Oct312016
Solar panels evolve with attractive architectural integration
The future home comes equipped with solar panels that charge home batteries and an electric car.
My grandfather loved new technologies. He bought a handheld calculator in the early 1970s for over $50. Over the 30 years that followed, calculators became much more complex, and much, much less expensive.
The first calculators had no advantages over the mechanical adding machines of the time, but as prices fell and capabilities improved, the technology became widely adopted and the old adding machine technology largely disappeared. More recently this same phenomenon occurred with cell-phone cameras displacing snapshot cameras.
It isn’t only individual products that see advances and displacements. In oil production, the cost of oil fracking was so high that it was rarely used, but once oil prices rose high enough, the initial cost threshold was crossed, unleashing a torrent of research and development that drove costs down further, spawning a revolution in oil production.
As the chart above shows, solar power generation displays a similar pattern to oil fracking. The technology for generating solar power was initially an expensive novelty, and despite its promise as an alternative power source, rather than invest in developing this alternative, we chose to remain dependent on oil for another 30 years, spending trillions to secure oil supplies (and thousands of lives) rather than billions to develop alternatives.
Finally, innovators like Elon Musk, responding to government subsidies and incentives, solved the complex problems of solar panel design and production and drove the costs down to the point that solar power became financially feasible. Quite predictably, once this threshold was crossed, solar panel production — and solar power production — skyrocketed.
Taking advantage of the expansion of inexpensive solar panels, the State of California, eager to avoid a repeat of the rolling blackouts of the early 00s, and generally on the forefront of green energy initiatives, passed legislation requiring new homes built by 2020 to produce as much energy as they consume, resulting in a zero net energy consumption.
New California Building Efficiency Standards Set the Stage for Zero Net Energy Homes by 2020
June 10, 2015 Meg Waltner
The California Energy Commission voted unanimously today to approve updated building energy efficiency standards that the CEC says will cut regulated energy use in new homes by 28 percent and save consumers $31 a month compared to houses built under the current energy code. The new standards also set the stage for zero net energy new homes in the state within five years.
Known as “Title 24,” the standards will go into effect on January 1, 2017, and set minimum energy-saving requirements for new buildings and renovations that will reduce energy used for lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, and water heating. …
California has set goals that all new residential buildings will be zero net energy (ZNE) by 2020 and new commercial buildings will be ZNE by 2030.
One of the main problems with early solar panels is that they were large, bulky, and unattractive. Solar panels generally need to face south (in the Northern Hemisphere) to point at the sun. If the south side of the house faced the street, many homeowners resisted installing these ugly panels on the front of their homes (and some HOAs wouldn’t allow it).
In response to the ugliness of early solar panel arrays, many HOAs in California sought to regulate or ban them entirely. The California State Legislature passed The California Solar Rights Act, found at Civil Code Sections 714 and 714.1, which provides certain protections for homeowners seeking to install solar panels on their properties. The Solar Rights Act prohibits HOAs from banning solar energy systems for aesthetic reasons — whether through an explicit ban or through onerous architectural restrictions that greatly reduce the performance of solar energy systems, or increase their costs.
As a result, even really high-end neighborhoods have atrocious solar panel arrays littering the landscape.
Now that solar panel technology overcame the cost barrier, for solar panels to be more widely adopted, the industry needed to address the aesthetic issues. Again, Elon Musk is the problem solver at the forefront of this new revolution.
Elon Musk Reveals Solar Roof Made of Glass Tiles in L.A.
Dana Hull, October 28, 2016
- Showcases ambitions to make Tesla a clean-energy giant
- Solar roof that looks better than normal roof, Musk Says
Elon Musk showcased his ambitions to make Tesla Motors Inc. a clean-energy behemoth Friday, unveiling a new “solar-roof” product at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California.
As the sun set, Musk told hundreds of guests … that Tesla and SolarCity Corp. … will make solar roofs that look better than normal roofs. He then showcased several houses with solar tiles gracefully embedded. Because the tiles are fully integrated into the roofs, many guests in attendance could not tell that they were solar.
“How do we have a solar roof that is better than a normal roof, looks better, last longer,” said Musk. “You want to pull your neighbors over and say ‘Check out this sweet roof.”’
If you have time, watch this 15-minute presentation that covers all the details.
The solar roof will be offered in four styles: Textured Glass Tile, Slate Glass Tile, Tuscan Glass Tile, and Smooth Glass Tile — due to a variety of architectural choices. SolarCity’s website says production will begin in mid-2017 and that the tempered glass is as “tough as steel.”
“The solar roof consists of uniquely designed glass tiles that complement the aesthetics of any home, embedded with the highest efficiency photovoltaic cells,” said Tesla in a statement. “Customers can choose which sections of their roof will contain the hidden solar technology while still having the entire roof look the same.” …
The larger idea is that homeowners will generate electricity for their home with solar power, then store that electricity in a home battery known as a Powerwall. You can “fill up” your battery during the day, then discharge it at night when the sun sets.
Elon Musk’s vision is beautiful in its simplicity. Solar panels on the house power the house, charge the battery to power the house at night, and they charge the car that people use for daily transportation — all without need for the power grid or emitting any polluting gasses.
His cars are superior to existing vehicles that consume fossil fuels, so going green doesn’t mean driving around in an uncomfortable Prius. His new house battery holds more power and costs less than the first generation, and these costs will continue falling as this technology develops. And now, he’s found a way to overcome many of the remaining objections to rooftop solar.
As some point, people will begin to ask “why not” when thinking about the off-grid, zero-emission lifestyle. If people don’t have to sacrifice quality of life as a green badge of honor, far more people will embrace green technologies, and the planet will be a better place.
Most real estate developers donate heavily to the election campaigns of local officials. This is not illegal because anyone can donate to an election campaign for any reason. However, when they start funneling money through other people in order to circumvent donation caps, then it becomes something else entirely.
A $72-million apartment project. Top politicians. Unlikely donors.
No one is registered to vote at the run-down house on 223rd Street. The living room window has been broken for months. A grit-covered pickup sits in the dirt front yard with a flat tire.
Yet dozens of donations to local politicians — totaling more than $40,000 — have come from four of the people who have lived there over the last eight years.
Victor Blanco, a repairman originally from El Salvador, gave the most: 22 donations totaling $20,300 since 2008, according to contribution reports. More than half that money went to U.S. Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Los Angeles) while she was pursuing local, state and federal office, according to contribution reports.
Asked about those donations, Blanco could not explain why he gave Hahn so much money.
“I do not remember,” he said, standing in the driveway of the home, located in West Carson.
Blanco is among more than 100 campaign contributors with a direct or indirect connection to Samuel Leung, a Torrance-based developer who was lobbying public officials to approve a 352-unit apartment complex, a Times investigation has found.
Those donors gave more than $600,000 to support Hahn, Mayor Eric Garcetti and other L.A.-area politicians between 2008 and 2015, as Leung was seeking city approval for the $72-million development in L.A.’s Harbor Gateway neighborhood, north of the Port of Los Angeles, The Times found.
While the arguments in this full article are convincing, I would still rather see some of the individuals go to jail. If people don’t fear this outcome, they behave badly.
Jail bait
America’s Department of Justice could have bowed to popular pressure by prosecuting senior bankers for selling mortgage-backed securities and the like. But this would have been foolish: the products were perfectly legal (if unwise) and the people doing the buying were just as well-informed as the people doing the selling. The DoJ could bring far more individual prosecutions. But most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing—long chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants.
Prosecuting firms may not have the smack of justice that populists crave: you can’t imprison a company, let alone force it to do a humiliating “perp walk”—being paraded in handcuffs in public. And the people who end up paying the fines are shareholders rather than the executives or employees who actually engaged in the misconduct. But it saves the taxpayer a great deal of money: the DoJ routinely asks firms to investigate themselves on pain of more serious punishment if they fail to do so. It also advances the cause of reform, if not retribution: companies are routinely required to fix their cultures and adjust their incentive systems.
The boomerang buyer meme is back.
2.5 million consumers hit by financial crisis ready to reenter housing
The time frame for borrowers who were significantly hit after the financial crisis to improve their credit score is about to happen, opening the door for a lot of consumers to reenter the housing market.
According to Experian’s latest analysis, foreclosures, short sales and bankruptcies remain on a credit report for seven years, which means these items are due to fall off the credit files of 2.5 million consumers between June 2016 and June 2017.
And even better for the housing market, the analysis shows that 68% of these consumers are scoring in the near-prime or higher credit segments, meaning the opportunity for this group to qualify for mortgage loans is growing.
The new Experian study looks at these potential borrowers and analyzes the consumers who foreclosed or short-sold between 2007 and 2010 and have since opened a new mortgage.
The study refers to these consumers as “boomerang borrowers” and shows that they have responsible credit behaviors and improving credit scores.
“With millions of borrowers potentially coming back into the housing market, the trends that we’re seeing are promising for both the mortgage seeker and the lender,” said Michele Raneri, vice president of analytics and new business development at Experian.
“In the coming years, boomerang borrowers will be a critical segment of the real-estate market,” said Raneri. “While many of these borrowers have gone through a very difficult time, it is encouraging to see them taking control of their finances with better credit scores and all-around better credit management.”
Land sales contracts are duping homebuyers
When the Millennium Boom came crashing to a halt, Wall Street made enormous profits by betting against the housing market in anticipation of its inevitable downfall. Now, as low-income homebuyers struggle to qualify for conventional mortgages in the post-Boom economy, investment firms like Goldman Sachs are wagering on homebuyers using alternative seller financing.
Land sales contracts, also called contracts for sale and known in other states as contracts for deeds, are gaining steam in the housing market. In its latest incarnation, investors are purchasing homes in bulk and selling them to low-income homebuyers. The sales are structured as a land sales contract in which the low-income buyer is given equitable ownership and possession of the property. However, title does not actually pass to the buyer by grant deed until the buyer pays the seller in full under the terms of the agreement.
The transactions have proven lucrative for investors. By offering creative financing, low-income buyers avoid the need for conventional financing, for which they may not otherwise qualify. But this isn’t simple charity. Low-income homebuyers are ultimately on the losing end since these exploitative agreements are marred by unscrupulous terms that leave homebuyers with little recourse in the event of default.
This is part of a longer article that details the problem.
TOO MUCH MONEY CHASING TOO FEW DEALS? OR NOT?
It’s been repeated so frequently through the past few years that the concept is almost universally accepted as truth in the residential development industry. Many private equity funds, hedge funds, etc have raised money to invest into housing development. However, in recent years, it’s not the amount of money raised that’s been problematic, but the type of money available unfit for projects needing financing in today’s relatively stable housing market.
Before the housing bubble and subsequent bust, private home builders typically utilized bank debt and pension fund capital to build subdivisions and master-planned communities. The debt component was readily available, attractively structured and pension fund capital had relatively long investment horizons with reasonable return expectations when compared to opportunity fund money which was typically used for entitlement projects and other, more risky ventures. It wasn’t unusual to have decent sized private builders in California build and sell several hundred homes a year or more. With a couple of notable exceptions, they were not going to compete with public home builders when it came to the cost of funds. However, they were still substantial players in the market and were able to build at decent levels of production while often delivering higher quality homes than their public competitors. This all changed when the housing market crashed. Banks reduced exposure to the home building and development space by a substantial amount, as did pension funds. Some left the space entirely.
At the same time, pension funds and banks were pulling back, opportunity funds ramped up their fund raising in order to capitalize on the carnage that the Great Recession wrought on land values. They offered their prospective investors high-octane returns that would be realized when they bought trophy properties at bargain-basement prices in a distressed environment, to develop or sell as the market began to recover. This capital was and is well suited for opportunistic investments brought on by a market crash – thus the label opportunity fund. But isn’t a great fit for investment in home builder and land development deals in a stable market. In reality, the window to buy distressed assets wasn’t quite as long as many had anticipated and the doldrums of 2010-2011 quickly gave way to a run-up in transactions and land values in late 2012 into early 2014. All of which brings us to where we are today: a stable market with tight inventories where there is a ton of capital that has been raised – but very little of that capital has a return profile that fits where it is needed most: lot manufacturing and production home building.
Our latest contrarian indicator
Is Orange County real estate’s hiring spree a warning sign?
Real estate-related employment is at a nine-year high in Orange County, not too far from a record high.
Is that good news – or a warning sign the market’s gotten too hot again?
The volatility of local real estate doesn’t just show up in property values. Job opportunities see-saw with industry fortunes. For example, seven years of real estate employment growth to 2006 was entirely wiped out in four, short years after the bubble burst.
To judge how the recent hiring spree measures up, I filled my trusty spreadsheet with state jobs data dating to 1990 for Orange County, carving out a local real estate employment category including work in construction, building supply, building services, property sales and rentals, lending and architecture and engineering.
What I found is local real estate’s significant slice of the recent economic recovery. Property-related jobs are now an above-average chunk of overall local employment thanks to an eye-catching hiring push. I’m sure that makes some observers gulp.
But to somewhat calm nerves, note this recent boost for real estate workers isn’t as large as the employment run-up we saw during the formation of last decade’s real estate insanity.
Here are five noteworthy trends making Orange County real estate workers happy … and the rest of us hold our breath that this isn’t a worrisome, overdone upswing:
1. Real estate jobs aren’t all the way back.
Orange County bosses in property-related fields are on pace to employ 250,000 workers this year. (As a comparison, leisure and hospitality industries employ 216,000 locally.) This is real estate employment’s largest workforce since 2007 – arguably the peak of the previous real estate insanity – but it’s still 15,000 or so below the all-time high set in 2006.
2. Property-related work is a big local slice.
Real estate this year represents 15.7 percent of all local jobs in 2016 – up from a post-recession low of 14 percent and the highest share since 2007. Please note that since 1990, real estate has averaged employing 14.7 percent of all Orange County workers with its biggest share – 17.3 percent – coming in 2006.
3. It’s a 2016 hiring spree.
Local real estate bosses are on pace to add 14,800 workers this year, the biggest jump in real estate ranks since 2004. It’s one-third of all local hires, and the 6.3 percent growth rate is almost triple the 2.2 percent year-over-year hiring pace of all other Orange County employers.
4. That hiring is no anomaly.
Local real estate lost 73,000 jobs from 2006 to 2010, but the industry rebounded to add 58,000 local jobs in the last six years. That’s a growth rate averaging 4.5 percent a year, outpacing the rest of the Orange County job market, which has grown at a 2.1 percent annual rate since 2010.
5. Noteworthy rebound.
Real estate’s 2010-16 job rebound equaled 27 percent of the 216,500 jobs added by all Orange County employers, or nearly twice real estate’s share of local employment. But note this real estate expansion’s scope pales to the previous boom’s pace: Property-industry bosses added 54,300 in four years through 2006, hiring equal to 46 percent of all local jobs added in the four-year period. We know how that ended.
Bay Area housing market cooling as buyers dig in heels
Is the Bay Area housing market losing steam? Could be.
With more buyers saying “no” to mile-high prices, September sales of single-family homes were up a modest 2.3 percent — a far cry from the red-hot market of the last several years. And even more revealing, June-through-September sales for the nine-county region were down 5.1 percent from the same period of 2015.
That’s the upshot of a new report from CoreLogic, the real estate information service. The numbers mirrored the observations of brokers and agents, who cited push-back from buyers after years of bidding wars and spiraling prices.
“Buyers are kind of digging their feet in and saying, ‘We’ve hit a threshold of pain in terms of affordability and you’ve got to say no,’ ” said Jennifer Branchini, past president of the East Bay Association of Realtors. “It’s going to be a big issue going forward. It’s not going away.”
In Santa Clara County — the heart of Silicon Valley — the median price was frozen in place from the year before, at $910,000, and the number of sales declined a hair, by 0.3 percent. September sales dipped 4.7 percent in San Mateo County, while rising just 0.2 percent in Contra Costa County and 2.9 percent in Alameda County.
The market was more robust in some of the more affordable inland areas, including Solano County, where sales were up 19.1 percent and the typical home cost $349,000, up 5.4 percent.
Looking at the nine Bay Area counties as a whole, the median price rose 2.3 percent to $675,000. The typical house cost $498,000 in Contra Costa County, up 3.8 percent from a year earlier; $718,500 in Alameda County, up 7.5 percent; and $1.14 million in San Mateo County, up 7.1 percent.
Those still are hefty prices, to be sure. But the rate of appreciation is well off the double-digit clip of the old runaway market.
“The market’s sort of correcting itself, given how high prices had gone,” said Andrew LePage, research analyst for CoreLogic. “Given that the job market is healthy and mortgage rates are low, it suggests that the affordability problem has worsened and we still have inventory constraints in a lot of markets.”
I am sure this has nothing to do with the complete collapse in technology IPOs.
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