Weekly News (July 12, 2023)

Mortgage Interest Rates Review

Fairway Asset Corp. 7/12/2023

Federal Fund Rate: 5.00% -5.25%        Prime Rate: 8.00%-8.25%

NJ First Home Buyer gets up to $25K

Korea Times   7/7/23

뉴저지서 첫 집사면 2만 5천달러 보조   

• The Governor Murphy signed the Act(A-5415) the first home buyer assisting program, allowing fund up to $25K for the first home buyers in NJ.
• The Act supports the down payment up to $15K for the first home buyers in NJ, whose income is under a certain level. The down pay assisted will be given as a loan, but if they live in that house for 5 years, the loan becomes a grant.
• In NJ, home owners rate in white people is 77%, black people is 42%, and Hispanic is 40%.  The racial unbalance of home ownership is significant in NJ.

NJ, Heating & A/C will be run by electricity  

Korea Daily   7/12/23

뉴저지 냉난방 에너지, 전기로  교체       

• The Governor Murphy announced in Feb the plan to change the energy source for heating and A/C by electricity by 2030 in order to achieve Zero carbon emission through an executive order.
• The plan includes 400K residential houses and 20K commercial buildings.
• However, the critics said it will cost about $140B in total including average cost of a residential conversion is $100K.

Gateway rail tunnel project gets $6.9B Fed Boost

Record  7/7/23

게이트 웨이 사업 $6.9B 달러 확보

• The Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s passion project, the $16.1B Gateway project to build a new tunnel would carry rail lines beneath the Hudson River from New Jersey in to Manhattan has reached the next step, securing a $6.9B federal grant.
• The new tunnel is needed because the existing tunnels that carry two rail lines beneath the Hudson – which date to 1910 – were drastically compromised by Superstorm Sandy and must be repaired.
• Once the new tunnel is finished, the old tunnels can be shut one at a time for vital restoration.

Luxury Real-Estate Sales Heat Up in Manhattan

WSJ   7/12/23

맨하탄 고급 아파트 판매 다시 열 받아

• New York City’s luxury residential market is gaining momentum after stumbling early in the year, another sign that pockets of the U.S. housing market are stirring to life despite high mortgage rates. Manhattan’s most expensive homes posted their second- best June for contracts signed since at least 2006.
• The late “ABC World News Tonight” anchor Peter Jennings’s apartment on Central Park attracted four bids above its $10.45 million asking price and went into contract within two weeks of being listed, according to broker Lisa Chajet. “Bigger buyers are saying ‘we should jump back in before prices come up again,’” Chajet said.

Manhattan Sales over $4M or Higher

WSJ 7/12/2023

Elon Musk  gave a false promise to NY State over Solar panel factory

• Elon Musk announced his plan to build the U.S. biggest solar panel factory in Buffalo, NY in 2016, which makes possible to provide solar panels enough to build 1000 houses a week and the factory will create 1400 jobs.
• WSJ said on 7th that NY State has spent over $1B for the last 8 years for Tesla and the State charged $1.00 for the land to build factory.
• In reality, the production of solar panel has reached only 2% of the initial plan. In addition, the effect of $1 of the supporting funds is equivalent to $0.54 which means a half of the funds spent was wasted.
• The lesson is one needs to be very careful when pone deals with a billionaire who is self-centered business man.

Shares of Home Builders Rally Amid Shortage of Houses for Sale

WSJ  7/5/23

낮은 재고 가운데 주택 건축 회사 주식 호황

• Home-builder stocks are climbing, thanks partly to high mortgage rates that are keeping many homeowners in place. So far this year,Pulte-Group is up about 70%, and D.R. Horton and Lennar are both up more than 30%, compared with a 16% rise in the S& P 500.
• The rally is thanks to a shortage of homes for sale. New listings in May decreased 25% from the previous year, according to Redfin. That was the sharpest decline on record since May 2020. There were 1.08 million existing homes for sale or under contract at the end of May. In May of 2019, there were 1.91 million.
• New-home sales are becoming playing a bigger role. New home sales as a percentage of home sales went from 15% in early 2018 to 19% this year.

Share-price and Index performance, year to date

WSJ  7/7/2023

Resets Damp Affordable Housing Supply

WSJ    7/12/23

정부 보호 프로그램 종결되면 렌트 대란 예상

• The U.S. is at risk of losing nearly 200,000 affordable housing units over the next five years, as government protections end at hundreds of rental properties and landlords become free to set their own rents. The federal government relies on a 30-year tax credit as its main program to encourage developers to build affordable housing. Now a wave of agreements that assisted low-income renters is set to expire, offering landlords the option to charge market rate for their units instead of continuing with the government program.

• Many landlords are expected to raise rents following one of the highest periods of rent growth in recent history. Asking rents for market-rate units soared 25% between early 2021 and the summer of 2022, according to Apartment List, a rentals website.

Cumulative change in rent and household income

WSJ 7/12/23

Threads Signs Up 30 Million Users, Tops App Charts

WSJ   7/7/2023

새로운 앱 “드레즈” 에 첫 날, 3천만명 등록

• In less than 24 hours, the microblogging app Threads, launched Wednesday byMeta Platforms,has signed up more than 30 million users, surged to the top of app-store download charts and become a trending topic on Twitter, the social network it is hoping to upend.
• The launch also drew a sharply-worded letter from a Twitter lawyer, which alleged that Meta hired Twitter employees and assigned them to help build Threads. A Meta spokesman denied the charge.
• Meta launched Threads using the infrastructure and user base of Instagram, which it owns, and Threads allows users to log in with their Instagram accounts.