Hopes that 2008 will bring a rebound in the Bay State’s battered real estate market are fading, with new numbers showing another big drop in home sales and prices.
Massachusetts single-family home sales plunged last month by 17.1 percent, the Warren Group reported.
And median home prices also fell beneath the $300,000 mark for the first time since March 2004. The state’s median home price in October was $290,000, a 6.5 percent decrease.
International Place builder Don Chiofaro plans to construct a $1 billion office, hotel and residential complex along the new Greenway.
Chiofaro, who emerged victorious yesterday after a bidding war for the hulking Harbor Garage next door to the New England Aquarium, said he is now turning his attention to plans for developing the site.
Several firms competed for the seven-story, 1,380-car garage, valued at over $130 million.
The company that auctioned nearly 300 foreclosed homes in Boston this past weekend expects to return in the spring to sell more troubled properties.
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Real Estate Disposition Corp. said only a few of the homes it put on the block at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center failed to sell. The two-day auction attracted almost 4,000 registered bidders. The firm declined to disclose details on individual sales.
NEARLY EVERY day, it seems, we hear about the rising tide of homeowners who are losing their homes to foreclosure, and the identified culprit is usually the "predatory" lender. But there are simpler, less nefarious reasons why some consumers find themselves in this predicament. There are structural conflicts of interest in the real estate industry - conflicts that helped shepherd borrowers to all-too-predictable financial ruin. We should use the present crisis as an opportunity to correct them.
Boston Capital Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) Inc. recently announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement in which an affiliate of BPG Properties Ltd. will acquire the company in an all-cash transaction valued at $13.30 per share.
The merger has been unanimously approved by the company’s board of directors. Completion of the merger, expected to occur by the end of the first quarter of 2008, is subject to approval by the company’s common shareholders, as well as to certain other customary closing conditions.
NorthPoint, a new minicity under construction in East Cambridge, is being sold, and its buyer is Archon Group, the real estate arm of the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
"I can confirm we have the property under agreement," Rob Griffin, president of Cushman & Wakefield of Massachusetts Inc., which represented the sellers, said yesterday.
