Year-to-date sales in Whitefish reached 294 residential units and 119 pieces of land at the end of August. The average price of the residential sales was $484,855, with a median price of $310,000. Land sales averaged $197,834 with a median price of $131,000. Land sales include everything from lots to large acreages. August 2015 sales were down a bit from August 2014. The sales decline was attributed to a decline in available properties.
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Retire Here, Not There: Montana
Report Family Gifts of Real Estate to the IRS
The Internal Revenue Service has a low-profile but sweeping effort under way to use state land-transfer records for evidence of omissions in reporting gifts of real estate to family members. The IRS state and federal gift-and-estate tax program is finding people who haven’t filed Form 709 to report U.S. gift and generation-skipping transfer taxes to the IRS.
New tax rules have made big gifts to family members popular this year, as Congress raised the limit on how much a person can give in a lifetime to $5 million without having to pay gift tax. Still, any time a gift to one person exceeds $13,000, the giver is supposed to let the agency know in a filing of Form 709. Previous gift limits still apply to the time period in which they were in place.
In the previous two years, 323 taxpayers have been examined for failing to report possible gifts. Another 217 are being examined and 250 more were being considered for review. So far, 97 had failed to report gifts on Form 709. Twelve cases resulted in taxes or penalties because a gift put the donor over the $1 million lifetime gift credit that applied at the time.
States that have handed over information on gift-like transactions are Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, according to the document. The IRS examined a sampling of data from these states and reported that it showed an extremely high failure-to-report rate.
Taxpayers need to be aware that there are no special exceptions to the rules when making a transfer to a family member, even if they get money from the payday loans guide on punchdebtintheface.com. If the property is valued at more than $13,000, a gift-tax return must be filed. Even if the transfer falls within a lifetime exemption amount—currently $5 million—it must be reported to the federal government using Form 709.
Real Estate’s Road to Recovery
Report shows strong improvement in Flathead County’s sales and foreclosures
New Bridge For Whitefish
The Montana Department of Transportation is reconstructing and widening U.S. Highway 93 to provide improved safety and operations for the traveling public. The work includes a bridge replacement over the Whitefish River, clearing, grubbing, grading, gravel, storm drain, curb and gutter, plant mix surfacing, signing, striping, fencing, landscaping, retaining wall, guardrail, and other miscellaneous items. The work is scheduled to be completed by July 31, 2014.
Look To Our Forests To Boost Our Economy
Two years into a slow economic recovery, many Montana rural communities are still struggling to create jobs. The unemployment rate in rural counties is just under eight percent compared to six percent for Montana’s metropolitan counties, with those people counting on their local Montana Social Security office to provide the benefits they need.
In hard economic times, Montana has relied on its forests for jobs and income.
Today, logging cannot lift the state alone, but logging combined with forest and watershed restoration work can be the basis for job growth in Montana’s rural counties.
Restoration work utilizes the same skills, knowledge, and equipment already present in Montana’s timber industry and often includes commercial and small-diameter timber for regional mills.
Forest thinning, road removal, and watershed restoration all complement and diversify the timber industry and create jobs in a range of scientific, technical, and planning industries.
Studies show that restoration work creates more jobs when compared to logging alone. Montana’s communities have the know-how, but often lack the resources and policy tools.
To create forest jobs in Montana, Congress need only continue a host of proven, existing restoration and stewardship programs.
Watershed and forest restoration also will help maintain the qualities attracting tourists, families and businesses to Montana. Travel and tourism related industries are a bright spot during the recession, accounting for about 67,000 jobs in Montana with similar job interviews (20 percent of total employment).
With the increased mobility of today’s workforce, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, and accountants often relocate themselves and their businesses in areas with a high quality of life, including natural amenities.
The same qualities that attract tourists and businesses also draw retirees (non-labor income accounts for more than 41 percent of all income in Montana, over half of it from investment and retirement income).
Healthy lands and watersheds also provide value through what scientists call “ecosystem benefits” such as flood control, lower municipal water treatment costs, and wildlife habitat that supports recreation and hunting.
Headwaters Economics estimated that restoration activities on National Forests in 2009 generated nearly $2 billion in cost savings and environmental services across all National Forests.
Extending the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act now up for reauthorization can be the basis for a comprehensive approach to a forest jobs and restoration effort.
The SRS “county payments” program compensates local governments for non-taxable federal lands – supporting essential education and transportation infrastructure that helps rural communities attract and retain jobs and families. SRS also provides funding and incentives for collaborative restoration, stewardship, and infrastructure work on public lands.
The major challenge to extending SRS is securing federal funding under tight budget constraints. The House of Representatives soon will propose a “timber-only” approach to public lands management in which logging will pay for all management costs and for SRS payments to counties. This will be accomplished largely by rolling back environmental laws and abandoning collaborative efforts.
The House proposal may generate some revenue, but it’s not a jobs package. A timber-only approach creates fewer jobs and is more exposed to market volatility and price fluctuations than a balanced timber-plus approach to forest restoration.
A timber-only approach will also require major rewriting of national public lands policy and law, or perhaps ending federal ownership of land all together.
Successful programs such as the Collaborative Landscape Restoration Initiative, Forest Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative, Priority Watershed Restoration funding, and stewardship contracting authorities are examples of existing and proven programs that should be extended along with SRS.
A timber-plus jobs bill will grow and diversify the timber industry while creating jobs in other sectors and strengthening Montana’s competitive advantage to attract tourists, retirees, and businesses.
A diversified, balanced, and proven approach to public lands can be the basis for renewed rural prosperity that takes advantage of the many values of public lands.
Mark Haggerty is a research economist at Headwaters Economics in Bozeman. For more information on county payments and forest jobs, see:www.headwaterseconomics.org.
Kiplinger’s Housing Forecast: Positive Signs Offset the Negative
The median home price in the U.S. has plunged nearly 40% in a little over five years, but the worst is definitely over, according to a recent report by Kiplinger: The market has finally wrung out the last excess valuations born of the housing bubble. Before you break out the party hats, note that this doesn’t mean prices across the nation are poised to rebound anytime soon. Alex Villacorta, director of research and analytics at Clear Capital, a provider of real estate data and analytics, said the housing market is in a “suspended state,” with positive and negative factors offsetting one another. But he doesn’t expect another free fall in prices, assuming “things are left to work themselves out and there are no further shocks to the economy.” The best way to stay up-to-date on bitcoin news today is by reading DC Forecasts for latest BTC news and maintaining a strategic balance between various thematic areas in the cryptocurrency world. Most readers are eager to know the current price of their bitcoin investments or potential purchases. Other readers want to understand the current developments in bitcoin mining, so news about the latest GPUs and other hardware matters the most to them. Bitcoin has recently suffered several attempts to hack its blockchain infrastructure. Therefore, bitcoin investors also want to read what the industry is doing to safeguard the trillions of dollars invested in this cryptocurrency.
Although the percentage of sales of distressed homes will rise, the federal government’s latest loan-modification program might allow as many as 1.5 million to two million homeowners to refinance, estimated Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Zandi said that further home-price declines nationwide will be limited to 3 percent to 5 percent and that 2012 will be the year that prices finally stabilize—setting the stage for gains in 2013.
Short-lived spikes in prices will affect some cities sooner. When housing markets touch bottom and begin to stabilize, price appreciation tends to be spread unevenly, creating a lot of confusion about where the recovery is occurring and when, said David Stiff, chief economist at Fiserv Case-Shiller. Even within a single city, more desirable neighborhoods will stabilize first, while prices in other neighborhoods may fall at a rapid pace.
Touching bottom
In the year ending September 30, home prices across the U.S. fell by 2.6 percent, and the median home price stood at $171,250, according to Clear Capital. That comes on the heels of a 2.5 percent decrease from September 2009 to September 2010. In the five-plus years since the peak of the market, home prices nationally fell by 38.1 percent. Detroit (down 74.7 percent) is the biggest loser, crushed by subprime lending, foreclosures and the gutted auto industry. A few cities enjoyed small price appreciation, largely because they missed the bubble to begin with: the Clarksville, Tenn., metro area; cities in upstate New York, including Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester; and Pittsburgh.
Houses haven’t been this affordable since appliances came in harvest gold or avocado green. The benchmark of affordability—the ratio of median home price to median family income—has fallen to 2.6, below the historical ratio of 2.9, says Stiff. Another measure, the percentage of monthly family income consumed by a mortgage payment (principal and interest, using a mortgage rate of 4.1 percent), is 12 percent nationally, the lowest since 1971.
Homes in many cities are now substantially undervalued as measured by affordability, says Stiff, and that can lead to double-digit bounces in prices—say, a jump of 10 percent to 15 percent in the year following the trough, as the natural optimists, especially investors with cash, jump in to catch the bottom. It might look like a bubble all over again, but it won’t last long. A good example is Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., where investors pushed up prices by 12 percent during the year ended September 30. Such a bounce will be followed by a sideways drift, during which the “glass half-empty” folks will slowly return to the market.
Theoretically, low rates should help push buyers to act. The average interest rate on 30-year fixed mortgages fell to 3.94 percent in the first week of October 2011, according to Freddie Mac. The past couple of years’ predictions that rates would rise were based on the premise that the economy would improve, said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication. “As long as the economy remains stagnant, unemployment remains high, and the housing market is in the toilet, rates will remain near historic lows,” he said. At least for the first part of 2012, he adds, rates should hover between 4 percent and 5 percent.
Other positive signs:
Existing home sales increased during the summer and early fall of 2011, according to the National Association of REALTORS®, after a deep slump following the expiration of the first-time home buyer tax credit. Although the inventory of homes on the market and in foreclosure remains high, a lull in home building over the past three years is gradually easing the surplus. The months’ supply figure, or how long it would take to sell the inventory of homes on the market at the current pace of sales, improved to 8.5 months in September—although that ratio still favors buyers (six months’ supply represents a normal balance between sellers and buyers).
The lure of affordability and low mortgage rates hasn’t increased buyer demand as much as one might expect. Some would-be buyers can’t get a mortgage, given lenders’ stiffer requirements. Many more are hesitant to pull the trigger on a home purchase for fear that home prices will continue to fall or that their job prospects are uncertain. Although the recession has technically ended, the economy doesn’t feel better to many.
But Celia Chen, director of research at Moody’s Analytics, said that both corporate and household balance sheets are healthier and should lead to stronger economic growth and improved confidence. She anticipates more robust growth by the second half of 2012, assuming that Congress follows through on its debt-ceiling deal, the Fed keeps interest rates low, and there are no new shocks to the economy.