Apartment vacancy rate falls to lowest level since 2001

By Ilaina Jonas

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. apartment vacancy rate fell to its lowest level in more than a decade, but persistent stagnant income growth for U.S. workers has tempered the ability of landlords to raise rents, according to an industry report released on Wednesday.

The national apartment vacancy rate fell 0.2 percentage points to 4.3 percent in the first quarter, the lowest since the fourth quarter 2001, according to a preliminary report by real estate research firm Reis Inc. Rents, on the other hand, grew by 0.5 percent, the smallest increase since the fourth quarter of 2011.

Over the past five years, the apartment sector has been the beneficiary of the U.S. housing bust, the economic recovery, high mortgage requirements, and a constrained supply of new apartments. Those factors have pushed down the vacancy rate and allowed apartment owners, such as Equity Residential , Essex Property Trust Inc and AvalonBay Communities Inc to push up rents.

But rising rents may be bumping up against a ceiling of stagnant wages.

Wages have barely been keeping up with inflation, according to the latest data available from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Average hourly earnings rose 2.1 percent in February from a year ago, while the consumer price index was up 2 percent. February followed similar gains in January and December.

"At some point, you can't keep pushing these rent increases on since the majority of the tenants, if they're not getting income gains to keep up with that, it's just not sustainable," Reis economist Ryan Severino said.

While the housing sector rebound has not curbed the overall demand for apartments, it may be starting to nibble at the very high end. Unlike most would-be home buyers, these tenants tend not to be hemmed in by tough mortgage requirements that leave many others unable to buy homes.

They can and are choosing to buy, Severino said. Since the second half of 2010 through the first half of 2012, in buildings where the average rent was $3,000 or more, landlords have had to lower the rent to attract new tenants about 25 percent to 27 percent of the time. That jumped to 44 percent in the second half of 2012, as those high income earners used their dollars to own rather than for rental payments Severino said.

The 4.3 percent average vacancy rate in the first quarter was down from 5.0 percent the prior quarter and 8 percent from the cyclical peak in late 2009.

Forty-eight of the 79 markets that Reis tracks posted vacancy rates lower than the first-quarter average, with New York's 1.9 percent vacancy rate being the lowest. Memphis, Tennessee had the highest vacancy rate at 8.5 percent.

The average asking rent rose 0.5 percent in the first quarter to $1,102 per month. Factoring months of free rent and other perks landlords offer to attract tenants, the average effective rent also rose 0.5 percent to $1,054. Seattle saw the highest effective rent increase, up 1.5 percent to $1,078 per month. New York remained the most expensive place to rent in the United States with an average effective rent of $2,989, up 0.2 percent.

Federal cutbacks helped Washington D.C. register the only effective rent decrease, down 0.1 percentage point to $1,489 per month.

For the remainder of the year, Reis does not expect to see a significant uptick in the vacancy rate barring any economic downturn. It also expects rent growth to be consistent, with somewhat stronger growth in the traditional moving season in the second and third quarters.

(Reporting by Ilaina Jonas; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/apartment-vacancy-rate-falls-lowest-level-since-2001-040506838--sector.html

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Hollyweird Scoop

Hollyweird Scoop

Beyonce Calls Herself a Feminist?[The Frisky] Hilary Duff to Play Crazy Drunk Girl on TV?[HollyWire] Nicki Minaj & Lil Wayne High School Video on the Web?[Right Celebrity] Jenna Dewan-Tatum Defends Pregnant Women?[The Celebrity Cafe] Kesha Had Kinky Sex with Johnny Depp??[The Blemish] Christina Aguilera Spotted Sans Makeup?[The Huffington Post] Kate Hudson Talks Shocking Pregnancy?[Anything Hollywood] ...

Hollyweird Scoop Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/04/hollyweird-scoop-2/

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Palestinians protest after Israeli jail cancer death

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli prison guards fired tear gas to quell disturbances by Palestinian inmates on Tuesday after a prisoner serving a life sentence over an attempt to bomb an Israeli cafe died of cancer.

Maysara Abu Hamdeya's death threatened to raise tensions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinians, who view jailed brethren as heroes in a fight for statehood, have held several protests in recent weeks in support of prisoners.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel had ignored pleas to free Abu Hamdeya, 64, sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for recruiting a bomber who planted explosives in a Jerusalem cafe. The bomb did not detonate.

A Prisons Service spokeswoman said Abu Hamdeya died in a hospital in southern Israel on Tuesday before an early release process, begun last week after doctors diagnosed his cancer as terminal, could be completed.

"The Israeli government in its intransigence and arrogance refused to respond to Palestinian efforts to save the life of the prisoner," Abbas told members of his Fatah party in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Abu Hamdeya is the second Palestinian to die in Israeli custody this year. Arafat Jaradat, 30, died after an interrogation session in February. Palestinian officials said he had been tortured, an allegation Israel denied.

News of Abu Hamdeya's death touched off protests by Palestinian inmates in several Israeli prisons. At Ramon jail, in southern Israel, inmates threw objects at guards, who responded with tear gas, the Prisons Service spokeswoman said.

Three prisoners and six guards were treated at the jail for tear gas inhalation, she said.

In Abu Hamdeya's West Bank home city of Hebron, masked stone-throwers confronted Israeli soldiers. No serious injuries were reported.

A protest outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City turned violent with Palestinian demonstrators throwing stones and Israeli forces firing stun grenades to disperse the crowds. Police said three people were arrested and no one was injured.

The Israeli military said that two rockets fired from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip toward Israel landed inside the Palestinian territory. No group claimed responsibility for the launches which appeared to be a response to Abu Hamdeya's death.

Such launches have been rare since a November truce between Israel and Hamas ended an eight-day cross border war. Last month an al Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for firing rockets into Israel during President Obama's visit to the region.

Some 4,800 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails. Israel says most of them planned or carried out anti-Israeli attacks. It also holds 178 "administrative" detainees who have been jailed without trial as suspected militants for renewable three- to six-month terms based on classified evidence.

Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital - territories Israel captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

(Reporting by Noah Browning in Ramallah, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem, Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Jason Webb)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/palestinians-protest-israeli-jail-cancer-death-163244960.html

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White supremacists in DA death?

KAUFMAN, Texas (AP) ? Two days after a Texas district attorney and his wife were found shot to death in their home, authorities have said little about their investigation or any potential suspects.

But suspicion in the slayings shifted Monday to a white supremacist prison gang with a long history of violence and retribution that was also the focus of a December law enforcement bulletin warning that its members might try to attack police or prosecutors.

The deaths of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife were especially jarring because they happened just a couple of months after one of the county's assistant district attorneys, Mark Hasse, was killed near his courthouse office and less than two weeks after Colorado's prison chief was shot to death at his front door, apparently by a white supremacist ex-convict.

The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas has been in the state's prison system since the 1980s, when it began as a white supremacist gang that protected its members and ran illegal activities, including drug distribution, according to Terry Pelz, a former Texas prison warden and expert on the gang.

The group is now believed to have more than 4,000 members in and out of prison who deal in a variety of criminal enterprises, including prostitution, robbery and murder.

It has a paramilitary structure with five factions around the state, Pelz said. Each faction has a general, who is part of a steering committee known as the "Wheel," which controls all criminal aspects of the gang, according to court papers.

Four top leaders of the group were indicted in October for crimes ranging from murder to drug trafficking. Two months later, authorities issued the bulletin warning that the gang might try to retaliate against law enforcement for the investigation that also led to the arrest of 30 other members.

At the time, prosecutors called the indictments "a devastating blow to the leadership" of the gang. Pelz said the indictments might have fragmented the gang's leadership.

Hasse's Jan. 31 death came on the same day as the first guilty pleas were entered in the indictment. No arrests have been made in his killing.

McLelland was part of a multi-agency task force that investigated the Aryan Brotherhood with help from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and police in Houston and Fort Worth.

Detectives have declined to say if the Aryan Brotherhood is the focus of their investigation, but the state Department of Public Safety bulletin warned that the group is "involved in issuing orders to inflict 'mass casualties or death' to law enforcement officials involved in the recent case."

Killing law enforcement representatives would be uncharacteristic of the group, Pelz said.

"They don't go around killing officials," he said. "They don't draw heat upon themselves."

But Pelz, who worked in the Texas prison system for 21 years, said the gang has a history of threatening officials and of killing its own members or rivals.

The 18-count indictment accused gang members of being involved in three murders of rival gang members, multiple attempted murders, kidnappings, assaults and conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and cocaine.

Some of the attempted murders in the indictment involved gang members who were targeted for not following orders or rules or who were believed to be cooperating with law enforcement. The indictment also alleges that gang members discussed killing a police officer in 2008 and allegedly ordered a subordinate gang member to kill a prospect "and to return the victim's severed finger as a trophy."

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies throughout Texas were on high alert, and steps were being taken to better protect DAs and their staffs.

In Kaufman County, deputies escorted some employees into the courthouse Monday after the slayings stirred fears that other public employees could be targeted. Law enforcement officers were seen patrolling outside the courthouse, one holding a semi-automatic weapon, while others walked around inside.

McLelland was the 13th prosecutor killed in the U.S. since the National Association of District Attorneys began keeping count in the 1960s.

Deputies were called to the McLelland home by relatives and friends who had been unable to reach the pair, according to a search warrant affidavit.

When they arrived, investigators found the couple had been shot multiple times. Cartridge casings were scattered near their bodies, the affidavit said.

Authorities have not discussed a motive.

The slayings also called to mind the death of Colorado's corrections director, Tom Clements, who was killed March 19 when he answered the doorbell at his home outside Colorado Springs. Two days later, Evan Spencer Ebel, a white supremacist and former Colorado inmate suspected of shooting Clements, died in a shootout with Texas deputies about 100 miles from Kaufman.

In an Associated Press interview shortly after the Colorado killing, McLelland himself raised the possibility that Hasse was gunned down by a white supremacist gang.

After that attack, McLelland said, he carried a gun everywhere around town, even when walking his dog. He figured assassins were more likely to try to attack him outside. He said he had warned all his employees to be constantly on the alert.

___

Lozano reported from Houston. Associated Press Writer Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth also contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suspicion-da-death-shifts-white-supremacists-223215989.html

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Reminder+ for iPhone review

While the default Reminders app can get the job done, some people's tasks are more granular than what the iPhone supports natively. Reminder+ is one of those third party apps that steps in to solve a lot of the issues with the default Reminders app.

In this case, if you've got a lot of location based reminders, Reminder+ allows you to easily set them up with as many locations as you'd like. It also has support for timers and alarms built right in.

The main feature of Reminder+ is the ability to create location based reminders at virtually any play you'd like. The problem with the native iOS reminders app is that you can't necessarily save locations for later so while you can set any location, it doesn't save that location for later use. Reminder+ will do just that which means if you frequent places like Starbucks, the gym, or other places that you may need to remember something at, you'll be able to select them in just one tap after you've initially added them in.

To create a reminder, you'll just tap the plus sign from the places section. Here you'll search for a location or choose an existing one. After that just enter the details and choose the time at which Reminder+ should notify you. You can also select to set reminders as recurring. You can do this with alarms as well.

Reminder+ allows you to choose if you'd like to be notified when you arrive or leave a location. From there you can also choose time intervals such as 5 minutes after or before you arrive. For example, if you want to be reminded to send an email to someone when you get to work, you may want some time to get settled in first. In this case, just set a reminder for a few minutes after you get to work. This is a functionality that the default reminders app doesn't have when it comes to location based reminders.

The good

• Saves places for later use making continuous entries fast
• Lots of tones and alerts to choose from so they aren't the same sounds as your other apps
• Location settings work well and always seem to be within 50 feet of where you're going

The bad

• No way to set reminders that aren't location based

The bottom line

Reminder+ not only has a great interface, but it functions beautifully. The only down side is that you don't have any option to set reminders that aren't location based. I don't necessarily need all of my reminders to be location based, such as sending emails or remembering to call someone later on. This seems like excess battery drain so to avoid that, I'd have to use two apps to accomplish what I want.

If Reminder+ would add the ability to add both location based and time based reminders, it could really give the default Reminders app a run for its money as it's a lot simpler to use but just as powerful as a lot of the other options out there.

• $1.99 - Download Now

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/QZN7QMRuIj4/story01.htm

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China March PMIs rebound, domestic demand shines

By Koh Gui Qing

BEIJING (Reuters) - Stronger domestic demand helped China's factory activity to rebound in March, with new orders up sharply in a sign that the underlying economic recovery is strong enough to weather any risks from patchy export performance, surveys showed on Monday.

China's official manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI) released by the National Bureau of Statistics rose to an 11-month high of 50.9 in March, above the 50-point level that indicates growth on the month, but below a Reuters poll consensus forecast of 52.0.

A separate survey by HSBC showed its final PMI climbing to 51.6 last month, roughly in line with a flash reading of 51.7 and up from February's 50.4.

"Growth momentum has been stabilizing, but headwinds remain," Liu Li Gang and Zhou Hao, economists at ANZ, said in a note to clients. "The current economic rebound remains fragile, and could falter with tightened monetary policy conditions."

The twin PMI surveys suggest the speed of revival in the world's No. 2 economy may not be as brisk as some think, as unsteady foreign demand for Chinese exports remained a constraint.

Most analysts expect China's economy to enjoy a steady but gentle recovery this year, driven internally by infrastructure investment and household consumption, after growth struck 13-year lows in 2012 due to crumbling demand for Chinese exports.

ELSEWHERE IN ASIA

Similar trends were evident elsewhere in North Asia. The HSBC/Markit survey of purchasing managers showed manufacturing activity in South Korea at its strongest rate in a year as new export orders picked up, suggesting beginnings of a recovery.

A Markit/JMMA survey for Japan, released on Friday, had shown manufacturing activity grew there for the first time in 10 months, in a sign that the economy was gaining momentum as a weaker yen was helping exporters.

The story in Sought Asia was more gloomy, with cooling domestic and foreign demand resulting in India's manufacturing sector expanding at its slowest pace since November 2011. The HSBC manufacturing PMI for India fell to 52.0 in March from 54.2 in February, marking the biggest month-on-month drop since September 11.

CHINA MONETARY POLICY

The strength and extent of China's recovery hinges on when the central bank tightens monetary policy after loosening policy last year and increasing credit supply to induce an economic rebound.

Qu Hongbin, HSBC's chief China economist, said while China's resilient local demand would support its economy in coming months, domestic growth is not surging, not with the HSBC PMI showing factory inflation fell in March for the first time in six months.

"Beijing policymakers should keep a relatively accommodative policy stance in place," Qu said.

The HSBC PMI showed factories struggling with stubbornly sluggish export orders, weakness that was offset by firmer domestic demand that a drove a big rise in new orders.

The official PMI was more upbeat. It showed new orders and new export orders scaling 11-month peaks, pushing factory output to its highest in 10 months.

Manufacturers of cars, electronics, machinery and equipment saw business improve while non-ferrous metal smelters and petroleum processing and coking activity slowed, the official PMI found.

The official and HSBC PMI surveys on China often do not move in tandem due to their different sampling methods. The official PMI favors big state factories while the HSBC PMI favors smaller private manufacturers.

PROPERTY RISKS

Concerns that China's economic policy may be less accommodative this year were heightened over the weekend when a host of Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, said they would enforce plans to cool property prices.

The property market accounted for 17 percent of China's economy in 2011 and while the country's record home prices are a social problem, analysts worry a heavy-handed approach to calming prices would risk scuppering the economic recovery.

Ting Lu, an economist at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, said China's renewed push to enact property controls come as Beijing reins in wasteful government spending and lending outside traditional financing channels, and as the debt crisis worsens in Europe, a key market for China's exports.

"We cut year-on-year quarterly gross domestic product growth to 7.9 percent and 8.1 percent for the first and second quarters respectively," Lu wrote in a note to clients. The bank had previously forecast growth of 8.3 percent in both quarters.

However, Lu said he expects China's central bank to leave rates unchanged this year as the country's economic recovery remains fragile and inflation pressures muted.

The rebound in China's PMIs in March comes after a choppy start to the year.

The official PMI in February fell to within a whisker of the 50-point mark that separates accelerating from slowing growth in China's giant factory sector. But investors mostly saw February's weak reading as a consequence of the Lunar New Year, as many Chinese factories closed for at least two weeks.

(Reporting by China Economics Team; Editing by Nick Edwards and Simon Cameron-Moore)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-official-factory-pmi-11-month-high-march-011526716--business.html

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