Lease To Buy Homes

Lend Lease, Best Buy, Major League Teams Sign Up to Better Buildings Commitments

Best Buy, Lend Lease and a coalition of 25 major sports teams are among 14 initial partners that have signed up to the Obama administration’s Better Buildings Challenge.

The Better Buildings Challenge is part of the Better Buildings Initiative that President Obama launched in February . The initiative aims to use tax breaks, grants and loan guarantees, and other programs to catalyze private sector investment in commercial building upgrades and make America’s commercial buildings 20 percent more efficient over the next decade.

Under the challenge, private sector companies and local governments commit to taking actions to make their facilities more efficient, and are eligible for technical assistance.

The challenge partners announced yesterday have made commitments including a pledge by Lend Lease to retrofit 40,000 homes for military families and by Transwestern to upgrade energy efficiency in 78 million square feet of commercial real estate.

The Green Sports Alliance – a collaboration of 25 sports teams across 17 North American cities –  has committed to reduce the aggregated energy use of member facilities by at least 20 percent by 2020. And Best Buy is focused on reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, using its 2009 levels as a baseline.

Cities and communities signing up yesterday include Los Angeles, Atlanta and Seattle’s 2030 District – an alliance of more than 40 civic leaders from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors to construct the first large-scale, high-energy performance building district in the country.

The challenge partners will work with the Department of Energy in the coming months to further develop the details of the challenge in advance of another round of partnership announcements in the fall.

The Better Buildings Initiative is co-led by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and former president Bill Clinton.  Earlier this month, the council recommended that Obama prioritize the Better Buildings Initiative as a way to support job creation.

“Improving building energy efficiency on a large scale is a challenge we can’t afford not to take,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. “It will create jobs, reduce energy waste, save our businesses and institutions money, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

HomeRun Homes Rent to Own Homes Blog: Was The Increase In Pending ...

, "A forward-looking indicator based on contract signings" (per the National Association of Realtors®, or NAR), and per the NAR, "Pending home sales rose strongly in May with all regions experiencing gains from a year ago, pointing to higher housing activity in the second half of the year". To be exact, the numbers rose 8.2% from April, and 13.4% from May 2010. Was this a surprise, or was it expected...and what does it really mean? , a Vice President of Luxury Home Sales with Baird Warner says that the uptick in the pending numbers, "was no surprise to us as this is the prime seasonality to see an upturn--no upturn in May would be indeed very glum.". "Mays sales numbers are only representative of the "national market" (if there is such a thing) and we all now that real estate is local", per    Ward says that the "The First-Time Homebuyer Credit" expired on April 30 of last year, so, "most buyers scrambled to get their offers in prior to May 1.", and Cook says that until we, "move beyond the inflated sales numbers of last years first time home buyer tax credit, we cant really tell if were better or worse year-over-year.", and adds that, "Once we move beyond those numbers (after June) the comparisons become more relevant and we might have a clearer picture of the health of our market."    Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said, “If banks would simply return to normal sound underwriting standards and begin lending to more creditworthy borrowers, we’d get a much faster recovery in the housing sector.”, and cautioned that job creation is critical to a solid recovery, since, "The job market has sputtered recently, and because variations in local job creation impact housing demand, markets will recover unevenly around the country".