Because houses that stay still are just so boring, here's the D'Angelo House, which is "one of only a handful of homes in the world that rotate electrically," according to the listing. That's right: homes that move may be a dime a dozen, but homes that rotate are another creature entirely. Anyway, the 857-square-foot home outside Palm Springs, now asking $279K, was built in 1963 by businessman Floyd D'Angelo, who enlisted an engineer pal to, you know, make sure the structure did the Hokey Pokey. Even The Beatles were enchanted—they partied here in 1965. The current owner switched a solar-powered motor for a new one, and now it takes a painfully slow 15 seconds for the place to rotate 130 degrees—perhaps someone will juice it up further so it's a little more, say, fun? Curbed LA has a closer look.
· Desert's Rotating D'Angelo House Hits the Market For $279K [Curbed LA]
A slew of new housing data last week disappointed the analysts and the stock market, and all of a sudden you started to hear concern that maybe housing wasn’t exactly in a robust recovery.From home builder sentiment to housing starts, to home builder earnings right through to sales of newly built homes, there was not one hopeful headline in any of it (except perhaps 
] , which builds lower-priced homes, also came in with wildly disappointing earnings and an 8 percent drop in new orders. Sales of new homes also disappointed, which one analyst called, “puzzling.” “If new homes are not selling, then why are builder confidence and single-family housing permits moving up, and why is the S.& P. home builder index up 80 percent since last October?” asks Patrick Newport at IHS Global Insight. “Time will tell if builders and investors have gone out on a limb.” Several other analysts started to question the strength of the recovery as well, with some just hoping that perhaps a warm winter had pulled some demand forward from spring. Despite a miss on existing home sales in February, the headline pointed to, again, big gains from a year ago. Yes, we are ahead of where we were, but as we’ve noted so many times here on this page, rising foreclosures will put added pressure on this market, and we may not be out of the woods yet. “Despite an extraordinarily mild winter, home sales just plod along at a pace last seen during the mid-1990s,” notes Mark Zandi in his monthly report from Moody’s Analytics. “Thus, the underlying pace of home sales may not yet be strong enough to support a long-lasting upturn by home prices.” Tomorrow we get the monthly reading on the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index. This index hasn’t been improving nearly as much as home sales, but the ever-hopeful housing lobby keeps blaming that on the fact that prices always lag sales, which is historically true, but what in today’s market has followed history? Home prices are still falling not because of some lag, but because this housing market is running on sales of distressed properties at the very low end. The rest of the market is still stalled. Questions? Comments? document.write("
At a meeting of Mayors Wednesday, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, mentioned that a settlement would include principal reduction for about a million borrowers.For over a year now, state attorneys general have been negotiating some kind of settlement deal with the nations four largest lenders, as well as several smaller ones. The settlement pertains to faulty foreclosure processing, first uncovered in October of 2010 and now commonly referred to as “Robo-signing.” Rather than dozens of lawsuits, the states initially were looking to assess one great punishment on the lenders and thereby appease borrowers who felt they were wronged. The banks were looking for wider immunity from securitization issues, and that is largely what has held up the negotiations for so long. Now, suddenly, after umpteen “we’re close to a deal”s, apparently we’re now really close to a deal, largely because the State of the Union address is next Tuesday, and this is an election year. So at a meeting of Mayors Wednesday, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, mentioned that a settlement would include principal reduction for about a million borrowers. “With few other tools to help housing, the administration sees the deal as a way to take credit for helping underwater borrowers without exposing taxpayers to loss,” says Jaret Seiberg at Guggenheim partners, noting that the deal may not fully be in place by Tuesday, but a “framework” could be announced. “If this deal does score enough political points, then it will dampen calls for the administration to roll out more housing help such as a mass refinancing. As we remain dubious about the real impact of a deal, our view is that the administration will face pressure this spring to do more. That means more refinancings of GSE loans will still be on the table,” he adds. Of course we already know the basic framework of the deal, which would involve up to $25 billion from the banks, though only a small portion of that would be a cash settlement. The bulk of the money would be used to do principal write downs, short sales, and more aggressive loan modifications. Unfortunately, several key states, including Massachusetts, California, New York, Delaware and Nevada have expressed serious concerns about the deal currently on the table, and some bank sources are telling us that without California and New York, it’s hard to see how there would be a deal. If there is a deal, beyond the politics, it could have a larger effect on the state of the housing market and its recovery. Remember, this deal is about foreclosure processing, which has been nearly stalled in many states. “To that end, it will give banks some increased certainty about their ability to foreclose in those states that sign on to the agreement. As a result, we may see foreclosures ramp up fairly quickly in those states,” says Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher. Rosner calls the deal “somewhat nonsensical,” even without knowing the full details, as he believes it offers no assurances to any state regarding specific amounts of relief, not to mention leaving questions about the credibility of the monitoring, oversight, compliance and enforcement of the deal terms. “The expected political calculus is that the public will see the headline and will not bother to watch the operationalization or follow-through,” says Rosner. My concern is about this principal reduction headline. Yes, the banks processed foreclosures using improper methods, having one person sign off on thousands of documents that were never read. Yes, there was a huge breakdown in accountability and a huge lack of attention paid to struggling borrowers. The trouble is, after going over these cases, the bottom line is that the vast majority of the foreclosures were and are valid. People didn’t pay their mortgages. So now you’re offering cash back to these borrowers, perhaps even their homes back, while others in the very same position, who may have had their foreclosures processed correctly, get nothing. Questions? Comments? document.write("