URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1006 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 18, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

What Are The Amoral House Flippers, Charming Jerks, Snotty Buyers And Greedy Sellers Of The New Property Shows Really Trying To Teach Us?
BYLINE: By Rob Walker.

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for The New York Times Magazine and is working on a book about consumer behavior.

SECTION: Section 6; Column 1; Key; TV LAND; Pg. 92
LENGTH: 4099 words
What makes a house a home is a topic suitable for poetry. But a house or a home is always something else. It is property. Does this fact contain poetry? Probably not. But it does contain entertainment. It's a form of television entertainment I'd never paid the slightest bit of attention to until I got involved in buying property myself, which happened right around the time that the long housing boom was unraveling last year. Previously invisible to me, these entertainments were, for months, the only things I wanted to watch. Buying, selling, updating, restoring and ''flipping'' for quick profits -- it all ran together, but I watched even when I couldn't remember if the title of a certain show was ''Flip This House'' or ''Flip That House.''

It turned out these were two different shows, and with every ''pain of U.S. housing slump'' headline, the inventory of real estate entertainment looked a little more glutty. It made me ponder this curious genre's fate. Like sunny sellers' agents, television executives and producers assured me that such shows had a post-housing-bubble future that was already in the works. I looked for signs of what that might mean as I watched, and pondered just what it was I was tuning in to see. HOW TO EXPRESS THE SELF

In the distant world of 1980, episodes of ''This Old House'' began appearing nationally on PBS stations, documenting the restoration of an 1860 Victorian in Boston. Long, calm, detailed and earnest, the project carried the warm glow of education and New England do-goodism. In time, ''This Old House'' became a franchise (multiple shows, books, a magazine); its original star, a builder named Bob Vila, left in a dispute over endorsement deals and became a brand unto himself. The Thoughtful Improvement ethic -- or at least the phrase ''do it yourself'' -- became a trendy idea.

Entertainment is supposed to be better in the hundreds-of-channels present than it was in 1980, but of course new places for expressing ideas do not guarantee new ideas. The upshot is that what used to be a concept for a show is now the basis for a genre, in the form of dozens of shows, entire channels, a category. The HGTV channel went on the air in 1994 and is now in more than 91 million homes; it's owned by Scripps Networks (which also owns DIY Network, Food Network and Fine Living). HGTV is a soft, warm, pleasant place where nice ladies make quilts during the day and nice young couples redecorate at night and lots of ''tips'' are shared. Here the home is an expression of the self: Michael Dingley, senior vice president for programming and content strategy, says the channel aims to ''provide ideas and inspiration, to make the home better.'' He continues, ''And I don't mean home as in the sense of four walls, but also home in a more emotional kind of way, more abstract.''

In 1999, the channel started ''House Hunters,'' which is now on five nights a week and is among its most popular shows. On each episode, the hostess, a genial automaton called Suzanne Whang -- always shown wandering through some anonymous suburban environment -- gives us a chipper sketch of the house hunter and his or her desires (the software engineer seeking a shorter commute, the single mom looking for space, the tedious young English prof who wants to have poets over more often, etc.) and three available choices. She remains in her undisclosed location as we follow the hunter through the houses, scrutinizing pros and cons, while canned music plays just audibly enough to subtly suggest that something is happening. The episodes conclude with a decision, and usually a coda about how it all worked out perfectly.

In part, ''House Hunters'' simply recreates the way that property functions as entertainment in the real world: like scanning the real estate pages for new listings and going to open houses, it's a part of the mildly voyeuristic pastime of ''seeing what's out there,'' of taking a peek at how other people live, a crash course on the market in Chicago or Atlanta or elsewhere.

Along with HGTV's home design shows, Dingley maintains, such programming demystifies property, and has ''enlightened and empowered consumers.'' He uses the phrase ''relevant entertainment.'' On ''House Hunters'' you may learn that $379K gets you a surprisingly nice 3 BR, 2000 SF, 1927 Craftsman in Seattle. But by and large these happy families are all the same: enlightened and empowered to congratulate themselves for having the same instinct for which wallpaper is ''dated'' and which mantle has ''a lot of character'' that everybody on all the other shows has.

Meanwhile, much is left out. Buyer's remorse, for instance, never materializes. Almost all of the property shows avoid one of the screaming issues of real-life real estate, which is the neighborhood. No one mentions crime statistics, lousy school systems or proximity to homeless shelters or Superfund sites. In an episode of ''House Hunters,'' a cute young New Jersey couple move to the shore, specifically to Asbury Park, which Whang brightly calls ''a majestic boardwalk town.'' Have you ever been to Asbury Park? She adds that the place was made famous by the songs of Bruce Springsteen, and that's true. For instance, it inspired ''My City of Ruins.''

HGTV, Dingley explains, is not a ''mean-spirited'' place. ''We're not a snarky, mean, nasty brand.'' Perhaps the channel offers shelter from gloomy homeowner news. ''For most folks, a home is not only the most expensive investment in their lives, it's also the most personal,'' he says, and a rockier housing market sharpens the viewers' interest in ''making the right, prudent decision.'' That said, its ''relevant'' programming has been expanding to encompass a bit more of the things that have dominated property entertainment on those networks that are a little less concerned about how mean-spiritedness might affect the brand: namely, money and drama. HOW TO BE GREEDIER

The American entertainment consumer surely seeks enlightenment on matters of taste and style, but also on that other key aspect of the self, net worth. The soaring stock market of the late 1990s made CNBC almost as popular as CNN, supposedly because we'd become an enlightened and empowered nation of investors, but really because bull market geniuses loved watching a game they never seemed to lose. Tanking markets cleared up the difference between personal finance and rollicking fun, and CNBC's viewership retreated to niche levels. The Thoughtful Improvement ethic of ''This Old House'' and the Something for Nothing ethic of Nasdaq-as-sporting-event come together in the form of the flip shows. Don't make a home, don't invest in a house -- flip a property: how much money, how fast, for how little effort, can be extracted from a shabby, crumbling residence? Booyah! -- as CNBC throwback Jim Cramer might shout -- now you've got something.

TLC has included home-related programming since 1997 (starting with Bob Vila's post-''This Old House'' project, ''Bob Vila's Home Again''). And its show ''Trading Spaces'' -- in which neighbors redecorate each other's homes -- was a home-entertainment milestone. The network began airing ''Flip That House'' in 2005. Every half-hour episode features a different ''flipper,'' some experienced, some with no particular background in real estate or construction but with an interest in what (on television at least) sounds like easy money. We learn the purchase price, tour the generally ramshackle property, and listen to an overview of planned updates and renovations. Usually a demolition montage follows: carpets ripped out, off-trend cabinetry smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer. Episodes involving experienced flippers tend to go rather smoothly, and I suppose the instructional payoff for the viewer comes in the form of tips. These generally involve granite countertops, Brazilian cherry wood floors, travertine tile. Often, the tips are communicated in the form of orders issued to the stoic head of some all-Hispanic construction crew, who simply nods.

The profit motive obliterates home-ness and all other topics. An episode involving a guy named Hay, who is ''in the entertainment industry,'' and restores houses in the area once known as South Central Los Angeles so he can rent them, begins: ''The 1992 riots tore the city apart. But now it's become an attractive destination for house flippers, hoping to turn their property into profit.'' He goes over budget, and we learn to use angled paint brushes. When he's done, the real estate agent says he can get $1,600 a month for the place.

The vague idea of learning from the pros animates ''Flip That House'' rival ''Flip This House,'' which runs on A&E. ''We're constantly looking to evolve the shelter brand,'' executive producer Michael Morrison informs me. ''And one of the trends in real estate, obviously, is house flipping.'' ''Flip This House'' also made its debut in 2005, and rather than an endless series of flippers, revolves around recurring sets of real estate pros. The first season followed Trademark Properties, based near Charleston, S. C. and run by Richard C. Davis. The second season has focused on two different realty teams, one in San Antonio and one in Atlanta. ''Flip This House'' episodes each last an hour, and what's added to the mix of tips are basic elements of drama. Most notably, the stars get more full-fledged character treatment.

The San Antonio shows are the serialized adventures of Armando and David Montelongo, who are brothers, and their wives. The series works more because the people happen to be entertaining than because they happen to work in real estate. Armando in particular has just the sort of polarizing charisma that can carry a show. A charming jerk, he lowballs subcontractors, bullies an unpaid intern and taunts his wife with a fistful of roaches grabbed from the kitchen of one nasty property he has acquired, pausing now and again to reflect on the all-American success story of his life so far.

In one episode, for no obvious reason, the brothers and their wives compete, flipping two houses at once to see who can make more money. By the time girls in bikinis arrive to distract one team's subcontractors with free beer, the Enlightened Improvement ethic has been reduced to occasional text popping up on the screen making never-substantiated assertions about how much ''value'' a new fence or windows supposedly add to the final sales price.

Davis of Trademark Properties will be back on television soon enough, as it happens, with a new show over on TLC. It's called ''The Real Deal,'' and it will, as he describes it, be firmly about the business of real estate. Davis is a creature relatively rare in entertainment but commonplace in real life: The Southern hustler, who doesn't care what slow-witted stereotypes you read into his accent as long as he gets your money. Davis -- still involved in a lawsuit against A&E that he filed after the channel decided to use those other groups in the second season of ''Flip This House'' -- sounds flat-out thrilled about the end of the housing bubble.

Seven years ago, real estate was dominated by ''A players'' like him. Eventually, ''you got to the point where you got your F players in the game--and making money!'' Now that that's over, ''it becomes survival of the fittest, and cash becomes king,'' he says, and the banks start telling loan-seeking F players to go back to their day jobs. He believes that this will be good not only for Trademark, but for his show. ''Flip This House,'' he says, ignored the important point that the key to his business isn't mere remodeling prowess; it's knowing how to find properties that are a bargain to begin with. The premise of his show is that he is an inspiring, visionary entrepreneur, and a down market will only make that clearer. ''That's when I'll entertain you the most,'' he says. ''My most dramatic deals are always in a down market. That's when it gets really crazy, and really fun.'' HOW TO ENJOY THE MISFORTUNE OF OTHERS

Watching other people make money because they're smarter than I am doesn't actually sound like that much fun, but there's little danger of it on another flip show on TLC that I found perversely gripping, ''Property Ladder.'' All reality shows rise and fall on casting, and despite the show-opening tease (''Want to make more money in a few months than you did last year?''), here the producers seem bent on finding ''real estate rookies'' capable of catastrophe. One episode involved lunkhead buddies who got interested in house-flipping through an infomercial. In another, a newly married couple more or less disintegrate over the course of an ill-fated, months-long flip fiasco. Shouting matches feature prominently in nearly every installment.

Like ''Flip That House,'' the show focuses on a different project every week. The twist is an expert named Kirsten Kemp (billed as a veteran house flipper, she also, somewhat curiously, happens to have a bit-part acting resume that includes appearances on ''JAG'' and ''Married With Children''), who shows up periodically to give advice and pass judgment. My favorite episode involved a Simi Valley couple who bought a ''wrecked'' and ''abandoned'' house for $435,000 and not only planned to flip it for $600,000 after putting in $50,000 worth of renovations over 10 weeks, but pledged to do so in an eco-friendly manner. ''We're really supporting the planet this way,'' the wife cheerfully explains, wearing an unconvincing smile that stays frozen on her face through the many disasters that follow.

Kemp openly scoffs at the particulars of their budget and makes a face when told about plans for a solar panel. She tells them they're better off putting French doors in the master bedroom -- that way they will actually add some value. Perhaps what ensues can be characterized as advice. The smiling wife buys eco-trendy bamboo flooring but ''violated her green ideals,'' as the near-mocking narrator puts it, when tiles made from recycled material prove too expensive. They also blow off some ''energy efficient'' windows in favor of the French doors that Kemp suggested, and of course they give up on the solar panel scheme as time runs short and their spending balloons. And when Kemp returns toward the end of the show, they inform her (big smile from the wife here) that not only did they opt not to install air conditioning, but they're going to sell the house themselves so they won't have to pay a real estate agent's fee.

Kemp is TV-attractive, articulate and informed, but her most fascinating quality is her two-faced snakiness. She hugs her amateur charges, softens her stern advice and raised eyebrows with compliments and smiles - and then, alone with the camera, coldly enumerates how they blew it. In this case, Simi Valley's summer highs average 91 degrees, and the for-sale-by-owner approach just proves that in addition to being naive, the eco-flippers are greedy. It will end up costing them money, she announces. And indeed, the show closes with a montage of months passing with no offer; an end note says they finally went with a listing service, and found a buyer, after more than six months. Cackling on my sofa, I'm pleasantly blase about where I stand in the property zeitgeist. Aside from inspirational business savvy or handy news you can use, here's another thing that's entertaining: schadenfreude. HOW TO ESCAPE REALITY

Property shows seem so profoundly American -- it is our manifest destiny to own a 4,000-square-foot place in a good school district within five years of obtaining a college degree -- it's a disappointment to learn that the contemporary property entertainment model is largely an import. ''Hot Property,'' which first aired on Channel 5 in Britain in 1997, involved a prospective home buyer looking at three houses. The original ''Property Ladder'' runs on Channel 4.

Fenton Bailey is one of the founders of World of Wonder Productions, which creates programming for both the American and British markets. He's British, and he lives in Los Angeles. Not everything works in both markets. A World of Wonder show that aired in Britain, ''Housebusters,'' addressed the problems of various homeowners -- can't make friends in the neighborhood, can't seem to save any money since moving -- by bringing in supernatural types like a ''geopathic stress'' expert, an electromagnetics guy, a feng shui advocate, a psychic and even a witch. Americans, he says, seem uninterested in home solutions that are less tangible than, say, buying a plasma-screen television, and Bravo passed on a United States pilot.

But the markets also have much in common. The key to property drama, Bailey says, is the key to all drama: transformation. ''Very little of what's on television is about accepting who you are and being happy with it. The old you, the threadbare you -- no one wants to know about that.'' If anything, he says, the British housing market has been even more overheated than the United States market, and got that way earlier. And finally, he says, ''The destiny of television is to put everything on television,'' so housing shows had to happen at some point.

''Buildings and interiors have been only something the very rich can enjoy,'' Bailey continues. ''They formed an elite pastime that's been absolutely democratized by television.'' World of Wonder also happens to be responsible for ''Million Dollar Listing,'' which ran on Bravo last year and probably made real estate more entertaining than any other single show, not least because it took place in Malibu, a world well beyond the reach of most of the democratized audience.

Over the course of six episodes, ''Million Dollar Listing'' deconstructed transactions and failed transactions in astonishing detail, giving a more complete version of the harrowing mix of emotions and egos and half-truths of the property drama. Getting suitable access to so many buyers, sellers and agents consumes a great deal of time, and Bailey says the first season of ''Million Dollar Listing'' took nearly a year to complete; a second season is being cast now. Bailey doesn't sound worried about what effect the housing slump might have on the show, and it's easy to see why. ''Million Dollar Listing'' deals with falling property values by unfolding in the borderline freak show of high-dollar Southern California, with characters who make Armando Montelongo look like a cream puff as they whine and wheedle in the never-ending sunlight of this promised land. By now we are far from ''This Old House,'' where an earnest discussion of cabinet installation might last three or four minutes and include the phrase ''medium density fiberboard with a thermofoil wrap.'' The only practical bit that I picked up from ''Million Dollar Listing'' was the superiority of ''whitewater'' ocean views to regular old ocean views. You can't get any further away from everyday reality without actually making things up.HOW TO OBLITERATE THE SELF

''Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway.'' So observes Frank Bascombe, narrator of Richard Ford's novel ''The Lay of the Land.'' Bascombe drifted into realty in Ford's earlier novel ''Independence Day,'' and while he may have done so in order ''to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear,'' he is perhaps the wisest observer of property drama we are likely to have.

The agony of property, for example, is rarely more visceral than in the long episode in ''Independence Day'' in which Bascombe deals with a Vermont couple whose problems will most likely not be solved by a new home in New Jersey. ''The realty dreads,'' in his view, are never about lost money or the wrong house, but ''in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we're just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold.'' Thus when Bascombe successfully leads clients ''toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness,'' he achieves an outcome that is ''not poetry but generalized social good with a profit motive.''

Television, however, differs from literature in the following way. The dramatic shows, for all their tears and shouting matches, in the end, read as harmless, campy cartoons. It's the happy shows full of smiles and high-fives -- the ones that loudly promise us that you need not worry about unchinkable molds when you can consider how much airier the living room will feel if you simply move that sofa -- where, every so often, thin cracks in the happy facade can reveal things wholly unintended.

One of HGTV's newer hits, for instance, is the perfectly upbeat ''Designed to Sell.'' A relatively winning host named Clive introduces us to someone who is having trouble selling a home and brings in experts to improve things as much as possible for $2,000. One step in the process involves the homeowners watching a videotape of a real estate agent walking from room to room, enumerating what they've done wrong. The basic lessons recur over and over: reduce clutter, define the space, brighten up this bedroom, do something about the dated window treatments, and please, American house sellers, pack away your myriad collections of weird figurines immediately. What we learn, in other words, is that despite the supposed home-design revolution, you people have not gotten the point.

Clive and a rotating crew of design experts soften the blow by reminding the homeowners, and us, just what the point is: money. ''More light, more space . . . more money,'' one designer announces. Replace this ''losing-money lime'' color with a ''money-making mushroom'' hue, Clive advises, and ''Top dollar!'' he says, many times. So the homeowners shrug off the remarks about their grandmotherly decor by smiling and saying, for instance, ''Ka-ching!' Or in one episode, huddling with the design team and chanting, ''One, two, three -- money!''

A remarkably similar show called ''Sell This House,'' on A&E, stars Tanya Memme, a high-energy party girl type who favors plunging necklines and has no obvious skills, and a bulbous-muscled bear named Roger, identified as a ''home design consultant.'' In this version, the flummoxed homeowner listens to the snide, videotaped remarks of random prospective home buyers. The most crushing episode involved a faultlessly polite Southern woman whose wallpaper looked to be 31 years old for the simple reason that she had never stopped liking it. Other features of her long time home include shag carpeting, a mind-boggling menagerie of tchotckes and a mailbox done over to resemble a fish. The videotaped critiques are much what you'd expect, with the added insult of some ill-mannered oaf saying that the place ''smells like old people.''

''I will admit,'' this sweet woman tells Tanya Memme, ''I did cry.'' She knows full well that her things might seem idiosyncratic -- but they are her things. And she cannot for the life of her see what difference that makes. ''If they buy the house, there won't be any of this stuff here,'' she says, reasonably. ''That was my version.''

Here we learn the ultimate lesson of these shows: You can look at a free-standing building wherein some persons reside, and you can spin house-or-home poetry out of that all day long. But at the end of that day, property is what it is. Your home can look like an expression of you, but your property needs to look like a Pottery Barn catalog. Your wallpaper decisions may have expressed your individuality when you made them, but you are not an individual anymore, and no one wants to think about you. Stop expressing yourself. This place you live needs to look, in fact, like the total obliteration of ''you,'' because selling property is about someone else's dreams of self-expression and taste.

Tanya and Roger rip up the carpet and consign to storage every object that means anything to the nice Southern lady. When the show ends, Tanya brightly informs us that prospective buyers are giving it ''a second look.'' In other words, it hasn't sold. One imagines the dignified and bewildered owner imprisoned there still, looking around at the catalog pages that have become, not so much her home, but merely the place where she lives.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: POETRY (90%); TELEVISION INDUSTRY (90%); LITERATURE GENRES (89%); REAL ESTATE (78%); HOUSING MARKET (78%); RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY (78%); TELEVISION PROGRAMMING (77%); PUBLIC TELEVISION (77%); NETWORK TELEVISION (74%); ETHICS (71%) Housing; Television; Television; Television
COMPANY: FOOD NETWORK (50%)
PERSON: Rob Walker
GEOGRAPHIC: BOSTON, MA, USA (54%) NORTHEAST USA (70%); MASSACHUSETTS, USA (54%) UNITED STATES (70%)
LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos (Illustratons by Todd St. John)(pgs. 91,93,94,95)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1007 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 18, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Paradise, In Contract
BYLINE: By Somini Sengupta.

Somini Sengupta is chief of The New York Times's South Asia bureau.

SECTION: Section 6; Column 1; Key; Pg. 97
LENGTH: 3109 words
One afternoon in December, Roy Patrao peered through a sturdy iron gate and scanned the gnarled roots of a tree embracing the ruin of an old stone house. Only a shell of the house survived, with thick columns holding up a portico. A window shutter made of seashells and slatted wood was visible amid the overgrown bush. On this plot of land, Patrao saw his dream.

He would build a villa here, with cool limestone floors and a modern kitchen. The upstairs windows would open to a view of the river that meandered through the village. In the backyard, he pictured a family gathering around the barbecue, as they might on a summer's evening in Southern California, where Patrao once lived. But this time, the domestic scene would take place in Goa, the sliver of a state on India's western coast.

The site was perfect. On the adjacent property was a paddy field, which by law was off limits to construction. The river view was a bonus, for in the real estate business, river views are nearly as lucrative as Goa's legendary ocean views, which have become virtually impossible to attain. The village itself, called Aldona, was long on Goan charm, surrounded by rolling hills with the beaches of the Arabian Sea less than an hour's drive away. Across the road from the old house stood a small white chapel. The fishmonger did the rounds each morning. The charm factor was sweetened by local lore: Patrao told me there were tales of two ghost sightings in the house.

Patrao hadn't bought the plot yet, but he was already picturing that this would be the first of 10, maybe 20, houses that he would build across Goa. He would use his own money and that of friends, who likewise would be banking on the appeal of Goa's lore. One day, he imagined, a community of Indian-Americans like him might spend holidays in their Goan homes or eventually retire here. He was born in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), but when he spoke of homecoming, he meant Goa.

Goa, like much of India, is in the midst of a real estate frenzy, and Patrao, a man nearly 60, a veteran of the construction business in California and New York, is nothing if not an entrepreneur. His ambitions were fueled as much by his canny business sense as by Goa's enticements. The houses he imagined building would sell for at least $180,000, he reckoned, or more than twice the investment in the land and construction costs. Real estate, he figured, was the way to go in India. ''One billion people. Limited land supply. It's a no-brainer,'' he concluded.

With that plan in mind, Patrao and his girlfriend, Sundiv Kaur, known as Sunny, were devoting their days and nights to the quest for land. They drove from village to village, eyeing ruins and plots, inspecting views, making drawings and, in the evenings, plotting their findings on a flowchart to see how well the math worked.

Theirs was also a personal venture. Goa is where they both came to recover from their old lives. Both had left their previous marriages -- she in Singapore, he in the United States. They met in Goa, became friends, fell in love, rented an apartment together and decided to put down new roots. One day, they said, they would build themselves a house in Goa. ''This is a second-chance place, baby,'' was Patrao's verdict.

As Patrao drove through Aldona on the warm December afternoon, Kaur sat next to him, quietly smiling. The next morning, they planned to put down money on their dream ruin.

In popular culture, Goa has long embodied qualities hard to find in India -- it is quaint, laid-back, libertine -- and its real estate boom may be more about mythology than location. It is the kind of place, you repeatedly hear, where a woman can go out of the house in shorts, or where people are reasonably tolerant of a situation like Patrao's living with Kaur, who, at 34, is much younger, and not even his wife. An acquaintance of mine in Delhi who owns a house in Goa put it bluntly: If you want to get out of India, come to Goa.

Goa has long been a crossroads of East and West. It was conquered by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, just after Vasco da Gama reached India (he landed a bit farther south) and effectively planted the flag for European rule in India. Chilies came to India through Goa, after the Portuguese ferried them from the Americas, and forever changed Indian food. The echoes of Portuguese rule are still felt in the houses with their frescoed walls and wraparound porches.

In a 1964 essay called ''Goa the Unique,'' Graham Greene wrote, ''Outside Goa one is aware all the time of the interminable repetition of the ramshackle, the enormous pressure of poverty, flowing, branching, extending like flood water.'' In Goa, he recalled attending a party where he was offered a Benzedrine tablet at 4 a.m.

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and novelist, says that in the Indian mind Goa has long signified freedom, particularly of the sexual kind. It is an association advanced by Hindi movies of another era, he said, in which Goan women were often portrayed as sexually available and Goan men as drunks. ''Goa is associated with free sensuality,'' he said by way of explaining its real estate lure. ''That I think is a very big attraction -- and the keeping up with the Joneses. It's a party place, a place to let go of your inhibitions.'' Kakar himself let go of his two homes -- renting out one in ''aggressive'' Delhi, in his words, the other in ''cold'' Berlin -- and moved to Goa four years ago. He and his wife, Katharina, set about restoring an old Portuguese-era house.

The makeover of Goa into an upscale vacation spot -- the Hamptons, if you will, for the upwardly mobile Indian -- began in the late 1960s, when hippies came to conquer Goa's beaches. Over time, it became a mandatory stop on the Israeli post-military-service circuit. A string of five-star resorts opened in the 1990s. Onetime visitors, both Indian and foreign, began restoring old houses. Then, over the past few years, as private airlines added new flights to Goa, affluent urban professionals from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and elsewhere began coming in droves. The economy was soaring. People suddenly had money to invest. They started buying Goan real estate.

The Goa phenomenon has been fueled by India's economic rise. There is more money swirling around than ever before, including more foreign investment for real estate. Drive along any major highway in India and you are likely to see earth being moved day and night, laborers carrying cement on their heads, steel pilings pointing up to the sky like so many skinny fingers of ambition. Once unremarkable small towns now see a rush of high-rise apartment blocks under construction. Erstwhile fields of wheat and mustard are fenced off, with giant billboards announcing the arrival of new townships.

There is a genuine demand for some types of development: office buildings are absorbed in cities like Bangalore as quickly as they are built. But there's also a breathless quality to some of the forecasts. One report from Deutsche Bank of Germany predicted in January that 600 malls would be under way across India in the next three years. In recent months, in an apparent effort to temper soaring real estate prices, Indian banks have gradually raised interest rates on home loans.

In Goa, the boom started, naturally, with tycoons. Eight years ago, Vijay Mallya, who owns Kingfisher Beer, hired Dean D'Cruz, one of Goa's best-known architects, to design what Mallya dubbed the Kingfisher Villa, spilling down to the Arabian Sea. ''When people walk into my house, I want them to go weak in the knees,'' is how D'Cruz recalled his instructions.

Somewhat less wealthy seekers followed, but their real estate fantasies burned just as hot. Gated communities with clubhouses and pools began to go up. Hillsides were carved out for condominiums. Cashew groves were cut for a road. Recently, some of the country's biggest developers have put forward plans for apartments, golf courses, hotels, shopping malls and a software park.

Prices have swiftly climbed into the stratosphere. In April of last year, DLF Universal, one of India's largest builders, bought a patch of land near the capital, Panaji, for more than $1,100 a square yard. Just two years ago, the state government, which owned the land, could not dispose of the property for a sixth of that price. DLF plans to build a mall and office complex on the site.

This construction has not been greeted with universal joy. Last fall, after the Goan state government approved a five-year regional plan that opened new swaths of land to development, some of it hillsides with coveted views of river and sea, residents of laid-back Goa were roused to action. Builders welcomed the plan as relief from what they deplored as overly stringent restrictions on construction, including a ban on buildings taller than the nearest coconut palm. But critics in Goa, who included D'Cruz, saw it as an open invitation to destruction. Where would all the garbage go? Where was the clean drinking water for all the newcomers when the village wells were running dry or salty? Goa's ecology would be destroyed, the critics cried, its magic would be gone.

Protests were organized, and a campaign, called Save Goa, was established. One protest in December drew thousands of people to Panaji. Amateur photographers fanned across the state snapping pictures of supposedly illegal construction. The Catholic Church put its weight behind the campaign. Save Goa took state officials to court. ''Paradise Lost,'' its Web site warned.

By mid-January, the campaign could claim a substantial victory. The government of Goa, ruled by the Congress Party, voted to scrap the regional plan and draft a new one. Menino Peres, the director of the department of information and publicity, said it was because of the ''sentiment of large numbers of people in Goa, and on environment and congestion considerations.''

Roy Patrao watched the controversy closely, and not without self-interest. He regarded the debate as unnecessarily polarized. In the anti-development lobby he saw tendencies of Nimby-ism. But during the week of the big protest in Panaji, he sent me an e-mail message saying he was glad he had refrained from big projects and what he called ''controversial lands.''

''I had a powerful feeling that something smelled here -- and that I did not want to be part of the stench,'' he wrote. ''Having said that, I also believe that many of the luminaries of Goa feel slighted because $(lsquo$)outsiders' want to develop mega-projects in Goa. They want Goa to remain as it always was. I feel they would like to be the ones in charge.''

Spread across 140 acres along a wooded ridge on the edge of the water some 11 miles from Aldona, Aldeia de Goa, a lavish gated community, bears little resemblance to the rest of India. Irvine, Calif., might be a closer cousin. There are no potholes. There are street lamps and around-the-clock water from the tap. Sewage is treated and not left to fester in a septic tank. Terraced lawns lead down to a clubhouse under construction, along with a gym, tennis courts and a swimming pool. A five-star hotel will be built on the beach. Where the ridge bends, a section has been cleared for the construction of another cluster of bungalows and condominiums. The views face west onto the widening mouth of the Zuari River as it pours into the Arabian Sea.

The rest of the hill tells you what Aldeia de Goa once was -- shrubs and trees formerly zoned as orchard land where no development was allowed. The developers argued for a rezoning many years ago and managed to relax Goa's strict coastal regulations for the patch of beach where they are putting up the hotel. They convinced local authorities that since the property abuts the mouth of the Zuari, the 200-meter buffer that applies to hotel construction on the seacoast should not apply; they have been allowed to build closer to the water.

Aldeia is the postcard for a new Indian aspiration -- the country house, which had been the province of Indian blue-blood families, and even for them it meant a cottage in the hills, bought from the departing British. In Aldeia, completed houses can go for as much as $700,000. Prices of bungalow plots have more than doubled in two years. All told, about half of the roughly 250 properties in Aldeia have been bought by people from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The rest are Indians who live abroad. ''Invest in the lifestyle you deserve,'' the cover of the sales brochure declares.

The owners at Aldeia also include local officials who at one point or another have smoothed the way for building permits and rezoning. Among them is Goa's most famous politician, Atanasio Monserrate, who until recently served as the minister for town and country planning and was a chief architect of the repealed regional plan. One of his most controversial acts of rezoning was to allow for a road to be built through paddy fields in order to connect two of his houses. At Aldeia, he has a corner plot with a prime view of the water. Monserrate declined several requests for an interview, but in December, when a private Indian television news station, NDTV, asked him about charges of graft, Monserrate said flatly that such accusations were impossible to prove. He resigned in January, saying that he had been unfairly blamed for the new regional plan.

One afternoon a few months ago, a few miles north of the capital, Dean D'Cruz drove across a narrow bridge and pointed to mangroves that had recently gone up for sale. We were headed to check on a hotel in Calangute that D'Cruz had designed, and along Aguada Bay he showed me a gentle slope that leads down to the water. It had been shaved off, and a new house was under construction; D'Cruz suspected it was a violation of the coastal regulations.

As we continued our drive north to Morjim, where there has been a flurry of real estate deals, we saw a bulldozer burrowing a road through a wooded hill. These activities distress many Goans. Kalu Ganesh Shetgaonkar, the 75-year-old patriarch of an extended family of 60 in Morjim, said he regularly wards off buyers and brokers who come to inquire about his property on the hill. There's nothing up there, not even water, Shetgaonkar said -- just cashew trees. ''It's our ancestors' land,'' his son, Ganesh Kalu, injected. ''Why should we sell it? We didn't buy it.''

As attached as many Goans are to their ancestral lands, the money can't always be so easily declined. Saba Bhiva Shetgaonkar, another Morjim resident, said he was compelled to sell 1,200 square yards of his cashew hills, so poor and indebted had the family become. The sale paid for the weddings of some of his eight daughters. Shetgaonkar said he would have to dispose of another parcel soon, for the weddings of his two youngest daughters. His only consolation was that prices had nearly quadrupled since he last sold.

As an architect and a Goa native who grew up in Mumbai, D'Cruz has had a front-row seat to the transformation of Goa. A few years ago, he designed a house for a friend from Mumbai, who in turn sold it for a small fortune and asked D'Cruz to design a dozen more. D'Cruz has since built his share of hotels and private houses, even some small apartments. He welcomed the settlers who came to rescue the crumbling Portuguese-era houses.

''It's nice to see people buy in villages, because the old houses are crumbling,'' D'Cruz said. ''A fair number of people restore them nicely. But they don't participate in the community. It helps architecturally. It doesn't necessarily help the community.''

Lately he has also reluctantly come to see tourism as better fuel for Goa's economy than the rush to build private houses. At least, he says, tourism creates a few more jobs. What scares him, he says, is the specter of sprawl on these hills. He sent a text message to my cellphone on the day of a vital court hearing on the regional plan. ''Pray for us,'' he said.

Roy Patrao and Sunny Kaur were keenly aware of the roiled waters they were entering as they searched for perfect plots on which to build. They would build small. They would win over the neighbors.

On the December afternoon I spent with them, having given up finding anything close to the coast, they were in a village not far from Aldona, inspecting an overgrown plot of land that appeared to have been used as a public toilet.

''Roy, you should come see this,'' Kaur called out from the bushes. Through the brush, you could make out a winding river, snaking through paddy fields. The village was still undiscovered, in real estate terms, and so the plot was still reasonably priced -- about $50 a square yard. A dilapidated house that stood next door, Patrao guessed, would go on the market as soon as construction started on this plot. ''It's gentrification,'' he said. ''Remember TriBeCa?''

They drove down to the river. There was a white cross, decorated with a garland of marigold and a daub of yogurt, an emblem of the entangled Christian and Hindu practice common in Goa.

As they were learning, Goan real estate was also entangled in its own particular ways. It is not easy to confirm which lands are actually zoned for construction, nor to get a clean title deed, nor even to follow building codes. A local builder told Patrao that if he built by the rules, government inspectors would get mad. ''They make their money from $(lsquo$)mistakes,' '' he told me.

That afternoon, they drove on to Aldona, to show me the old house behind the gate. ''The ruin I've got my eye on,'' Kaur said, eyes twinkling.

They would reorient the house, turning an overgrown front garden into the backyard. They would keep the portico on the side. The slatted seashell windows, they weren't sure about. They could easily double their investment, they said, even with the bribes they assumed they would need to pay to local officials for building permits. They had already increased their initial bid on the plot. They expected the owner's blessings the next day.

But then, the reality of Goan real estate hit them. First, their broker told them the owner had chosen another buyer. Then the buyer backed out, because, as Patrao explained, two of the owner's sisters refused to relinquish their claim on the family property. Under Goan law, which dates back to Portuguese times, the sisters could lay claim at any point in their lifetimes, bungling any future owner's plans. Six weeks later, the place was still on the market. The agent said the asking price had nearly doubled. The family, he reckoned, would eventually sell.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: REAL ESTATE (89%); CONSTRUCTION (88%); BEACHES (77%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (72%); CONSTRUCTION COSTS (67%) Housing
PERSON: Somini Sengupta
GEOGRAPHIC: MUMBAI, INDIA (90%) CALIFORNIA, USA (92%); GOA, INDIA (90%); NEW YORK, USA (79%); INDIAN OCEAN (79%) INDIA (92%); UNITED STATES (92%) India; Goa (India) ; India
LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: At Another Crossroads -- Goa has long been a mix of East and West. Now the ornate style of old Goa meets the rebar and concrete of the new. (Photographs By Olivo Barbieri For The New York Times)(pgs. 96,97)

No Taller Than the Nearest Palm -- Builders can get around such old-fashioned restrictions, and new construction looms over a church in Mapusa, a town in northern Goa. (Photograph By Olivo Barbieri For The New York Times)(pg. 99)

To the Sea -- The region was once a bohemian getaway, with many beaches like this one in southern Goa. Today the Indian version of the Hamptons crowd is putting its money into condos and renovations.

To the Hill -- A country house is no longer just for Indian blue bloods. The sales brochure for the new gated community Aldeia de Goa, above, declares, ''Invest in the lifestyle you deserve.'' (Photographs By Olivo Barbieri For The New York Times)(pgs. 100,101)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1008 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 18, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Daring to Bet That Americans Would Take a Shine to Imports
BYLINE: By BARNABY J. FEDER
SECTION: Section 12; Column 4; Automobiles; MOTORING; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1191 words
FOR more than a year, my father has been driving around Boulder, Colo., in a Toyota Prius. This might seem like an odd development for a man whose career as a foreign car dealer was defined in many ways by a bitter lawsuit with Toyota in the 1960s, but it spotlights some of the reasons Toyota is poised to pass General Motors as the world's largest carmaker.

My father, Richard W. Feder, was Toyota's first dealer in San Francisco when the Japanese company returned to the United States in 1964 with the Corona compact after analyzing why Americans had rejected its underpowered Toyopet in the late 1950s.

That Feder-Toyota relationship did not last long -- Dad did not buy into the company's drive to increase sales rapidly at the expense of near-term profits -- but he never stopped admiring Toyota's focus on improving quality. When the company eventually expanded its engineering efforts into hybrid technology and other advances that represented the kind of forward thinking Dad loved in European cars, he was ready to become a customer.

Given the globalization of business, it may seem inevitable in hindsight that Toyota and other foreign carmakers have emerged as big forces in the economy, with factories scattered around the United States. But that development, unimaginable when Dad's generation returned home from World War II, still seemed far-fetched in the 1960s when he began selling Toyotas. It was not until 1978 that Volkswagen became the first foreign carmaker to open an American factory in the postwar era. Dad entered the business in 1955 as a partner in a struggling BMW-Mercedes dealership. A year later he bought control of the new-car side of the business, which he renamed Executive Motors.

Max Hoffman, a New York-based distributor of European cars, and other pioneers like Kjell Qvale, a Norwegian immigrant who brought Volkswagen and numerous British marques to San Francisco, had mapped the niches where entrepreneurs could survive in the import-car business: Old World prestige (Rolls-Royce, Bentley), fun and speed (MG, Porsche) and extreme practicality (Volkswagen). The common thread among import customers was a taste for novelty.

Mr. Qvale said that pioneering dealers had to demonstrate years of business success before American banks would support loans or leases attached to the imports.

''We even struggled getting people to insure them,'' said Mr. Qvale, who is now 86.

Executive Motors started out in a small building on Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco's auto row, as a Mercedes, Maserati and BMW dealership; Citroen was soon added. Dad's landlord was the gentlemanly Ellis Brooks, whose mammoth Chevrolet dealership up the street showcased all that seemed impregnable about the domestic car industry. After a few years Executive Motors moved to a small showroom on the west flank of Nob Hill to save on rent. But Dad was confident about the future.

''You could see what was going to happen to G.M., Ford and Chrysler,'' Dad said recently. ''They had already ceded quality and innovation to the imported cars.''

An oversimplification from a biased source? Sure, but Executive Motors provided a window on the social and economic forces that fueled the success of importers like Toyota -- and the failures of others.

In addition to the early relations with Mercedes and BMW and the ties to Citroen that lasted until that French company left the United States in 1974, Executive Motors sold Rover and Land Rover. It brought Saab to San Francisco before that Swedish carmaker was ready to support an official dealership by acquiring two-stroke models in Denver. It took a pioneering stab at Subaru, which Dad dropped after its models at the time (with two-stroke engines in the rear of the cars) proved unsellable.

In addition, Executive Motors enjoyed the dubious, unprofitable distinction of dealing in such obscure marques as Glas (''the poor man's Porsche''), Stanguellini (a racing car that never made a successful transition to consumer sports car) and the Janus (a microcar from Zundapp, a German motorcycle maker, with a mid-mounted engine and a body almost identical at the front and the rear).

And Dad -- who else? -- was the San Francisco dealer for Amphicar, which for all its innovative features performed dismally as both a car and as a boat.

All in all, the track record was long on color and short on shrewdness. Still, just as Dad anticipated when he chose Toyota over the simultaneous opportunity to become San Francisco's first Datsun dealer, the Corona began to catch on. Its four doors and design touches struck buyers as a step up from Volkswagen. And its reliability offered better value than shoddy domestic compacts like the Nash Rambler. The smaller Corolla also looked promising when it arrived in 1968. But when Toyota pressed Dad to move back to Van Ness and bet his future on high-volume sales at lower profit margins, Dad was not willing to take that risk. ''I thought it was premature,'' he said recently.

In truth, the time might never have seemed right to him for such a move. His heart belonged to imports at the leading -- or, all too often, outer -- edge of design, especially Citroen. Once a car and the customers seeking it became less than exotic, Dad seemed to lose his taste for selling it.

Toyota did not waste long arguing with him about its prospects. It set up a competing dealer. The relatively small sum it had to pay Dad to end the subsequent litigation was probably a sound business investment.

The outcome made it clear that Dad was not on the path of import titans like Mr. Qvale, who ended up owning more than 100 dealerships. And it underscored how rapidly the world of imports was changing. Toyota came to Dad because it had little choice. When Honda moved into San Francisco less than a decade later, its first dealership went to a prominent Pontiac dealer.

Meanwhile, Executive Motors puttered into the 1980s as an extreme example of the sometimes offbeat enterprises that gave the imported car business its first foothold in the United States. The wealth it produced was mostly stories, like run-ins with the California Highway Patrol over the Amphicar's lighting (''But it's exactly what the Coast Guard requires,'' was Dad's successful defense in court) or dealings with unconventional customers (Note to Jack Casady, bass player for the Jefferson Airplane at the time he bought a Citroen: Dad's under the impression that you still owe him money, but I think we're all square because you got us into the Wally Heider Studio one night when both the Airplane and the Grateful Dead were recording.)

Naturally, I emerged from such an upbringing with an endearingly strange car -- a 1971 Citroen Dyane, a larger, slightly more powerful version of the flimsy 2CV.

Today, though, I drive a Toyota Sienna van. And Peter Watkins, Dad's longtime accountant and salesman, recently replaced his Toyota-made Scion with a Prius. ''Once they came back, there was never a year when Toyota put out a bad car,'' Mr. Watkins said. ''The sickening part of what happened to Ford and G.M. is that they have good cars now, but nobody trusts them.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: AUTOMOBILE MFG (90%); AUTOMAKERS (90%); MOTOR VEHICLES (92%); AUTOMOTIVE MFG (90%); NEW CAR DEALERS (89%); AUTOMOTIVE SECTOR PERFORMANCE (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (75%); GLOBALIZATION (77%); IMMIGRATION (77%); ENTERPRISE GLOBALIZATION (71%); WORLD WAR II (50%); INTERNATIONAL TRADE (71%) Automobiles; International Trade and World Market; Foreign Cars
COMPANY: VOLKSWAGEN AG (85%); GENERAL MOTORS CORP (58%); OLD WORLD BAKERY (52%); TOYOTA MOTOR CORP (92%)
TICKER: VWP (PAR) (82%); VWB (BRU) (82%); VWA (AMS) (85%); VOW (FRA) (85%); VKW (LSE) (85%); GMR (LSE) (57%); GMP (PAR) (58%); GM (NYSE) (58%); TYT (LSE) (92%); TM (NYSE) (92%); 7203 (TSE) (92%); VW (SWX) (85%); VOA (PAR) (85%); 7659 (TSE) (85%); GMB (BRU) (58%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS336111 AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING (92%); SIC3711 MOTOR VEHICLES & PASSENGER CAR BODIES (85%); NAICS336112 LIGHT TRUCK & UTILITY VEHICLE MANUFACTURING (92%); SIC3714 MOTOR VEHICLE PARTS & ACCESSORIES (57%)
PERSON: Barnaby J Feder
GEOGRAPHIC: CALIFORNIA, USA (93%); COLORADO, USA (92%); NEW YORK, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (95%); NORWAY (79%)
LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: PIONEER -- Richard Feder helped establish Toyota in San Francisco. (pg. 6)

FRENCH CONNECTION -- Richard Feder, right, loves innovative cars. From left, his children Timothy, Leslie and the author with a Citroen wagon the family drove cross-country. (Photo by Michal E. Feder)(pg. 1)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1009 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 18, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Down The Middle
BYLINE: By ANNA BERNASEK
SECTION: Section 6; Column 1; Key; BY THE NUMBERS; Pg. 26
LENGTH: 800 words
For the past few years we've been flooded with national housing-market statistics -- chronicling a boom, predicting a bust. But as any homeowner knows, national numbers don't tell you much about what's happening in the local housing market. For that you have to go deeper. ''What's striking if you look closer is that different patterns emerge,'' says Jonathan J. Miller, chief executive of the New York-based real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel Inc. ''In New York, for instance, we're finding bidding wars in some markets and prices dropping in others.''

One way to understand where the housing slump has been hitting is to break the market down according to different price tiers. Judging by local data supplied by brokers (national data don't provide a detailed breakdown), it seems that so far it has struck hardest in the middle. In Miami-Dade County for instance, where condominiums represent about two-thirds of the market and single-family homes one-third, the average price of a condo in the $600,000 to $800,000 range (the middle of the middle tier) was down 1 percent in November 2006 compared with November 2005. At the high end, with most properties ranging from $2 million to $4 million, the average price rose 15 percent over the same period. And at the lower end, for condos between $400,000 and $600,000, the average price rose 2 percent.

The trend is similar in New York. In Manhattan, with its concentration of extremely high-priced properties, the weak middle has been in the range of $2 million to $4 million. Prices of apartments in that range fell an average of 7 percent in November 2006, compared with the previous November. During the same period, the average price of apartments costing more than $10 million rose by 5 percent, and of those under $1 million more than 8 percent. In Chicago, though, the market has been less variable. The average price of a single-family home in the middle -- the $600,000-to-$800,000 range -- fell 1 percent in November 2006, compared with the previous year, while the top (homes above $1 million) also dropped 1 percent. But the bottom end, those properties below $400,000, remained flat.

''Weakness in the market has been concentrated in certain segments,'' says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com. ''We're not witnessing the entire housing market in metro areas caving in.''

So why is the middle taking the blow? Perhaps because those factors that appear to be causing the slump -- overbuilding and concerns about affordability -- have weighed most heavily on that sector. Demand in the middle-price tiers has been supported by historically low interest rates and resulting high affordability, but not by significant gains in income. As rates began their rise and affordability began to decrease, the demand for housing in the middle price range began to fall.

Prices at the top, by contrast, have been driven by changes in wealth. In recent years wealth creation in the United States has been spectacular for many at the high end. Fueled by a boom in investment income, low taxes and demand from wealthy foreign buyers, the high end of the housing market has continued to experience strong price gains. ''That's the market where we're seeing bidding wars,'' Miller says. In Miami, for instance, developers are still betting on the high end to perform well. Frank McKinney, a developer of oceanfront properties from Palm Beach to Miami, is going ahead with several single-family home developments priced above $20 million. ''If you look at the ultrawealthy class, it's expanding exponentially,'' he says.

High-end markets in cities like Chicago, Denver and San Diego have been less robust, but that's because the wealthy in those markets tend to be doctors, lawyers and small entrepreneurs, and they haven't experienced the outsize gains of the very rich who work in fields like finance.

At the low end, the market has held up well nationwide. But there's an important reason for that, too: the availability of credit. The deciding factor for many first-time home purchasers is not home prices or interest rates; it's whether they can get a mortgage at all. And aggressive lending has been a booming business, allowing even people with a weak credit history or limited resources to borrow to buy a house or apartment.

That may be about to change, though. A group of regulators, including the Federal Reserve, is expected to announce tighter lending requirements for the sub-prime housing market in coming weeks. ''Anyone could get a loan up until the end of last year,'' says Zandi, the Moody's economist. ''But that's changing rapidly. And that will take the wind out of the sails of the lower end of the market.''

So watch out. Not too long from now we may be looking at another soft spot.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: REAL ESTATE (91%); RESIDENTIAL CO-OWNERSHIP (90%); HOUSING MARKET (90%); CONDOMINIUMS (90%); RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY (90%); PRICE INCREASES (89%); PRICE CHANGES (89%); TRENDS (78%); REAL ESTATE APPRAISALS (73%) Housing; Prices (Fares, Fees and Rates); Real Estate; Housing
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (84%) Anna Bernasek
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (90%); MIAMI, FL, USA (87%) NEW YORK, USA (93%); FLORIDA, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%) Manhattan (NYC); Chicago (Ill); Miami-Dade County (Fla)
LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Graph: ''PRICE PEAKS AND VALLEYS'' shows real estate prices from November 2005-November 2006. (Sources by Manhattan: Miller Samuel Inc.

miami-Dade county: Coldwell Banker

chicago: Coldwell Banker)

(Infographic By Catalogtree)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1010 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 17, 2007 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

Pining for Irish Soil? Now You Can Buy It By the 12-Ounce Bag
BYLINE: By COREY KILGANNON
SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 908 words
DATELINE: SPEONK, N.Y., March 14

Download 4.36 Mb.

Share with your friends: