Designer of Terra Bella Village to Create Lakefront Traditional Neighborhood Development

The term, traditional neighborhood development, evolved out of the concept of urban planning which included designing a “small town” within larger cities that has its own town center as well as commercial, retail, residential, and sometimes rental opportunities for its residents.  Walk to where you work and play became the buzz words for these urban and suburban communities.  Now, in Mandeville, Louisiana urban architect Steve Oubre, of Architects Southwest is set as the designer of terra bella village to create lakefront traditional neighborhood development plans for the site of the now abandoned industrial concrete plant.

Located just east of the Causeway Bridge, the plant was used to fabricate the concrete sections and

pillars for the Causeway Bridge, which was originally built in 1956.  The plant has not operated as an industrial concrete fabrication site since 1984.  Drs Michael and Marcus Pittman purchased the property at sheriff’s auction that same year.  In 2011, they commenced a massive cleanup effort to prep the land for development.

Three planning  meetings have been scheduled by Architects Southwest, the developers, and interested community groups and residents of Mandeville on April 7th, April 9th, and April 13th.  Steve Oubre spoke at the first meeting on April 7th and presented a 90-minute powerpoint explaining the vision of this new community.  After extensive market studies, high-rise towers were eliminated from the plan, and the vision now includes retails shops, housing units, a hotel, and a marina on the lakefront location all centered around the town center, just like the traditional neighborhood developments he designed both in Lafayette, LA and Covington, Louisiana.

Once community feedback has been received, it’s “back to the drawing board” to actually draw up plans and renderings to present to the Mandeville City Council and the St. Tammany Parish government for ultimate approval to begin construction. Homeowners in Mandeville can expect property values to appreciate with the construction of several hundred housing units if the engineered plans are approved.

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Multiple Reasons for Optimism in the Housing Market

Home builders nationwide have a reason to celebrate – it’s beginning to look a lot like a seller’s market once again in the current real estate market.  According to statistics, the monthly supply of homes ready to be purchased on the market has dropped below a 5 months supply.  The tightening of inventory will promote quick sales as well as an eventual increase in home prices as demand will soon outweigh supply.
Potential home buyers will be able to purchase these new homes for sale as well as existing homes for sale because of an easing of credit requirements and down payment requirements both for FHA and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loans.  Decisions are being made to introduce loan packages that will offer down payment assistance to home buyers as well.

Another huge factor in supply and demand is the dramatic increase in household formation which means that more people will be out looking to establish a residence whether it is in an apartment or buying a home.  Millennials that were unable to get a job “right out of college” have started to move out of roommate or parent / relative living arrangements because of the new availability of employment nationwide.  The percentage of Millennials looking to get their own place increased by 11% from November to March according to surveys.

Finally, even though housing starts have been stymied by the unusually brutal winter weather, housing sales as of February reported a 7.8% sales increase on a monthly basis for new home sales and a 1.2 sales increase on a monthly basis for previously owned homes.

Wall Street is reflecting this sentiment with the iShares Dow Jones U. S. Home Construction ETF (ITB) showing a new 7.5 year high which is a reflection of the averaging out of home pricing gains which were on a roller coaster ride as the economy recovered.  Investors are interested in housing shares once again as the real estate market is showing true signs of recovery.  Overall there are multiple reasons for optimism in the housing market

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New Home Buyers Can Make More Flexible and Informed Mortgage Decisions

As credit requirements and down payment requirements become more feasible for first-time home buyers as well as conventional loan buyers, new home buyers can make more flexible and informed mortgage decisions about the type of loan that they would like to use making their purchase.  First-time home buyers can enjoy the benefits of using a loan offered by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae or even an FHA loan.  These loans typically reduce the amount of money that must be brought to the table and make it more affordable to buy a home.

Other home buyers can also use an FHA loan if they meet the time period requirements between the purchase of their existing home and the purchase of a new home.  Also, for the veterans, the VA loan is an incredible opportunity to become a homeowner and start establishing home equity.  Regardless of the type of loan you use when you buy your home, you still have to make a decision about the terms of your loan.  Interest rate, purchased points, ARM vs. standard, and time periods come into play when you are making your decision.  Below are some of the reasons that using a 15-year loan vs. a 30-year fixed loan can be beneficial to your long-term financial situation.

15-Year Home Loans:

1. Pay Off Your Home More Quickly:  If you are in a position to make a higher monthly payment (you have a lot of residual income each month, you have no financial responsibilities for multiple children’s expenses, you have a really low loan amount because you had a lot of equity when you purchased your home, etc.), you will want to consider using a 15-year loan.  Even though the payments will be higher each month, you will save 10’s of thousands of dollars in interest.  If you are near retirement age, you may want to pay off your home quicker so that you don’t have to make loan payments with a social security benefit check.

2. Faster Equity Accrual:  Because the way that a 15-year mortgage is structured, you are making a huge dent in your principal and interest for every loan payment that you make.  Because your payments are higher, you are also paying off more principle, more quickly, thereby creating “instant” home equity by being in a shorter-term loan.

3. Pay Less Interest Overall: Have you ever looked at a Federal Truth in Lending page and wondered how in the world you ended up with $120,000 interest on a $200,000 loan?  With a 15-year mortgage, you pay significantly less interest over the life of the loan because you are cutting the time in half and increasing the amount you pay.

4. Lower Money Up Front: 15-year loans can require less money up front because they require a less stringent loan-to-value (LTV) ratio – 95% vs. 80%.  This means you can finance up to 95% of the value of your loan.  Also, 15-year mortgages typically have better interest rates because they deem the buyer more financially stable and responsible to make higher monthly payments.

5. Multiple Loan Types From Which to Choose: You can get many different types of 15-year loans – FHA loans, conventional loans backed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and VA loans.  You can pretty much select to turn any type of loan into a 15-year mortgage vs. a 30-year fixed mortgage.
If you are in the market for a new home for sale in the St. Tammany Parish area, you may want to consider building a new custom home in the cities of Mandeville, Madisonville, Covington, and Abita Springs on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain.  For more information about building a new home and using a 15-year loan, Contact Us at 985-626-7619 or E-mail Info@RonLeeHomes.com.

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Ways to Maximize Your Home’s Marketability

It’s time to sell your home because you are ready to move on, move up, or move out of state and relocate.  Since real estate has been on the steady track to recovery, chances are good that your home will sell relatively fast in this emerging market.  However, there are ways to maximize your home’s marketability to be able to compete against all of the other home owners who are having the exact same hopeful thoughts as  yourself.  Take note of the concepts below when you are preparing your home for sale.

Keep it Simple:
The way to sell a home successfully to a potential home buyer is to help them imagine their furniture, children, pets, friends, and life in your currently occupied space.  You may want to consider going ahead and packing away the items in your home that make you “uniquely you,” which could include African animal heads on the wall, an extensive doll or teddy bear collection, or a series of books from a particular author alphabetized on your bookshelves.  You never know what people may find strange or offensive, so you want to minimize their exposure to these types of personal belongings.  In the kitchen, living room, and even your master bedroom, get rid of the clutter and clean up the surfaces to allow buyers to “fill up” the spaces with their imaginary lives.
 
Keep it Clean:
This may be a common sense concept for many home sellers, but your definition of clean and a potential home buyer’s concept of clean may be totally different.  Don’t take any chances: go from the outside in and the floor up.  You don’t necessarily have to hire someone to pressure wash the exterior of your home to clean it up, although, here in Louisiana, homes can accumulate mildew in

less than 2 year’s time, so it might be time for a thorough cleaning.  If you want to put some elbow grease into it, you can actually just mix up buckets of lightly bleached water and using a long-handled scrubbing tool for those stubbornly stuck-on spots, you can “wash” the exterior of your home to make the paint look fresh and almost new.  More work can be done by washing your windows both on the outside and the inside, making your floorplan more light and airy while also making the glass sparkle.  Vacuum and MOP your floors on the inside of the home – this will make your home smell fresh as well.  You can either rent a steam cleaner with a scented deodorizer in it or use a powder deodorizer in your vacuum cleaner for your carpets.  Once you have scrubbed every inch of every surface in your home, cover up any remaining odors and put your best foot forward by buying plug-in’s for each room.  They are very powerful and will probably last for the hopefully 30 – 45 days it will take to sell your home.  You never get a second chance to make an excellent first impression.

Keep it Maintenanced
There is a good chance that it will rain in Louisiana while you are trying to sell your home – a chance that it may even rain very hard.  You will want to make sure that your home is kept in good repair throughout the entire selling process.  Before you even start the cleaning process, make sure you REPLACE damaged parts of your home – this includes dents in the walls, water leaks, cracked door or window frames, broken windows, and chipped formica or granite.  If you are not selling your home as a KNOWN, as-is renovation project, you don’t want a buyer to bypass purchasing your home because they see that work will have to be done as soon as they move in.  When selling a previously-owned home, there may be an understanding that it has already been lived in by other people, but you want to give them the illusion that they are buying a home that is in superior condition and will need little to no work at all.

Keep it Exposed
If you use the Internet for professional or personal use, you know that there are websites out there which maximize your home’s marketability through the use of social media.  You can be your own online agent for your home by taking excellent pictures (or having your really talented photographer friend take pictures) of your home and then posting to your personal social media pages.  If you do not yet have an online presence, ask one of your tech-savvy friends to help you by posting the listing for your.  In addition to social media, you can also sign up for real estate websites for free such as trulia.com, zillow.com, activerain.com, and redfin.com to post just your house for sale on the Internet.  Remember, the more pictures and descriptive information that you add, the more your listing will show up in the search results.
After all of your hard work, and your new home sells; you may be interested in building a new custom home on a lot in one of the excellent subdivisions in St. Tammany Parish.  You can Contact Ron Lee Homes at 985-626-7619 or E-mail Info@RonLeeHomes.com to get started on building your new home.

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7-Part Series of Education Workshops for Local St. Tammany Parish Businesses

As an increase to 2014’s workforce development series, the St. Tammany Economic Development Foundation will be sponsoring a 7-part series of education workshops for local St. Tammany Parish businesses, a year-over-year increase from the successful 5-part series which was hosted in 2014.  Founded in 1981, the St. Tammany Parish Economic Development Foundation (STEDF) has been

highly integral in the attraction and retention of new business to the parish.  Even before Hurricane Katrina, this foundation had been gradually increasing business opportunities to the Northshore.  After Hurricane Katrina, the construction growth and economic development of the region has lead to national recognition of the I-12 corridor being one of the fastest growing regional areas in the United States for new business opporunities.


In 2014, the St. Tammany Economic Development Foundation was responsible for the creation of 315 new jobs and the retention of 276 jobs with the completion of 13 projects which saw $54.3 million in investments.  The foundation is diligent in businss retention in St. Tammany Parish by utilizing “retention visits” to existing businesses to gauge their satisfaction and confidence in the local economy.  According to their annual report, the STEDF visited 112 different times to businesses which, all told, provided 7,891 jobs for residents of St. Tammany Parish.

This forward-thinking, proactive, and “preventative” approach to retaining business on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain has been the mission of the STEDF.  They are continuing that mindeset by offering the seminars and classes below:

April 28: Healthcare and Biosciences
May 19: Manufacturing
June 23: Digital Media
July 14: Construction and Coastal Restoration
Sept. 22: Energy, Oil and Gas
Oct. 13: Education and Training – Jump Start, Two-Year- and Four-Year-Colleges
Nov. 10: To be determined

“We hope this series will increase your knowledge of workforce opportunities, connect you to resources for workforce enhancement and training and provide insight about the future needs and trends of the workforce in our region,” Ashley Cangelosi Llewellyn, programs manager for the foundation, said in a news release.

To attend any of these workshops about workforce development opportunities, attendees must register in advance during the enrollment period for each program.  The classes themselves will be held in the STEDF conference room on Koop Drive in Mandeville from 9am – 10am with doors opening at 8:30am.  To register for the April event, email stedfinfo@stedf.org.

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Act of Sale for the Nearly 300 Acres of Land in St. Tammany Parish

The act of sale for the nearly 300 acres of land that currently encompasses the former Southeast Louisiana Psychiatric Hospital – now known as Northlake Behavioral Health – will be held, Thursday, March 26, 2015, at 2pm.  The sale is between the state of Louisiana and St. Tammany Parish.  The parish negotiated a sales price of $15.4 million to buy the property, and the parish

plans on utilizing the land for a few different purposes: possible expansion for Pelican Park, a new roadway from Hwy. 190 (Florida St.) to 1088 reducing congestion for both Hwy. 190 and Hwy. 59, and to bolster the government’s wetland mitigation bank.

St. Tammany Parish’s wetland mitigation bank is served by Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank which also serves the wetland preservation needs of Washington and Tangipahoa Parishes.  It will also review requests for credit from areas outside of these areas on a case-by-case basis.  The idea is that builders and developers may purchase a one-time credit from the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank to offset the impacts that their construction will have on the wetlands involved with the project.  They must offer another portion of the project that is close to or adjacent to the job that they own in exchange for this credit so that the wetlands in other areas are preserved.

“When impacts to jurisdictional wetlands are unavoidable, a one-time credit purchase from the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank prevents mitigation cost overruns and irrevocably transfers your perpetual mitigation liability to Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), one of the nation’s leading providers of environmental credits,” according to the website for the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank.
St. Tammany Parish’s Pelican Park may purchase as much as 100 acres of the land involved in Thursday’s act of sale to expand upon its already 321-acre park. In conjunction with the expansion is the hope that St. Tammany Parish will go ahead with the road building / expansion project between 190 and 1088 in order to construct a second entrance to Pelican Park on this cut-through road.

The “fate” of Northlake Behavioral Health is secured through this act of sale because one of the conditions of the purchase was that St. Tammany Parish leave the buildings and land belonging to the psychiatric hospital campus intact and operating as a behavioral health hospital.  Meridian Behavioral Healthcare, the current company that mangages operations at the hospital through a privatization program has expressed interested in purchasing the entire campus and land from St. Tammany Parish.

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Ron Lee Homes Now Offers Renovations and Remodeling

Floorplan design is the most essential part of the home building process, and Ron Lee Homes takes great care and pride in offering unique, beautiful semi-custom and fully custom floorplan designs for our clients.  Ron Lee has been designing and building state-of-the art new homes in St. Tammany Parish for over 20 years.  His hands-on approach to his projects has not only exponentially increased his knowledge of home building techniques that are both technology savvy and energy efficient but also stylish and elegantly beautiful.  He has found that even the smallest details such as matching tile choices for flooring and backsplashes as well as crown molding and built-in cabinetry trim selections can create a stunning display of craftsmanship and workmanship in the homes that he builds.
With this standard in mind, Ron Lee Homes has recently hired Cheryl Murphy, a design specialist who worked for many years with Floor to Ceiling off of Florida Street in Mandeville, Louisiana.  The purpose of adding her to the team at Ron Lee Homes is so that we can offer an even more specialized design service experience for our customers while they are building their home with us, or if they have an individual remodeling or renovation project that they need handled.  Many people may have heard of making “selections” during the home building process.  Some builders offer minimal selections such as carpeting colors, tile design choices, paint colors, siding colors, etc.  For the homes built with Ron Lee Homes, our custom home design process can be extensive, and the choice of selections can be “dizzying.”  That is where Cheryl Murphy will take over and make the process of navigating the selection choices a more manageable and pleasant experience for the custom home building part of her job.

With her background at Floor to Ceiling, Cheryl was a designer who helped home buyers, renovators, and remodelors find the perfect selections for their kitchen, bath, cabinetry, and flooring.  From wood styles and colors, to kitchen cabinetry, countertops, fixtures, and appliances, to flooring choices, Cheryl will use her instinctive design skills to help clients choose the perfect blend of color, textures, and styles to make their project the very best that it can be both architecturally as well as aesthetically.  In addition to the construction aspects of the renovation and remodeling projects, Cheryl also excels at helping her clients choose accessories such as bathroom furniture, rugs, floor coverings, blinds, drapes, and other window treatments, and even specific requests such as wall art, sculptures, and stand-alone pieces. Lighting packages are also a specialty of Cheryl Murphy’s design skills.  She can help clients completely change the look and feel of the room that they are remodeling by completely changing the lighting scheme throughout.

So, whether you are building and designing your home with us as a semi-custom or custom home project, or you have a smaller remodeling or renovation project, you will have the expert assistance of Cheryl Murphy with Ron Lee Homes to help you make the perfect selections for you and your project.  For More Information About Renovations and Remodeling by Ron Lee Homes, Call 985-626-7619 or E-mail Info@RonLeeHomes.com.