Windermere Real Estate is the latest regional brokerage company to make property listings available to consumers searching Google Base for real estate.

The company announced it provide continuous feeds of all its listings to the Google Base classified listing service. Windermere has 330 offices and 8,400 associates with listings in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming and Washington.

“Where your customers are is where you need to be,” said Geoff Wood, CEO of Windermere. “And when people search for information today, they search with Google.”

Read the whole article on Inman News here.

If you’ve taken a look at the new low gas prices and are thinking about buying a brand new SUV or other large car to get from your job to your new home in the suburbs, take heed: gas prices are probably not going to stay at these levels for too long.

Who can remember all the way back to last summer, when we had daylight savings time, baseball and $3 a gallon gasoline prices?

Sales of big pickup trucks and SUVs went through the roof - doubling from the year before in some cases. Sales of small, fuel-efficient cars, meanwhile, remained stagnant. It is as if all that moaning and groaning about price gouging by oil companies never happened.

Read the whole article here (Fortune Magazine).

American homeowners have been tapping into their homes like ATMs at an incredible rate since the housing boom began in 2000. But this year it looks like they’ve taken it to a new level. The number of homeowners tapping into home equity through cash-out refinancing has hit its highest level since 1990. And 89% of Freddie Mac-owned loans that refinanced got mortgages that were at least 5% higher than the original balances.

“High demand for cash extraction through refinance is being driven by the high cost of home improvement loans and home-equity lines of credit — that is, the cost of alternative financing — and still-strong demand for home improvements,” Amy Crews Cutts, Freddie Mac deputy chief economist, said in a release.

Also, a huge wave of adjustable-rate mortgages created in the past few years are facing their first reset, giving borrowers the incentive to refinance and take additional cash, Freddie Mac said.

Read the whole article here (CNN Money).

Broderick Perkins at Realty Times has some advice about keeping your real estate investments strong - keep relying on the fundamentals and you’ll be fine. And what’s more fundamental than buying low and selling high?

“Lower prices mean greater investment opportunities because there are more motivated sellers and more deals coming on the horizon. Now is definitely the time to buy — but to buy smart,” says Nashville, TN-based real estate investor, author and frequent Learning Annex speaker Robert Shemin.

Buy and Hold. The best approach to real estate investments is over the long haul. Holding property five to seven years or more is a good hedge against short-term price plunges.
Buy Cash Flow. Buying properties that pay for themselves with rental income, helps offset lost value.
“A lot of people got stuck with the idea of buying with a negative cash flow, but now they don’t have any appreciation and are getting tired of writing checks,” said Shemin.

Read the whole article here (Realty Times).

Thinking about buying a “fixer-upper”? Unless you plan on doing the bulk of work yourself, you may want to consider buying a home in better condition or else be prepared to live in the rough for the indeterminate future. Take this writer’s plight. In her case “a little work” turned out to be a lot of headaches, not to mention a lot of takeout dinners.

Your life becomes dominated by the project. You spend all your time — and more money than you want to — shopping for the project. Hours go by while you look at paint samples, lighting, flooring, while you look at magazines and books and think about every detail — including details you never even considered. Moulding can occupy a day.

Read the whole article here (Home News Tribune).

The Wall Street Journal asks if relocating for a job is always the best idea. While the opportunities may be more plentiful and the money better, living in areas that don’t align with your lifestyle may be more detrimental to your career (and your happiness) in the long run.

Moving for a job, especially when you’re just starting out, can be the springboard that launches your career. But weigh your options carefully. Where you move is just as important for your happiness as the job you move for, many career managers and recruitment professionals say.

Obviously, the last thing you want is to move and then be let go. Ask what happened to the person who formerly filled the slot. High turnover may be a red flag. Is your position new or part of a new program? If so, you may want to think extra hard, because the company could change course and eliminate the post, says Cathy Goodwin, a career consultant in Seattle.

Read the whole article here (Real Estate Journal).

In decades past, the future of civilization was painted in the silver strokes of gleaming high rises, the dense traffic of speeding vehicles, and of course, ubiquitous plastic. While the latter two visions have materialized, the future may not include the high tech of high rises, but instead a return to a very retro notion of small village communities.

Picture the scene: it’s 2025, and you and your family are living in a beautiful, leafy-green village that seems more 19th century than 21st, even though it has only been in existence for ten years and is just 20 miles from a major American city.

It all seems a world away from the crumbling old 20th-century suburbs people used to live in, if you could call it living. You shudder to think you could still be living there. Oh, and you see that really nice house just down the bicycle lane? That’s yours, the fruits of your smart move to plunk down a payment on a piece of the hottest new trend in real estate.

Read the whole article here (CNN Money).

The long-frothy UK housing market keeps chugging along at an incredible rate, with mortgage approvals hitting their highest rate in almost three years. And like it’s US counterpart, the UK market showed suprisingly strong gains in August despite an unexpected hike to the interest rate.

Approvals for house purchases jumped to 126,000 from 120,000 in August, the highest figures since February 2004. The figure was well above market expectations of around 117,000.

The value of approvals for house purchases rose to £16.9 billion from £16.3 billion in August.

Read the whole article here (Times Online).

If housing stats in San Francisco don’t look as healthy as they did a year ago, don’t try telling that to businesses specializing in high-end residential properties. While falling prices have made headlines nationally, the high end residential market in San Francisco seems to be enjoying a reprieve from gloomy news.

“Real estate is very location specific, neighborhood specific, marketplace specific,” Costello said. He later added that with “way more buyers than sellers,” San Francisco is “still a sellers’ market.” Janice Stone, a real estate agent for PRI Coldwell Banker with 32 years experience, said that she thinks of the San Francisco market as spotty.

On Russian Hill, she recently sold a one-bedroom condominium that was only on the market for a week and a three-bedroom condominium for $2.4 million, $200,000 over the list price. “That’s not a bad market,” said Stone. She added that the market has settled down lately and that selling homes for well over the list price is a rarity.

Read the whole article here (North Gate News Online).

Do you drive a hybrid car and live in a home larger than 2000 square feet? You may be doing more bad than good for the environment, despite your sound transportation choices. This is because housing is fast becoming one of the most energy intensive sectors - consuming over 20% of the nation’s energy usage. Even as homes become more green, they are also becoming larger.

EIA reports indicate that over the past 20 or 30 years, energy-saving measures like efficient windows and refrigerators have become commonplace.

The net effect is troubling. Despite widespread use of efficient technology, a new study by scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory shows that from 1985 to 2002, total residential energy consumption per capita climbed eight percent, and residential consumption for the nation — the figure most relevant to global effects like carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions — climbed 32 percent.

Read the whole article here (Alternet).