Local hot spots boost real estate market

If all politics is local, last week confirmed that the same is true of real estate. Nationally, there certainly was plenty of bad news.
According to data from Emeryville, Calif.-based ZipRealty Inc., a national real estate brokerage firm, the supply of homes listed for sale continued to grow quickly in April, reflecting weak sales. Red Bank, N.J.-based K. Hovnanian Cos. LLC reported that orders for new homes dropped 30% in March and April from the levels of the previous year. And Ivy Zelman, a Cleveland-based housing analyst for Zurich, Switzerland-based Credit Suisse Group, not only called the spring selling season a “bust” in her most recent report but added that she now believes that “the market rebound will be pushed out until 2008 at the earliest.”
But according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, rising home prices in cities such as Austin, Texas, Charlotte, N.C., Houston, Portland, Ore., Raleigh, N.C., Seattle and Salt Lake City are impressively bucking the national trend.
In Charlotte, for example, house prices rose 9.09% from the fourth quarter of 2005 to the fourth quarter of 2006, nearly double the national average of 5.9%.

Spitzer slapped down
All you Eliot L. Spitzer “fans” out there (and you know who you are) must have had a good chuckle last week when a New York appeals court dismissed a critical legal claim the former New York state attorney general brought in 2004 against Richard Grasso, former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.
Mr. Spitzer, now governor of New York, had argued that Mr. Grasso’s $190 million pay package was unreasonable under the state’s non-profit law.
But in a 3-2 decision, judges in the appellate division of state Supreme Court ruled that the state’s attorney general “does not have the authority” to bring key parts of its case against Mr. Grasso. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s new attorney general, is expected to appeal.
To make Mr. Spitzer’s bad week worse, a New York tabloid reported that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is planning a run for governor in 2010. You can stop chuckling now.

Cash course
If only college could be so lucrative. Presidential candidate John Edwards decided the best way to really, truly understand the financial markets was to join a hedge fund as a part-time consultant in 2005. “It was primarily to learn,” he told The Associated Press last week, “but making money was a good thing, too.”
The former North Carolina senator’s compensation from New York-based Fortress Investment Group LLC will be revealed in his financial disclosure forms this week, but it is known that Fortress, which has more than $35 billion in assets under management, was the biggest single employer of donors to the Edwards campaign for the first three months of the year.
As it turns out, Chelsea Clinton, daughter of presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., works for Avenue Capital Group another New York-based hedge fund. And former President — and potential first gentleman — Bill Clinton is an adviser to a family of funds run by Los Angeles-based private-equity firm Yucaipa Companies LLC.

Ways of the wealthy
We know the rich are different from the rest of us, but how, exactly?
According to two new surveys released last week, they’re more fickle and more inclined to invest abroad. Cogent Research LLC of Cambridge, Mass., reported that the more money investors have, the less likely they are to stick with just one broker.
In fact, Cogent’s survey revealed that nearly 40% of investors with $500,000 to $2 million to invest have relationships with three or more brokers.
And according to The Spectrem Group Inc. of Chicago, 40% of households with more than $500,000 in investible assets said they were likely to invest or would continue to invest internationally. Nearly one-third said they were making more investments abroad than they had in the past. Tom Wynn, a Spectrem director, said he expects that the trend will continue, “barring a large catastrophe.”

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