Hawaii real estate news

Oahu housing market - June 2008 Statistics for June 2008 are published and Oahu home prices continue with their resilience. While the number of units sold is down 31% from a year ago, median home prices have decreased just 8.8% compared with June 2007, a relatively small amount compared to markets in other places, such as California, Nevada and Florida. Oahu's condo and townhome unit sales are down 35% with just a 1.9% decrease in sales prices versus a year earlier. Why is our market so resil... Read Full Post

For Sale By Owner Scam in Hawaii real estate A customer contacted me today and asked if I could represent him in a For Sale By Owner (FSBO) purchase. I said that would be fine. He forwarded an e-mail with a link to a website listing. See the photo below. I did not intentionally blur it, apparently that's what happens when a webpage is copied and pasted into another webpage. Message from a person claiming to be the owner The customer also included correspondence between himself and the "owner.... Read Full Post

Honolulu open house draws a crowd Ever have an open house and nobody visited? Or just a handful of visitors in three hours? What a drag. We recently listed a preforeclosure house in Honolulu. This house appealing because it's duplex (two separate residences for one price) and its location near downtown. The owners bought the house in January 2007 for $810,000. We listed the house for $750,000 and after 10 days there were a few inquiries but no big charge of buyers. The owners had waited awhil... Read Full Post

Hawaii foreclosures increase a bit Haven't they gone up everywhere? Honolulu statistics for the first quarter show 155 foreclosure filings this year (January through March) versus 102 during the same period last year. That's an increase of 52% - the increase percentage sounds ominous, however the number of forclosures versus households is still very small. Honolulu has the second lowest foreclosure rate in the U.S! Why aren't we getting hit? What's so special about this place? We got smoked b... Read Full Post

Hawaii Tourism Authority Steps Up On March 31 2008, Aloha Airlines flew its last passenger flight and laid off 1,900 workers. Customers with flights booked on Aloha Airlines were stuck if they were not completing their roundtrips by that day. Then on Wednesday April 2nd 2008, ATA Airlines shut down operations, stranding more passengers. Tens of thousands of people were affected by the shutdowns and there were not enough flights on other carriers to get people where they needed to go. Aloha Ai... Read Full Post

Hawaii Foreclosures rising This morning's newspaper has an article titled "Isle foreclosures slowly building." The article intrigued me as a Palolo Valley resident and realtor in Hawaii. House for sale in Palolo Valley I live just around the corner from the house pictured in the newspaper article (and pictured above). This house is located in Palolo Valley, a Honolulu neighborhood. Several months ago the house had a garage sale and we stopped by to check it out. The owner told us his story ab... Read Full Post

Assessed value and appraised value Today I was corresponding with a customer about a condo he's planning to purchase. We've looked at a few condos in this particular building and the unit in question has an assessed value that's lower than the others. His thinking is that the property is worth less than the others because of the assessed value. That's a common belief and sometimes it's true. Other times it's definitely not true. Assessed value and appraised value are determined by different p... Read Full Post

Maui Gas prices are the highest Hawaii generally has the highest gas prices in the United States. Maui, Kauai and the Big Island gas prices are normally higher than prices on Oahu. In past weeks Maui's price went up to $3.95 per gallon for regular and $4+ for the premium fuels. People on the outer islands (the islands other than Oahu) sometimes feel that they're getting ripped off. The truth is, nearly everything shipped to Hawaii arrives on Oahu first. From Oahu, freight is reloaded onto shi... Read Full Post

Be careful about MLS violations Last week I received an e-mail from the local Board of Realtors, informing me that I had committed an MLS violation. That caught me completely by surprise. The infraction: Posting a link in Tempo to my video of a listing. That in itself wasn't an infraction, but including my contact information in the video made it a violation. Wow! Were you aware of this? I remember our Board having informed members about putting contact information in the remarks section of a... Read Full Post

Tax information for Hawaii homeowners Selling your principal residence A single homeowner can claim up to $250,000 from the sale of a principal residence as a tax-free profit. A qualified married couple filing jointly in the year of a home sale can claim up to $500,000 tax-free profits. To qualify, Internal Revenue Code 121 requires owning and occupying your principal residence at least two of the last five years before its sale. However, if you acquired your home in an Internal Revenue Code ... Read Full Post