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Housing Market: We Have Seen the Worst. If you ignore the unsupported anectdotal evidence from this mid-month article from the Plain Dealer (you can look in the archive at my May article to see why this is a good practice), you learn that local builders pulled 19% fewer permits in the first half of 2009 than 2008. Nationally, construction of single-family homes rose 1% in July, while the 13% drop in apartment and condo construction pulled the overall index downward. The Plain Dealer also reported state-wide information. While sales of new and used homes usually slip from June to July, in Ohio they held steady. State-wide prices, however, fell 6% from July 2008 to July 2009. Cuyahoga County saw year-to-year prices rise by 4.8% while sales fell by 6%. By months' end, the national figures were looking rosy. Though the New York Times reported on August 26 that soon-to-adjust ARMs remained a threat to the market, the same day it trumpeted that new home sales had posted a big gain. Though they were down 13% from the year before, such sales grew by 9.6% from June to July. What these figures tell me is that the credit crisis is still crushing the commercial end of residential construction (apartments and condos), while low rates and first-time buyer incentives have given some life to the single-family market. And, the fact that Cuyahoga County sales figures are behaving normally (annualized gain in value, lower July than June sales rate) helps ease my anxiety over local real estate values. |
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Clinic's JJ North Building Obtains LEED Silver Congratulations to both the Cleveland Clinic and the design team at Bostwick Design Partnership for obtaining a LEED Silver rating for the JJ North Building, the first such achievement for a health care project in Northeast Ohio. The project achieved a rate of eighty-nine percent for the recycling of its construction waste while sourcing many of its materials within a 500-mile radius of the site. The building also provides showers for employees who ride their bikes to work, utilizes self-adjusting lights, and includes a number of water-saving features. Read more here. |
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Chinese Positioned for Leadership in Manufacture of Solar Materials With large government subsidies, cheap energy, cheap labor, and cheap design costs ($7000 annual salary for a first-year engineer), the Chinese are moving aggressively toward dominance in the manufacture of solar panels and related equipment. While First Solar of Tempe, Arizona remains the top manufacturer of photovaltic cells, Suntech of Wuxi, China will soon pass Q-Cells of Germany and move into second place. Learn more from this New York Times article.
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Do You Have Your Kitchen Basics? Are there any chefs--amateur, iron, or otherwise--on my subscriber list? Whatever your level of accomplishment in the kitchen, by now you may have heard of Kitchen Basics, a Brecksville-based company run by my client Paul Hamerly. Last November, after opening a nationally-distributed cooking magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to see an ad for Kitchen Basics and its line of all-natural cooking stocks. Like that magazine, Kitchen Basics's products are distributed nation-wide. Learn about the company on its web site, and pick up one of its excellent products next time you're at the grocery store. |
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Disclaimer
This document is intended to provide general information about legal developments, not legal advice. Receipt of this information does not create an attorney-client relationship. |
I am happy to report that, with this my sixth issue, my "open rate" is more than double the average for legal newsletters. I also have a respectable "click through" rate, which means that recipients who open the e-mail actually read the articles. One of these days, I'll figure out how to track visitors to the archive page (