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MARS: A Whole New Housing Market… In 2

MARS: A Whole New Housing Market… In 2023!!! SertikSells will be ready with Mary Jane Sertik and her team. A bit of humor in the crazy world of Real Estate.. keep on smiling!

NASA’s road map for getting to Mars may be in flux, and SpaceX pioneer Elon Musk has only a vague intention to point his rockets at the Red Planet. But that doesn’t mean nobody is making definitive plans to set up shop on the fourth rock from the Sun.

Stepping into the vacuum this Friday: a brand new private space venture from the Netherlands called Mars One, which aims to send four astronauts on a one-way journey to Mars in just 11 years time.

Founded by Dutch entrepreneur and researcher Bas Lansdorp, who previously headed up an alternative energy company, this new venture doesn’t have a lot of the polish of other private space companies, many of which were started by billionaires such as Musk, Paul Allen or Jeff Bezos.

Watch the video above and you’ll get a distinct sense of the earnest amateur. For all its letters of intent from component suppliers and support from Nobel prize-winners, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of money behind this venture — yet.

But Mars One does have something going for it: a definite and achievable to-do list.

Step one: send a communications satellite to Mars in 2016. Step two: follow up with a Red Planet rover in 2018, which will trawl the dusty landscape, scoping out some of the best spots to found a colony. Step three, in 2020: send infrastructure for the colonists to live in, including solar panels and machines that will convert the Martian elements into water and oxygen.

Only then, on the surprisingly specific date of September 14, 2022, will Mars One launch its first four astronauts. Their journey to the new colony will take ten months, though they will have been preparing for a decade. Most of that prep time, we hope, will be spent figuring out how not to kill someone when you have to live in extremely close quarters for the better part of a year with no shower access.

Lansdorp plans to send another couple of adventurous astronauts to join the colony every two years, but the idea is that no one gets a return journey. This is a permanent base, a Plymouth Rock in an entirely new world that will begin the long, slow and painstaking process of terraforming it.

And how will this all be funded? Lansdorp has two words for you: “media spectacle.” We’re not sure what that means, exactly — selling broadcast rights to the landing? Sponsorships from large corporations eager to advertise on the mission? Will Coke be the first soda on Mars?

Whatever it is, we can’t wait to find out. If Mars One is selling subscriptions to this spectacle, sign us up.

America’s Best Housing Markets ~ Forbes

America’s Best Housing Markets ~ Forbes Magazine
Wonderful article from Forbes Magazine, once again stating the, well-known fact by Pittsburghers, that Pittsburgh is the place to be!:

Families in the market for a house are shopping at the right time: Nationally, homes are near the most affordable they’ve been in 18 years. In the fourth quarter of 2009 housing was 62.4% more affordable than the same time a year earlier, according to the Housing Opportunity Index, published quarterly by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo.

The best place to buy right now: Pittsburgh. For a housing market to be attractive it should have appreciating prices that show homeowners are making wise investments; an affordability rating that gives middle-class families with good credit entry into the market; and a relatively low number of foreclosures, which keeps prices stable and indicates there isn’t an excess of inventory.

Pittsburgh has all three. In the metro area, 85% of homes are affordable to those making the median family income of $62,500. At the same time, foreclosures are low: Only one home is in foreclosure for every 120 housing units–the second-best record of all the cities we ranked; and home prices are expected to increase 2.67% by the end of the year.

Yes, the city has suffered greatly since the decline of its manufacturing-dependent economy. But that slump helped its real estate market dodge the rapid run-up in prices that doomed so many markets after the housing boom.

“Manufacturing cities like Pittsburgh have suffered so much for the last two, three, four years that there’s still a population base in that region, and now those areas are sort of attractive,” says James P. Gaines, research economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. “Home prices are so low, some service-level jobs can be created, so it’s not surprising perhaps that there’s been a revitalization of some of those communities.”

Behind the Numbers
To find the country’s best housing markets, we used the Housing Opportunity Index, a metric created by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo ( WFC – news – people ) that determines affordability by measuring median home prices against median incomes. Using the 40 largest housing Metropolitan Statistical Areas that the HOI ranks, we then factored in Moody’s ( MCO – news – people )Economy.com’s one-year forecast for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, a measure of sales prices in major markets, to find out where home prices were expected to rise. Finally we included the 2009 Foreclosure report from RealtyTrac, ranking cities by their percentage of foreclosures. We averaged the rankings for all these measures to arrive at an overall score.

The reason for taking all these factors into account is that alone each doesn’t say much about a housing market’s health. An area could be affordable because prices were dragged down by a glut of foreclosures. Similarly, a low foreclosure rate doesn’t guarantee that home-buying is a good investment, as values could be flat or falling. Even looking at home-price forecasts in a vacuum won’t tell you everything about a market, since some areas have dramatic price increases ahead due to severe drops back when the bubble burst.

Like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, might not jump to mind as one of the country’s best cities for housing, but job-rich suburbs surround the city and 87% of middle-income families can afford a home. That combination creates significant pull for homebuyers.

Also looking strong is Louisville, Ky., a city whose low foreclosure rate–only 1.15% of homes are in foreclosure, half the national average–illuminates it as one of the cities least affected by this aspect of the dramatic housing market collapse of the past three years. Louisville had less of a market boom than coastal cities and vacation destinations, so it didn’t have as far to fall.

Jobs Stability Equals Housing Stability
Strong industries…