Buffalo Rising Online

a property on Nottingham Terrace is being sold for $1.39 million dollars

Welcome to another edition of RhodeIslandBoy's Grammar Pet Peeves.

The statement by the writer is redundant. It is either $1.39 million or it's 1.39 million dollars. It's not both. Buffalo Rising, hire a copy editor!

[post was edited per RIBoy's comment above.]

Yup, I'm going to go out and get a $1.39 Million loan right now. All of those homes are expensive it's, Nottingham. It would be more interesting to see how home values in North Buffalo and West Buffalo (LWS, Allentown area) have either increased or decreased. That would be a more reasonable assessment of what the middle class people would be able to afford.

What was the orginal price of the home when it was bought the first time? I am a sucker for stats --- give me facts!

Here nor there I will sell the NBJOHN estate on Wellington Road for $1.39 millions dollars and 00 cents, if anyone is interested... Just busting on ya RhodeIsland Boy....

But yes...from where I bought my house in 2001, and where it is now -it has gone up in value quite well.

Joshua, you can go to http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/New_York/Buffalo-heat_map/ and play around with all kinds of stats and trends. You can rank the city itself by neighborhoods, or you can rank the entire metro by zip code. 14216 and 14222 outrank even 14221 in popularity of searches. Interesting stuff to look at.

can't complaint, my house has more than doubled in value in exactly 9 years (this month). but, the assessments also have sky-rocketed. ouch!!

cityindustry...thanks for that link. Very helpful!

I just checked the City of Buffalo's website. Assessed value for this property: $830,100. Sale price in 1995: $650,000.

r129 - what what was the link you used on the City of Buffalo's website?

USA Today seems to think we're on the rise. Here are more stats to chew on. Also references the listing of the Jacobs house:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/closetohome/2008-01-14-buffalo_N.htm

NBJOHN... I'll beat you to it and list my Wellington Rd compound for $1.37M. Ha. Should go for a beer sometime.

Joshua, at http://www.city-buffalo.com the link is under City Services and then Property Information, or just go to http://www.city-buffalo.com/applications/propertyinformation/propsearch.aspx

I wish the city's property information site wasn't always so slow. This is probably the only time I'll say anything good about the suburbs, but their property information sites are so much better! Many of them even include pictures of every single property. I think the City of Tonawanda's is my favorite, because it has multiple large photos with dates.

If you want to be a real stickler for grammar you would not say that the house was being sold unless there was an offer. Without an offer you need to say the the house is being offered for sale

"With the economy seeming to slowly be regaining lost ground..." Are you serious? We are on brink of recession. Buffalo is a flipper's paradise. Call Morano or Ryan Homes and ask them how strong the Western NY housing market is. New home sales are in the can. The high asking prices are on homes being flipped. I think this article was written way out of perspective. leadi is right on in that lenders are getting slammed by defaults on flexible rate loans that are on the rise. The rest of the nation is in forclosure hell but our market is OK due to more conservative lending in the past few years...relative to othe areas.

Very true Shake, very true. Nottingham is the exception to the rule here.

Those two links posted by cityindusty are interesting. In the 2nd link, the bar chart in lower left of USA Today article from today lists following median home prices and percent changes:

Buffalo and Erie Co: $115,000 (unchanged in past year)

NY State: $215,000 (down 11.2% in past year)

USA: $208,700 (down 3.7% in past year)

That doesn't seem they used the most recent data (Business First a few days ago reported a 1.3% yearly rise in median home prices here as of Dec 07), but it changes every month and that's pretty close to what USA Today said about it holding steady. Whether holding steady can be considered "looking up" simply depends on what's being compared to. It's doing a lot better over past year than NYS as a whole, and about 3 to 4 percent better than the USA as a whole. And of course if a longer term time frame is looked at instead of one year, the comparisons might look different as well. There's many different ways to look at this.

Cities like Cleveland are in MUCH worse shape than Buffalo. The damage caused by subprime lending was somewhat limited here because many of these lenders had minimum loan thresholds of $50,000. No amount of flipping and scamming could get the typical east side property valued over $50,000. In Cleveland (and Baltimore and other places), the flippers and scammers were able to artificially inflate the properties in lousy areas to a level where a $50,000 mortgage could be obtained. The problem is these so-called $60,000 properties are only worth $35,000 today.

So my guess is that the foreclosure problem in Buffalo (and Rochester and Syracuse) is less problematic.

The banks are partially to blame for the real estate mess, and the fed and government are partially to blame, but the true blame rests on the shoulders of the borrowers. People who live way beyond their means, borrowing more money than they can afford to repay, charging up huge amounts on credit cards and driving cars that are outside of their price range, are really to blame. Personal responsibility is lacking in this entire mess. At some point in time the average American has to realize the credit cards and home equity lines of credit are risky investments. People have to realize that they do not need 3 televisions, $200.00 running shoes, and all of the other 'luxuries' that we now consider necessities. Yes, the banks should not lend to high risk customers. The fed should not screw with the economy as much as they do. Finally, people need to learn to live within their means. That may mean going with only one car, or one television, or without a new IPOD. You can tell me about people who don't make enough money, or the horrible conspiracies against the poor, but it all comes back to personal responsibility. Don't spend it if you don't have it, and don't borrow it if you can't pay it back.

This article reminds us all...and should be a call to developers that downtown and the inner urban neighborhoods want $250,000 to $1,250,000 homes. These homes dont have to be built with an acre or more of land in Lancaster, Clarence, East Aurora, Orchard Park or Amherst...they can be built within the city and most definitely around all our major Olmsted Parks: Delaware, Front, LaSalle, Cazenovia, South Park and even Masten as well as along the Buffalo and Niagara Rivers.

(Yes I know LaSalle and Masten are not Olmsted)

I don't know why exactly they are selling this place now but it isn't their primary residence. When in town they live on a very nice estate in Elma called Deer Ridge Farm. When not they are in Aiken, SC and Palm Beach FL. Incidently when their daughter got married they had 2,000 guests at Deer Ridge including 3 ex-presidents. She married the son of the former CEO of American Express.....

I love having friends visit from out of town, just so I can tell them how little I paid for my house.

I will take slow steady growth than the roller coaster that happens elsewhere. We as a region closed out at 3,100 new jobs for the year. Up a couple percent in real estate value. That sounds like progress to me. Slow and steady wins the race.

I know on N.Pearl which our realtor told us was "to edgy" 5 years ago had homes from 45 thousand to about 150 thousand, now the average is 250 thousand to 325 thousand...nice return

I've been tracking housing prices in the city for the last 2 years. Some of what I have noticed are 1) Linwood house prices have increased quite a bit, somewhere between 100K and 150K in this time period 2) Parkside area houses have increased about $25,000 in the last 2 years 3) Many houses on streets off Hertel like Sterling, Commonwealth and Wellington, to name a few, are selling for 100K+ 4) houses on McKinley Parkway in South Buffalo now sell for 100K+ and the houses between McKinley and Abbott Road sell for higher prices than the houses from McKinley going back towards the lake 5) There are now many houses in Allentown, if restored or in good shape, that sell for over 200K.

rubygreta: it's true. The housing market in the Cleveland area is dire right now. It's one of the few Rust Belt cities to get hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, thanks to the prevalence of predatory lending. Real estate in the Cleveland area was about 30% to 50% pricier than in Buffalo, but still affordable by national standards. I live in one of the Heights-area burbs east of Cleveland that got hit especially hard. Lower and moderate income families from Cleveland's East Side ghetto, looking for a better life, were enticed by easy mortgage credit. They were mostly unprepared for home ownership, ARMs adjusted upward, and foreclosure was the result.

There is still a lot of new retail development, and new residential development in the city is moving slowly, but in the 'burbs -- understand that some of Cleveland's suburbs are very urban in character; many feel more like North Buffalo and Parkside than Amherst -- the market is dead.

In the long term, though, in Buffalo a house is just a shelter, even if it's in the best of neighborhoods. In other parts of the country, it's an investment.

Leadi - Good points, a few points to consider: HSBC is the third or fourth largest bank in the world and is headquartered in London. The parent company is under a great deal of pressure to change the operating model of HSBC North America, primarily due to the risk associated with owning Household Finance. Household Finance is the largest sub-prime lender in the US. If you look up articles on Knight Vinke, you will see the pressure that HSBC is under to change their operating model and increase profitability for North America. To cut expenses, HSBC has been moving jobs to Buffalo and Charlotte from New York and Chicago, this is one of the reasons that they were looking for additional space at the Mortgage Center on Walden. I am not sure if this is still the case. That said, HSBC is laying off employees on a very frequent basis, so is M&T and Bank of America. Citigroup just announced a major lay-off and restructuring that will result in a job gain for the Amherst processing center. Experts are predicting consolidation of the US banking market over the next 1 - 3 years, this may result in some of our smaller, local, banks being bought by either regional, mid-size, banks or some of the larger international banks if it meets their business needs.

I believe that more companies would move operations to WNY if we created a more business friendly environment and had a better qualified workforce. We do have a lot of educated people, but we truly lack a deep pool of candidates who are experienced and educated. I know that my company has been looking at moving more executives and several divisions to Buffalo and Omaha, but we have trouble finding enough qualified people to backfill positions. Moving these divisions would add quite a few mid-six figure executives to the area who would look for the higher-end houses like the one on Nottingham. We need to do a lot to make this happen, and I can tell you from experience that we are not in the short-list of tier 3 cities for many companies due in part to perception and past experiences for some companies. We need to work on changing this. Our selling point shouldn't be a lot of underemployed and unemployed workers who are available to the highest bidder, this only takes us so far and is hardly a key differentiator when compared to other struggling cities. Our core competencies should include inexpensive operating costs (power, water, fiber infrastructure), competitive tax structure, a well qualified and experienced workforce, and available class-A office space.

We have quite a distance to travel if we want to make this a reality, but I think that it is worth the investment.

Just an example to confirm the recent sale prices in North Buffalo. BuffaloHomefinderextra.com

10/31/2006 $128,000 157 Saranac Ave. BUFFALO Map 10/20/2006 $150,000 207 Saranac BUFFALO Map 3/17/2006 $141,000 137 Saranac Ave. BUFFALO Map 11/7/2007 $105,000 162 Saranac Ave BUFFALO Map 10/30/2007 $137,870 294 Saranac Ave. BUFFALO Map 10/12/2007 $120,000 90 Saranac Ave. BUFFALO Map /21/2007 $128,000 189 Saranac Ave. BUFFALO Map 2/27/2007 $129,500 185 Saranac Ave. BUFFALO Map 11/2/2007 $155,000 171 Sterling Ave BUFFALO Map 10/5/2007 $108,000 37 Sterling Ave. BUFFALO Map 2/26/2007 $130,000 61 Sterling Ave. BUFFALO Map 1/23/2007 $97,064 287 Sterling Ave. BUFFALO Map 10/26/2007 $125,000 277 Wellington Road BUFFALO Map 9/28/2007 $141,000 296 Wellington BUFFALO Map /30/2007 $110,000 187 Wellington Road BUFFALO Map