Tagged: real estate

Detroit’s real estate market posted some of the strongest price gains in the nation in 2012.

The just released S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index charts home sale prices in the nation’s twenty largest cities.

Detroit home sale prices rose more than 13 percent last year, the third highest percentage increase in the survey.

Craig Lazzara is the head of Index Investment Strategy at S&P Dow Jones Indices. He compiled the report. Lazzara says, despite the rise in prices, homes in Detroit are still selling for about what they did in 1997. 

A Wayne county man is facing criminal charges for allegedly defrauding federal real estate giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Samer Salami, a real estate agent and broker for Fannie and Freddie,
is accused of obtaining properties they owned through Trademark
Assets--a shell company he secretly controlled--for an artificially
low price.

Salami would then turn around and sell the property to an actual,
higher bidder—pocketing the difference between the two sales, plus a
double commission.

Overall, it’s alleged Salami bilked the mortgage giants out of about
$488,000, through 22 such illegal housing sales in Wayne county.

In “The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit,” Andrew Herscher re-imagines unused city spaces as areas of possibility.

The city’s surfeit of abandoned buildings is, for some, an image of blight.

But according to Herscher, a variety of individuals are using Detroit as a site of experimental craft and commerce.

"Unreal Estate" is the term Herscher gives to urban space that has lost economic value to the point where it can support other types of development.

When land is used by homes it becomes real-estate; but when these properties fail, the buildings they occupy become available to be appropriated in other ways.