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WASHINGTON – April 9, 2010 – To help resuscitate Florida’s condo market, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) eased their lending rules. Freddie was last, with new guidelines effective April 1.

The FHA made changes first in November 2009. At the time, Peter Zalewski, a condo market analyst and broker with Condo Vultures in Bal Harbour, Fla., called it a “pretty significant move. … This might be an entree for traditional and conventional lenders to return to the marketplace.”

Among other things, FHA increased the number of project units it would finance from 30 percent to 50 percent; required that at least 50 percent of units were owner-occupied; and reduced a presale requirement for new construction to 30 percent.

In January, Fannie Mae eased its condo lending rules, proving Zalewski’s prediction was correct. The government-sponsored enterprise took a hands-on approach by empowering a Florida team to analyze each condo project and approve lending in those it considered to have a lower risk.

Effective April 1, Freddie Mac followed suit. Rather than create teams, however, Freddie Mac stated a list of new rules it would follow as the FHA did, with a prime focus on the buying of a condo in which the seller has a mortgage backed by Freddie Mac.

Those rules include:

• The mortgage file must contain documentation verifying that the existing first lien conventional mortgage on the unit being purchased is owned by Freddie Mac, in whole or in part, or securitized by Freddie Mac.
• The seller’s note date of the existing mortgage for the unit being purchased is on or before Dec. 31, 2009.
• The settlement date for the new mortgage is on or before March 31, 2011.

Freddie Mac issued a Bulletin explaining the changes. To download the Bulletin (PDF format) click here.

© 2010 Florida Realtors®

PAT KELLY / News Herald Writer
WEST BAY — Lori Bates walks through the interior of the new airport terminal under construction near West Bay positively bubbling with excitement.

Although workers still bustle around the scaffolding and throw-cloths, Bates, the interior designer for the project, sees future floors, ticket counters, furniture, ceilings and wall coverings all reflecting the diversity of Northwest Florida.

With fewer than 50 days till a May 23 opening, construction on the main terminal building of the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport is now about 92 percent complete, and as Bates maneuvers around the interior, a visitor can begin to see the finished product through her eyes.

A light beige terrazzo tile symbolizing sand is being installed inside the front entrance area to give it a “beachy” feel, she said. Within the beige flooring space, large swatches of blue-green “poured-out” tiling suggest waves at the beach.

“It gives us some color and excitement, some ‘pop,’ ” Bates said. Sunshine streams through spacious skylights overhead to highlight massive, navy blue glass-tiled columns that complement the “poured terrazzo” sections.

When visitors enter the completed 120,000-square-foot terminal, they will notice the new airport’s logo, still undergoing final design, high overhead facing the entrance doors and illuminated by the skylights.

Bates said she is particularly excited by a large 20-foot-square Audubon Society mural that will be located to the left of the entrance space, composed of photos submitted by society members.

“We think it will be breathtaking,” Bates said.

Members of the Bay County Veterans Council were at the terminal recently examining a special second-floor “veterans” room they will begin operating in June, where military men and women coming and going from the airport can sit and enjoy coffee, cookies and light snacks.

“Our motto is vets serving vets,” said James Doescher, who also serves as commander of Chapter 794 of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. “We want to serve our veterans, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Bates said a hefty 40-foot by 21-foot mural honoring the area’s military heritage will go up on a nearby wall in the baggage-claim section, and vets will be able to view the mural through several large windows in their sector.

Bates said she is hopeful one of the furniture companies supplying the new airport will donate furniture for the vets’ room. The Airport Authority board also recently indicated its support for the project.

Light pours through multiple skylights along the length of the upstairs concourse, and six sizeable 17-foot by 15-foot murals of local photos are planned for that locale, Bates said.

The photos are all “real works of art,” said Carolyne Danzey, an interior design intern with Bates’ company, Lori Bates Interiors.

“We wanted to show the real diversity of the area,” said Danzey, who holds a degree in interior design from the University of Alabama.

The photos depict scenes from Northwest Florida counties such as Bay, Walton and Franklin that highlight recreational, educational and business opportunities in the region.

“It’s been quite a community effort to come up with the right photos,” Bates said. “I think they represent the entire area.”

Back on the ground floor, Bates moves her hand over the front surfaces of the new ticket counters almost ready for installation. The surfaces feature patterns of Capri shell slices that Bates called “a see-through version of mother of pearl.”

A fine metal mesh — much like a fireplace screen — is planned for the overhead space to give the illusion of a fishnet weave, she said, adding to the coastal feel of the airport.

Much of the ceiling material inside the terminal has the appearance of maple wood planks that are actually metal with a vinyl covering, creating a feeling of warmth and charm, she said.

The restaurants and retail shops in the facility will have “beach hut” features that will contribute to the natural coastal theme, Bates said. There will be separate restaurants both upstairs and downstairs.

Several artists have “generously donated their work” to be displayed in the terminal, Bates said, including Justin Gaffrey and Guy Harvey. The pieces will join an existing collection already owned by the airport.

Careful thought also has been given to seating in the terminal waiting areas, with large S-shaped furniture featured in the ground-floor, non-secure spaces, allowing family members and friends to wait for passengers without feeling they are staring at each other.

“It’s a very contemporary look,” Bates said.

MIAMI (AP) – April 1, 2010 – Freddie Mac is moving to buoy the battered Florida condo market, waiving lending rules that made it harder to buy and sell units in many condo buildings.

Freddie Mac said Wednesday it will back mortgages on units in financially troubled condo developments as long as the seller’s loan is already owned or securitized by the mortgage finance company.

The announcement is a reversal by Freddie Mac, which had been rejecting mortgages for units in condo developments with low occupancy and high delinquency rates for condo association fees.

The change, intended to increase financing availability for Florida condos, is effective April 1. To qualify, the closing date for the new mortgage must be on or before March 31, 2011.

Florida’s once-burgeoning condo market has been hit hard by foreclosures, falling prices and high inventory caused by overbuilding. Condo prices have fallen by half since 2006 in many parts of the state.

Condo associations with a glut of empty units have struggled to collect fees, causing buildings to fall into disrepair and forcing associations to delay improvements.

The condo market woes led Freddie Mac to implement rules governing mortgages in troubled buildings. Units in condo developments where more than 15 percent of owners were delinquent on their association fees could not get Freddie Mac financing. Also, Freddie Mac would not guarantee mortgages in developments unless at least 70 percent of the units were occupied.

The rules were meant to ensure that a building was in good shape and there were enough owners to pay for maintenance and preserve the value of the property.

But those same rules led to complaints from buyers as well as condo associations and developers, who saw them as obstacles to getting empty units sold and occupied.

Developers may now have an easier time selling units.

“Without a doubt, the condo developers that already have Freddie Mac loans in their buildings will be dancing a jig tonight because its the best news they can get,” said Jack McCabe, president of McCabe Research & Consulting, a real estate research firm based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Freddie Mac’s sibling company Fannie Mae announced a separate plan for Florida condos earlier this year.

Fannie Mae is reviewing hundreds of condo projects in the state that currently don’t qualify for its loans. Buildings deemed stable after the review will be given a special approval.

If projects receive special approval, lenders will be allowed to offer mortgages to homebuyers and sell those loans to Fannie Mae, which pools them into bonds and sells them to investors.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press, Adrian Sainz, AP real estate writer.

Mary Scott Speigner – bio
mspeigner@wmbb.com

Bay County, Fla:

The St. Joe Company has talked the talk, bringing in a new airport with a low cost air carrier, now they say their walking the walk.

“We can lead by example… that’s what we’re doing. We’re showing people that there is a reason to be here and I can’t think of any better reason than to have a major corporation put their headquarters,” said Britt Greene, President and CEO.

That’s why it’s moving its home base 300 miles away to Bay County and setting up shop right next to the new airport. It is also consolidating their offices in Port St. Joe, Tallahassee, and South Walton. That’s about 140 jobs moving to Bay County.

“We expect while the positions will move, not all individuals who are currently working will make the move. So there’s going to be some opportunity,” Greene said.

He says this move is bigger than their company. He believes the move will encourage other companies to the region.

“We’ve had great conversations with a number of aviation aerospace leaders and other types of companies looking at logistics and multimodal opportunities with the airport, port, and rail,” Greene said.

Bay County leaders agree. “It really speaks a major commitment of the St. Joe Company to this community and to the West Bay sector. We’re very excited,” said Janet Watermeier of the Economic Development Alliance.

More people means more money spent in our region.

“They will have kids that will have to go to school and they will have homes that they will have to live in and they’ll shop in our shopping centers and they’ll have to get their haircut. All of those things that should help raise the level of money that we’re all able to take advantage of,” she said.

The construction on the 50,000 square foot project will begin this summer making their home here by 2011.

This is all part of St. Joe’s West Bay Sector Plan. The project is 71,000 acres which is bigger than Washington D.C. But they’re starting with 1,000 acres for phase one.

Read more: http://www.panhandleparade.com/index.php/mbb/article/st._joe_company_moving_to_new_airport_site/22058/#ixzz0iX7ZXFGs

NEW YORK – March 5, 2010 – Two years after swallowing the troubled mortgage giant Countrywide Financial, Bank of America trails other major U.S. lenders in resolving troubled home loans through short sales or modified loan terms.

The lender, one of the nation’s biggest banks, holds more than a million mortgages that are months behind on their payments – twice as many defaulting home loans as any other lender in the country. But it has given permanent mortgage modifications to only about 1 percent of those borrowers – one of the lowest rates among lenders nationally, according to a report released last month on the federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program.

The issue is key in Metropolitan Orlando, which has the nation’s 11th-highest rate of mortgage modifications, with 18,000 homeowners in trial modifications and 2,468 in permanent ones, the report stated.

Loan modifications aren’t the only way of out a foreclosure. In January, about a quarter of all Orlando-area home closings were short sales, which occur when the lender allows a homeowner to sell the property for less than what’s owed on the mortgage.

But when it comes to short sales, Bank of America also lags other lenders, real-estate agents say, by taking too long to respond to offers.

“Realtors that I work with, if they hear Bank of America, they won’t even show the property,” said David Pruett, a broker for D.A. Pruett Properties.

The chairman of the Orlando Regional Realtor Association, Kathleen Gallagher McIver, said recently that Bank of America has the worst record for expediting short sales, “and there’s not anyone out there who will tell you otherwise.”

Bank of America acknowledges it needs help with its short sales.

“We clearly recognize the need to improve the short-sale process for both our customers and the real-estate professionals who are critical to a successful transaction,” said Jumana Bauwen, a bank spokeswoman.

The company said it has updated its training, enhanced its technology and established a short-sale team to help customers and real-estate agents navigate the process. It is piloting a short-sale program for owners who don’t qualify for new mortgage terms. And it has established a 24-hour phone line so agents, buyers and sellers can track the status of their short sales.

Bank of America is not alone in its struggles to deal with the avalanche of defaulting home mortgages, according to the February modification report by the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Wachovia Corp., now owned by Wells Fargo & Co., has approved permanently modified terms for fewer than 1 percent of its 86,461 defaulting mortgage customers. American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. has a similar track record with the 127,521 mortgages headed toward foreclosure that it holds. Among the nation’s largest lenders, GMAC Mortgage Inc. had the best rate: 17 percent of its 65,751 defaulting home loans have been permanently modified.

Bank of America, which inherited much of its mortgage portfolio from Countrywide, says part of the problem is that many homeowners have not been diligent about submitting the documents needed to convert a trial mortgage modification into a permanent one.

Clermont resident George Simmons said he is now totally frustrated, having tried for more than a year to get Bank of America to convert a series of trial modifications into something permanent.

“Let’s see, the last correspondence I had from them said they didn’t have my income-tax return and my Social Security records,” Simmons said. “I sent it to them so many times. I’ve got my fax receipts and my certified postal receipts. They just keep asking for the same paperwork over and over and over again.”

Overall, about a fifth of Bank of America’s defaulting-mortgage customers have received temporary, three-month trial modifications. To address the huge volume of troubled loans needing permanent solutions, the company has hired about 15,000 staffers. Workers knock on doors and call homeowners with trial modifications at least 10 times before the temporary terms expire in three months.

At one point, Bauwen said, Bank of America was behind in getting homeowners into trial loan modifications. But it has ramped up those efforts, she said, and many of those trials will be converted into permanent modifications.

More importantly, Bauwen added, the company is not ramping up its foreclosure efforts unnecessarily.

Copyright © 2010 The Orlando Sentinel, Fla., Mary Shanklin. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

PAT KELLY and SCARLET SIMS / News Herald writers
WEST BAY — The St. Joe Co. is working to widen the profile of the new airport and the entire West Bay Sector Plan by hosting several media tours for industry writers, including one today.

The effort coincides with plans by the Bay County Tourist Development Council to sponsor trips by travel and tourism writers to tour Panama City Beach and tell its story to a wider national audience, including a tour in April.

The media blitz by the TDC and St. Joe, running on separate but parallel tracks, is being conducted to capitalize on the opening of the new airport near West Bay and the announcement by Southwest Airlines, the nation’s largest domestic carrier, that it will begin operations there.

“This is part of our ongoing strategy to bring writers into the market,” said TDC executive director Dan Rowe said of the TDC’s efforts to market Panama City Beach by sponsoring tours for travel writers.

New York City public relations firm Spring O’Brien, working for St. Joe, has arranged three tours of the $318 million Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport by out-of-market industry writers before the airport’s scheduled May 23 opening.

Rowe recently attended a New York City media luncheon sponsored by the TDC’s public relations firm, New York City-based Lou Hammond & Associates, to promote the region to tourism writers.

Spring O’Brien official Martin Elder said the airport tours will include meetings with airport officials and Kevin Johnson, St. Joe’s vice president of economic development.

Johnson said St. Joe began targeting specific media outlets this year, particularly magazines.

“The interest in the new airport and the adjacent property for the industrial park has increased. People want to know what we’ve done, how far we’ve come and what lies ahead,” he said.

In addition, Gulf Coast Community College and other economic development groups are planning a conference in April on how airports attract businesses to nearby property.

Rowe said a second tour sponsored by the TDC for tourism and travel writers is scheduled for the summer.

St. Joe Co. owns about 577,000 acres in Northwest Florida and 71,000 acres surrounding the new airport. The property in the West Bay Sector Plan is a mixed-use, master-planned project in Bay County.

“This is a global play for us,” Johnson said. “We’ve had research done on what types of industry best suit Bay County and a labor study to validate infrastructure and skills here. Aerospace is our No. 1 target.”

Since last year the TDC, the county’s premier marketing vehicle, has been repositioning Panama City Beach as a year-round “family-friendly” designation, hoping to move beyond the notion that the area is primarily a lure for college-age partiers.

Lou Hammond & Associates, a public relations firm based in New York City, and Fahlgren, an Ohio-based advertising company, have been hired by the TDC to widen the area’s appeal beyond the traditional drive markets.

The West Bay Area Sector Plan is a state-sanctioned land-use plan for conservation and development of about 75,000 acres surrounding West Bay, the cornerstone of which is the airport.

The plan includes residential, commercial and business development and the conservation of about 41,000 acres of shoreline, wetlands and watershed.

SCARLET SIMS / News Herald Writer

PANAMA CITY — St. Joe Company is gearing up to promote West Bay as a premier location for industries and plans to have infrastructure in place before 2012.

“What we are creating in West Bay is a new central business district for Bay County,” said Kevin Johnson, St. Joe vice president of economic development. “This is the largest mixed-use facility in the United States of America.”

Johnson spoke to a packed room of more than 200 government and city leaders during the Bay County Chamber of Commerce’s monthly First Friday event.

“The most exciting news is they have a timetable and they are investing in infrastructure,” said Janet Watermeier, Bay County Economic Development Alliance executive director.

St. Joe has a timeline to complete infrastructure for the first 100 acres at the new industrial park adjacent to the new Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport by about mid-2011, Johnson said. Another 300 acres are planned to be ready by the end of that same year, he said. Eventually, 1,000 acres will be developed for industrial, flex-commercial office and retail use.

The timetable is an estimate because of the magnitude of the project, Johnson said. In the next three years, St. Joe hopes the state will release money to move State 388 to better facilitate the airport.

“This is not like baking a cake – there is no timing on it,” Johnson said of the project. “What we want to do is get all the ingredients so that when the time is right, we have all the necessary ingredients to bake the cake.”

The date release is exciting for economic officials because it indicates the industrial park will become a reality, Watermeier said.

St. Joe is actively courting particular companies, using a Dallas real estate group whose corporate clients St. Joe hopes to attract. To draw attention, St. Joe is targeting trade writers to tour the new airport and, beginning Tuesday, plans to make presentations directly to specific companies, Johnson said.

Bay County is best positioned for aerospace and defense industries, followed by transportation and logistics, financial, health services and environmental, Johnson said. St. Joe hopes to see a cluster of aerospace firms at the new airport. That means a focus on education and advanced training and research, he said.

The local workforce is only one element on which Bay County plans to focus, Watermeier said. The alliance recently revealed a comprehensive plan that looked at everything from ready-to-build sites and existing structures to telecommunications and infrastructure needs.

St. Joe is working with the alliance to develop incentives to attract businesses, Johnson said. He would not give any specifics about what St. Joe wants in any incentive package.

“We want to be able to respond to the bottom-line needs (of companies),” Johnson said.

Bay County has relied on beautiful beaches to build its tourism industry, but sugar sand and green water isn’t enough to draw diverse, high-wage companies and keep them, Johnson said.

“Don’t just turn on the sunshine light — that’s not enough,” Johnson said. “We have to change how we compete and you can’t do it by standing still. We have to think about how we compete for jobs. We can’t just wait for them to come.”

PAT KELLY / News Herald Writer
PANAMA CITY BEACH – Delta Air Lines has announced it will add two additional flights per day with larger aircraft when the new Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport opens in late May.

Randy Curtis, airport executive director, said the new jets will be McDonnell Douglas MD-88 models, which have a seating capacity if 142.

Delta currently uses its connector service, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, on flights from Panama City to Atlanta and Memphis, and ASA flies regional Bombardier Canadair jets in the 50- and 70-seat range. The new airport, with its 10,000-foot runway, is expected to begin operations May 23.

The announcement by Delta is seen by airport officials as a direct response to the decision by low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines to begin operations from the new airport. Lower fares by Delta are also expected, Curtis said.

Southwest, which uses only Boeing 737 aircraft with a normal seating capacity of 138, has committed to operating eight daily non-stop flights from Panama City to Orlando, Nashville, Tenn., Baltimore and Houston when the new airport opens.

Delta, via ASA, will continue to operate its regular schedule of flights to Atlanta and Memphis using its regional Canadair jets. The May 23 opening date for the airport comes just a week before Memorial Day, the traditional start of the summer tourism season.

In other business during Tuesday’s Airport Authority board meeting, Jeff Dealy of KBR, program manager for the airport relocation project, said the $318 million facility near West Bay was now 89 percent complete overall, with the terminal at the 85 percent completion mark.

He said the $4 million state-of-the-art 16,000-square-foot baggage handling system was on track for the Transportation Security Administration to begin testing in early April. In addition, several of the outlying structures of the $63 million seven-building terminal complex should be completed by the end of March, Dealy said.

“The biggest issue right now is the ponds and finalizing the storm drainage system,” Dealy said. The system, when finally operational, is expected to eliminate much of the current concerns by the Department of Environmental Protection over un-permitted stormwater discharges from the airport site.

Recent stormwater currently held in pond C, the main filtration facility of the yet-to-be-completed system, is scheduled to begin a draw-down today so work on the system can continue. Dealy said he hoped to have the drainage system finalized by the end of March.

Watershed experts with the St. Andrew Bay Resource Management Association’s Bay Watch Program said they were aware of this week’s discharge plans and would be monitoring the silt levels of nearby Crooked Creek and Burnt Mill Creek for higher-than-permitted turbidity readings.

As reported by the News Herald:

Delta Airlines has announced it will add two additional flights per day with larger aircraft when the new Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport opens in late May.

Randy Curtis, airport executive director, said the new jets will be McDonnell Douglas MD-88 models, which have a seating capacity if 142.

Delta currently uses its connector service, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, on flights from Panama City to Atlanta and Memphis, and ASA flies regional Bombardier Canadair jets in the 50- and 70-seat range. The new airport, with its 10,000-foot runway, is expected to begin operations May 23.

Tannehill: Delta To Fly Bigger Jets to New Airport

Posted: 24 Feb 2010 06:00 AM PST

As reported by the News Herald:

Delta Air Lines is expected to bring bigger planes and lower prices, [Airport Authority Chairman Joe] Tannehill said. Government officials expect the airport to draw new companies, increase tourism and help the Bay County economy recover from the worst recession since 1975 faster than other areas of the state.

Delta is expected to begin flights of MD-88 jets when the new airport opens at the end of May.

by Alyssa Katz
Heartened by the recent rise in home prices? Don’t get too comfortable. Standard & Poor’s, the credit-rating agency that tells investors what mortgage-backed securities are worth, reports that the increase was just an illusion. It predicts the nation is about to see a deluge of new foreclosures that will drive real estate values back down.

Blame the “shadow inventory” – nearly 1.8 million homes that are on the road to foreclosure but for all kinds of reasons haven’t gotten there yet.

Many homeowners have fallen behind on their mortgages or stopped paying, but foreclosure has not yet arrived. Mortgage servicers, the folks who send you the bills and file for foreclosure when you can’t pay them, are overwhelmed. Courts, too, are backed up. Mortgage modifications and foreclosure moratoriums have put off the day of reckoning for borrowers, but not forever. And unemployment is sabotaging more homeowners every day.

Out of more than $1.6 trillion in existing mortgages that were packaged into mortgage-backed securities by Wall Street, some $425 billion worth are extremely late on their payments, and therefore likely to go into foreclosure. Only a fraction of borrowers who fall seriously behind are able to catch up, with the help of a loan modification. And even then the majority end up falling behind again. That amount of bad mortgage debt has been spiking up every month, slowing down just a little thanks to the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program, but still continuing to rise.

Meanwhile, even as the amount of unpaid mortgage debt rises, the number of foreclosed, bank-owned homes for sale has been holding fairly steady. That tells us that the number of foreclosures for sale on the market is actually just a sliver of all the ones that are really out there. S&P’s chilling conclusion: “Overall, it is our opinion that recent positive housing reports should not be construed as a sign that the distress in the residential housing market is abating, but rather should be attributed to the temporarily limited supply of homes on the market.”

The bottom line: just counting the homeowners who are currently behind on their mortgages, along with the existing number of foreclosures for sale, at the current pace it will take nearly three years to sell all the foreclosures out there. That doesn’t include all the borrowers who haven’t fallen behind yet but are going to, because of unemployment or because their Option ARM payments are spiking up or because they just decide to stop paying.

The shadow inventory is equal to half the size of the entire market of homes for sale. When it starts getting listed, expect home prices in areas with lots of foreclosures to plummet. Yes, more.
Tags: Foreclosures, Home Affordable Modification Program, home prices, housing market, mortgages, shadow inventory, Standard Poors