francisco are up 0.3% over the first quarter of 2008, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a San Diego-based real-estate-data firm.

For today’s buyers, all this means that shopping for housing bargains is increasingly complicated. The best deals may be where prices have slid the most, but such areas could easily fall a good bit more before hitting bottom. Meanwhile, you’ll get few bargains if you buy a home in San Francisco or Manhattan or downtown Boston. Of course, if the housing crisis broadens, the central core areas also could see price drops.

Here’s a cheat sheet to understanding home-price patterns in some of the country’s biggest metro areas.

Chicago

It’s a mixed picture in Chicago’s downtown area. A flurry of condominium building has kept prices down on much new construction. At the same time, some established apartment buildings are still seeing buoyant prices, even as properties spend more time on the market. The Carlyle, a 1960s-era glass-and-concrete tower along the city’s prized Gold Coast neighborhood, recorded the highest price ever — $2.4 million — for one of its “C”-tier units earlier this year, for example.

Jim Kinney, president of Rubloff Residential Properties in Chicago, says “80% to 90% of the buildings along the Gold Coast achieved a record sales price in the last year.” The older buildings are often in blue-chip locations and are generally cheaper, per square foot, than new units.

Bargains abound in Chicago’s periphery. Seven miles south of the Carlyle is Bronzeville, a gentrifying community that during the housing boom was a favorite of buyers who couldn’t afford Chicago’s glitzier core. Just last month, a bank that owns a foreclosed duplex in Bronzeville dropped the asking price to just $85,000, from the January listing price of $129,900. The owners who lost the property originally paid $330,000 in November 2005, about a year before the Chicago market peaked.

Getty Images

But beware: Prices may be stagnant or worse for a long time to come. “Because of the huge inventory, it will take years to recover,” says Christina Miller, a Rubloff agent, citing periphery neighborhoods such as Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village and Bucktown.

Chicago’s desirable North Shore suburbs are, for the most part, doing well. Median prices in Evanston, Wilmette and Winnetka, all hugging Lake Michigan’s shoreline, are up over the past year to varying degrees, though sales volume is down sharply, according to a Zip Code analysis by DataQuick. Sellers are receiving about 89% of the list price, according to March data from the North Shore-Barrington Association of Realtors. That’s down from about 95% at the peak of the market.

In upscale Highland Park, about 25 miles north of downtown, prices are down more than 6%. But that average is being skewed by a high number of sales of low-end homes, some forced by foreclosure.

New York

While New York’s commuter market — which includes suburban New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — is down about 8% from its peak in mid-2006, much of Manhattan continues humming along. Neighborhoods such as SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Murray Hill, the Upper West Side and Harlem are all up in the past year, according to DataQuick’s Zip Code analysis.

Bidding wars still happen. Toni Haber, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, a New York City real-estate firm, says 60 people waited in line recently at an open house to view a three-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. The owner had four competing offers within the week, and agreed to sell for about $2.5 million — $300,000 over the asking price.

Part of the city’s strength comes from the fact that few buyers were investing in properties to flip them. Moreover, many apartment buildings in New York aren’t condominiums but co-ops, which impose financial demands on potential buyers far more rigorous than banks do — which helps keep the number of foreclosures down. In addition, foreign investors have been exploiting the weak dollar by grabbing Manhattan real estate.

One area of weakness: the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, where median prices are down, in part because of an abundance of new construction in the area.

Those areas of Brooklyn that are close to Manhattan are also holding up well. On the periphery, places like Jamaica, Queens; parts of the Bronx; and nearby New Jersey towns such as Jersey City and Hoboken are off between 3% and 14%.

Farther out, popular commuter towns like Summit and New Providence, N.J., are down at much as 16%. Pockets of suburban strength do exist, though. High-end suburbs in New York’s Westchester County such as Chappaqua are up over the past year.

Boston

Michael DiMella, managing partner at Charlesgate Realty Group, recently sold a one-bedroom condo in Boston’s South End district for $365,000, roughly $100,000 more than the owners originally paid in 2000 and about what they could have expected at the peak of the Boston real-estate market in late 2005. But the condo sat on the market for nearly four months before a buyer came along.

That sale typifies many parts of core Boston these days: flat to modestly higher prices but a longer time to sell. Prices in the city’s core are off less than 1% over the past year, according to first-quarter data from Listing Information Network, Boston’s MLS system. The real difference today is that homes are staying on the market for 111 days on average, up from 85 days in 2005.

Prices in key neighborhoods, such as Back Bay, the South End, Fenway and the Waterfront, are all up between 3% and 10%. Beacon Hill and the North End, however, are down sharply, as much as 33%. That’s partly the result of a slew of high-end properties that hit the market in 2006 and 2007 that were priced as high as $1.5 million, skewing the price data upward. Even without those sales, however, the median price would be down by double-digit amounts.

“No one is taking prices higher these days just to see if they can get it, like they used to,” Mr. DiMella says of Boston’s downtown core. “But you have to come with realistic expectations. This is a highly desirable area, and you’re not going to find a steal.”

Nearby communities are a mixed bag. Condos in suburban Brookline, one of the most desirable Zip Codes — 02445 — are down about 8%, while neighboring 02446 is up nearly 7%, for example. Among city neighborhoods, Dorchester is down across the board by as much as 25%, yet Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury are each up between 7% and 9%.

San Francisco

“I get buyers who come in thinking they’re going to get a real bargain these days because prices are down all over the country, and we just laugh,” says Caroline Werboff, an agent with San Francisco real-estate firm Hill & Co.

People want to live in San Francisco’s urban core. Median prices around the Financial District, North Beach, Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill are up — in some case strongly.

Ms. Werboff says a Russian Hill home that sold for $7.7 million in April 2004 sold again in February for $10.3 million. A newly listed house in Pacific Heights, another core neighborhood with strong price appreciation, sold three years ago for $6 million. Ms. Werboff says that the owners “will get $10 million now.”

Still, some San Francisco neighborhoods are down, particularly along the edges of the city, such as Portola, Bayview, Hunters Point and Sunset. Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, an economic research center at the University of California Los Angeles, warns that “the housing problems won’t bypass San Francisco proper. The decline will just take more time.”

Meanwhile, both closer-in and distant suburbs are weak, too, often markedly so. On the periphery, San Mateo County and high-end Marin County are doing the best, both down more than 4% between March 2007 and 2008, according to DataQuick. Alameda and Contra Costa, across San Francisco Bay from the city and chockablock with anonymous tract housing, are down 18% and 27%, respectively. Bargains exist, but with so much inventory, prices aren’t expected to rebound quickly.

Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, is down more than 9%, though pockets of strength exist in communities such Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Los Altos. Napa County, meanwhile, is one of the weakest in the region, with median prices off more than 20%.

Los Angeles

L.A. is an anomaly. No real urban core exists. The area is just a sprawling string of suburbs that run together.

And most of that sprawl is bathed in red ink. Median prices in communities throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties — the distant, inland suburbs that are at the epicenter of the region’s subprime and foreclosure crises — are down, often sharply.

Lower-priced homes in tony Palm Springs have lost about 24%, though more-expensive homes are up slightly. Less-affluent cities such as Ontario, Chino and Rancho Cucamonga are all down between 15% and 31%. Los Angeles County, Orange County to the south and Ventura County to the north are suffering equally.

The only notable area of strength: high-end real estate. L.A.’s Westside, home to affluent neighborhoods such as Brentwood and Westwood, “tends to be more insulated because this is where people with money want to be,” says Madison Offenhauser, regional director in Los Angeles for Keller Williams Realty.

Median prices in Brentwood are up 16%. The Hollywood Hills, up 26% to a median price of more than $2.1 million. Rancho Palos Verdes and the Palos Verdes peninsula, up 17%. Parts of Newport Beach, one of Orange County’s poshest addresses, are up as much as 67% to $2.75 million. The coastal village of Laguna Beach is up 6%.

Lee Ann Canaday, owner of the Canaday Group, a Laguna Beach real-estate firm, says “almost every deal I’ve done this year” in Laguna and Newport Beach has had multiple offers.

By Marilyn Kennedy Melia | Special the the Tibune

May 18, 2008
Whether you’re a buyer, seller or borrower, chances are you’re confused.

With the mortgage and housing markets in such flux, how can you make a sound decision?

Experts point out that traditional “rules” of real estate still apply. Here is a how the maxims work:

Maxim: The pay-off for mortgage shopping can be in the thousands.

Application: Studies show that consumers spend more time shopping for cars, electronics and other goods than they do examining rates and fees on mortgage offers. Bargain-hunters seem to forget that a slight decline in rates adds up to big savings over the years.

Since most consumers are looking for the plain-vanilla fixed-rate mortgage, it’s easier to compare one offer with another. Lenders also are crafting loans under the guidelines of federal mortgage agencies, notes Steven McCormick, president of First Centennial Mortgage, an Aurora brokerage. While, these agencies may decide that rates should be a half point higher for borrowers with a certain credit score, “not all firms will adopt [the hike] at the same time,” says McCormick. What’s more, some banks are going beyond the amount of down payment or credit score to determine the rate they’ll offer a borrower. A customer who has other relationships with the firm, even a credit card, may be deemed worthier.

A bank, however, also may look at when the customer pays bills—and notch up an offer, says David Hamermesh, a financial consultant with TowerGroup, Needham, Mass.

Maxim: The right price is key to making a sale.

Application: Sellers are prone to believe their home is special and will fetch more than it is worth.

Especially in today’s slower market, a high initial price will force owners to come down. Re-pricing will keep the home on the market longer and can lead to an even lower price when it does sell, says John R. Knight, real estate professor at the University of the Pacific.

“We’ve had a hard time proving this, because you can’t find data on listing-price changes,” says Knight.

But according to data for home sales in Stockton, Calif., in the late 1990s, “It took longer for homes with price changes to sell, and they sold for about 9 percent less [than similar properties]. And this was during a time when the market was stable; I suspect there would be bigger drops now.”

Knight’s research rings true with buyers today, says Darlene Little, managing broker at Rubloff Residential Properties, Chicago. “They keep looking at what’s new in a certain price range in the neighborhood [they want],” says Little. “When a new listing in their price pops up, they investigate right away. … So if you put a home on for $500,000 that’s worth $450,000, buyers will say, ‘Hey, this isn’t a $500,000 property.’ What’s more, you will lose some of the people who will pounce on the new $450,000 property.”

Maxim: Negotiation sells.

Application: Buyers hear news about declining sales and prices and expect bargains. Even if sellers get an offer they consider outrageously low, it’s smart to counter, says Morris Davis, a University of Wisconsin real estate professor.

If your home has been on the market for some time and the price trend is down in your neighborhood, the offer may not be as low as you think, Davis points out.

Besides, there’s a lot more to an offer than price, adds Barbara Novak of PAV Realtors, Berwyn. “Maybe you haven’t got a new place yet, and they’ll agree to let you [stay] there a couple of months rent-free after closing.”

Maxim: Homeowners anticipating a financial emergency can take out a home-equity line of credit.

Application: Lenders are much more discriminating about who qualifies for an equity line.

With recession looming, some financial planners advise taking a line out now even if there’s no immediate need.

Opening a home equity line of credit doesn’t mean you have to borrow—it just allows you to borrow in a certain time frame.

Be prudent about what constitutes an of emergency, stresses Steven Weydert of Bowyer Weydert Wealth Planning Partners, Park Ridge.

Using your home to, say, tide you over in a job search is one thing. Taking on more debt in response to an overload of credit-card and other bills is quite another, says Weydert.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Why Rubloff?—In Netcast No.3, learn why 3 top performers decided to switch to Rubloff and find out how they feel about their decision. What do they like most or least about making the move? How has it impacted their business? What does Rubloff have that the other companies don’t? This netcast features Monique Pieron, Ramey Robbins, and Maria Sabatini.

Your link to the podcast:
http://rublogg.com/podcast/Rubloff%20Residential%20Properties%20-%20Resident%20Experts%20-%20Episode%203.mp3

By Carol Nasser

Arthur Rubloff founded Rubloff in 1930.

From humble beginnings, Rubloff built the largest real estate company of its kind in Chicago. A visionary and innovator, Arthur Rubloff has been called “the man who changed the face of Chicago.” His pioneering ideas were catalysts for dozens of developments that have indelibly enhanced our city’s skyline. Rubloff coined the nickname “Mag Mile” for the section of North Michigan Avenue that extends from Oak Street to the Chicago River, and which today includes the award-winning One Magnificent Mile, the building that houses our corporate headquarters.

Arthur Rubloff created the master plan for the North Loop, and sponsored the redevelopment of Old Town, today one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods. He built the Carl Sandburg Village development of residential high-rises on the city’s Near North Side. Rubloff also developed Hyde Park’s University Gardens, and office buildings for many corporate headquarters in Chicago. By the 1980s, the company was operating in a dozen U.S. cities.

As a philanthropist, Arthur Rubloff was unrivaled. A visit to the Art Institute of Chicago will undoubtedly bring you into the Arthur Rubloff Building. Law students at Northwestern University will certainly know the Rubloff Law Library Building, and St. Xavier University just opened a new residence hall: Arthur Rubloff Hall which incidentally is a “green” building!

In 1996, the partnership of Howard Weinstein and Tom Horwich acquired Rubloff’s residential division. Weinstein had been the company’s C.O.O. and president, and Horwich also brought a background in real estate development and management. Their hands-on management style and capital investments to expand offices and services have built Rubloff Residential Properties into one of Chicago’s most respected and efficacious real estate firms. In the fall of 2006, the company expanded beyond the city by opening a new office in Evanston, to begin serving the communities of the North Shore.

The company that Arthur Rubloff founded has continued the philanthropic spirit. Agents gave generously to the Tsumani Relief Fund and their contributions were generously matched by Messers Weinstein and Horwich. The same was true with the Katrina Relief fund. More recently, Rubloff North Shore held a coat drive in late 2007 and Rubloff Lincoln Park hosted its 1st Annual Blood Drive in conjunction with Lifesource in February 2008. This weekend, Rubloff Lincoln Park agents along with their Managing Broker, Darlene Litte, will be spotted at the intersection of Lincoln, Halsted and Fullerton avenues raising money for Candy Days Misericordia.

On the technology front, Rubloff has pioneered again with a wonderful new website! If you think you have seen websites that ease the search for new homes…..this one will amaze you! First of it’s kind in the Chicago market, the polygon rubber banding tool is especially interesting. Click here and enjoy the trip!

My Chicago “thing” of the day is Misericordia Candy Days. Located on Chicago’s north side, Misericordia is home to over 550 children and adults with developmental disabilities. Candy Days start tomorrow. When you see the volunteers with the bright red aprons on the street corners, give generously. It is for a great cause.

To view more entry’s by Carol Ann please click here.

Rubloff Residential Properties will participate in the
2008 North Shore Women’s Conference & Expo:

Stop by Booth #64 for a chance to win
a gift basket of prizes that will benefit your home!

Friday, May 2, 2008 from 10 am-3 pm

Holiday Inn North Shore/Skokie Banquet & Conference Center
5300 W. Touhy, Skokie

click here for speaker schedule & more information
this event is co-sponsored by cooperating city Chambers of Commerce