Monday Morning Cup of Coffee takes a look at news coming across the HousingWire weekend desk, with more coverage to come on bigger issues.
Congratulations to the city of Cleveland and, in particular, Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert. Gilbert is also the owner of the 2016 National Basketball Association champions, the Cleveland Cavaliers.
It's now one year later, and the family of the Arizona Realtor who went missing is still left without answers on finding Sidney Cranston.
Cranston was last seen on June 16 when he reportedly went to show an unknown property to an unknown client near Kingman, Arizona, about 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas.
Now one year later, Chris Cranston, Sidney Cranston’s brother, recounted the case to The Huffington Post’s Senior Crime Reporter David Lohr, saying:
“It’s hard to put my feelings into words,” Chris told The Huffington Post. “Heartbreaking may be the best way to describe it — heartbreaking, frustrating and debilitating. It’s not something I would wish on anyone.”
About two months after Sidney Cranston went missing, the family, in an emotional and raw interview with Doug McMurdo of the Daily Miner, said that they are at the point of asking hunters, particularly those who will be in the Hualapai Mountains, to be on the lookout for the 40-year-old man's remains.
"We have to be realistic," said Chris Cranston back in August 2015. "They're obviously not going to find him alive, sitting down drinking a bottle of water."
Chris Cranston now urges anyone with information, even those possibly responsible, to come forward.
From The Huffington Post:
“The problem searching at this point is, it’s possible we’ve walked right over him and don’t even know it,” Chris said. “With the passage of time, even with dogs it becomes difficult to find someone if they’re buried.”
“Own your actions, clear your conscience and take responsibility,” he said. “Do the right thing and help our family before it’s too late.”
Anyone with information on this case is asked to call the Kingman Police Department at 928-753-1911 or Silent Witness at 928-753-1234. Silent Witness and the Cranston family have offered cash rewards for information.
For more updates, or to help the family, a GoFundMe page was started to help cover their search expenses, along with a Facebook page to share updates on those efforts.
San Francisco’s crazy housing market may have finally peaked in what is surely welcomed news for those living there.
According to a Bloomberg article by Alison Vekshin, “After four years of crammed open houses, heated competition and dizzying price gains that sent the median cost of a home to $1.2 million, San Francisco’s real estate market is starting to lose steam.”
While a slowdown to some might sound like a bad thing, in a city where the median home price has soared 66% in four years, it could finally give people who have persistently tried to get into the housing market a fighting chance.
From the article:
“It’s not the absolute feeding frenzy that we had for the last three springs before this one,” said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at Paragon Real Estate Group in San Francisco. “By any definition for the rest of the world, it’s still a very, very strong market. It’s just not as crazy hot as it has been.”
Gains in home prices are plateauing, according to a Paragon report released last week. In April and May, the median price of a house rose 2% from a year earlier to $1.38 million, compared with a 23% increase in 2015, the data show. The median condominium price was $1.13 million, unchanged, after a 21% jump the year before.
To help put into perspective just how crazy the San Francisco housing market was, nearly all the homes in San Francisco experienced a bidding war, and if that wasn’t enough, the typical San Francisco millennial could only afford to buy 135 square feet of housing.
$4 million. That’s a lot of money and now the average cost of a cyber breach.
Robert Hackett wrote in an article on Fortune that on average, the cost of a breach has risen to $4 million per incident—up 29% since 2013.
On top of this, Hackett wrote:
In addition to rising total cost, the average cost per stolen record—personally identifiable, payment, or health information about an individual contained in a company’s database, for example—is increasing, the study said. On average, the cost per lost record has grown to $158 from $154 last year.
The piece broke down how much stolen records cost by industry, with the financial industry sitting in the third spot at an average of $221.
The piece reiterated what HousingWire has stressed a lot recently. The threat of a cyber attack on a company, regardless of size, is unfortunately extremely likely, and the threat is only escalating, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In follow-up to HousingWire’s recent webinar on cyber security, Debbie Hoffman, chief legal officer at Digital Risk, said that it is vital for a company to establish the types and amount of sensitive/privatized information it possesses in order to determine the methods and “best practices” it should implement to maximize security and minimize the risk of a security breach.
Cyber security does not have a “one size fits all” solution.
Rents are not only increasing but they now top of the list of fastest rising prices, an article in CNBC by John Schoen said.
In the most recent news that restates just how intense the rental market is, the article writes:
The latest sign came from the government's monthly report on the consumer price index, which breaks out the change in cost of major spending categories. Last month, for the second month in a row, the annual rise in rental income approached 4%, nearly four times the overall inflation rate of just 1% for the last 12 months.
The surge in rental prices has eased a bit in recent months, but the forces driving rents higher remain in place, according to a recent analysis by real-estate-market researchers at Trulia.
Simply put: It's gotten harder in the last four years for many renters to buy a house, even though homeownership turns out to be a better deal in many markets around the country.
The Federal Insurance Deposit Corp. did not close any banks the week of June 17.
