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Indianapolis House Explosion That Killed 2 Now Investigated as Homicide

November 20, 2012 by PeterGreijn

Filed under: News

The house explosion that killed two people and destroyed several homes in an Indianapolis neighborhood is now being investigated as a homicide, authorities said, though no suspects have been named.

The incident was originally thought to have been caused by a faulty furnace, one of the homeowners said.

Indianapolis Homeland Security Director Gary Coons announced the criminal investigation Monday evening, shortly after a funeral was held for the husband and wife who had lived next door to the house where investigators believe the blast occurred.

House fire homicide“We are turning this into a criminal homicide investigation,” Coons said after meeting with residents, the first public acknowledgement by investigators of a possible criminal element to the Nov. 10 explosion.

Search warrants have been executed and officials are now looking for a white van that was seen in the subdivision on the day of the blast, Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry said. Federal authorities are offering a $ 10,000 reward for information in the case.

Curry said the investigation is aimed at “determining if there are individuals who may be responsible for this explosion and fire,” but neither he nor Coons took questions or indicated if investigators had any suspects. No arrests have been made.

A lawyer representing Monserrate Shirley and Mark Leonard, who lived in the home that is believed to have exploded, said Tuesday that the couple was bewildered by the new direction of the investigation.

Shirley said in a video on the Indianapolis Star newspaper’s website last week that investigators had asked her whether she had any enemies who wanted to kill her, suggesting that someone possibly planted a bomb in her home.

Shirley cried in the video and said that people were blaming her for the blast.

“Everybody’s pointing a finger at me like I did something wrong,” Shirley said. “I mean, I’m totally devastated like my neighbors are.

“It’s like waking up to this bad dream,” she continued. “I mean, sometimes I was there and I’d be dead, and I wouldn’t have to be asked so many questions.”

Randall Cable said in a statement that Shirley and Leonard have “cooperated fully” with investigators and that they want the cause “of this horrific and saddening tragedy to be determined.”

Officials say they believe natural gas was involved in the explosion, which destroyed five homes and left dozens damaged. Investigators have focused on appliances in their search for a cause. The explosion caused an estimated $ 4.4 million in damage.

“We thought something like this was not just an accident,” said Doug Aldridge, who heads the neighborhood Crime Watch.

Aldridge said he and other residents frequently saw a white van parked outside the home, though he didn’t know who owned it. He said residents are angry and upset but that he expects most of them to stay in the neighborhood.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral Monday for John Dion Longworth, 34, and his 36-year-old wife Jennifer Longworth.

She was a second-grade teacher remembered for knitting gifts for her students, while her husband, an electronics expert, was known as a gardener and nature lover. The school where Jennifer Longworth taught was closed Monday so teachers and students could attend the funeral.

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard told reporters after attending the Longworths’ funeral Monday that he had been having a hard time coming to terms with what happened.

“There is a search for truth and there is a search for justice,” Ballard said.

John Shirley, who co-owns the house with his ex-wife, Monserrate Shirley, has told The Associated Press that he had recently received a text message from his 12-year-old daughter saying the furnace in the home had gone out.

Monserrate Shirley said that Leonard had replaced the thermostat and that the furnace was working. Cable has said the daughter told her mother she had smelled an odd odor in recent weeks, but they hadn’t reported it.

Shirley and Leonard were away at a casino at the time of the blast, Cable said. The daughter was staying with a friend, and the family’s cat was being boarded.

AOL Real Estate contributed to this report.

See also:
Shantonia Heard of Atlanta Left Her 2 Children Alone With No Power and Gas Oven On, Police Say

Apartment Fire Safety Tips
Man Killed as Gas Explosion Destroys Connecticut Home

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Filed Under: News on Real Estate Tagged With: Explosion, Homicide, House, Indianapolis, Investigated, Killed

Frank Lloyd Wright adobe house on the market 

November 8, 2012 by PeterGreijn

1430 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe N.M.For sale: $  4.75 million  The only adobe structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1920s was supposed to be built in El Paso, Texas. But due to circumstances — rumored to be differences of opinion between Wright and the homeowner — the project never came to be, and by the end of the 1940s, the plans were shelved.1430 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe N.M.For sale: $ 4.75 million The only adobe structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1920s was supposed to be built in El Paso, Texas. But due to circumstances — rumored to be differences of opinion between Wright and the homeowner — the project never came to be, and by the end of the 1940s, the plans were shelved.








NBCNews.com: Real estate

Filed Under: News on Real Estate Tagged With: adobe, Frank, House, Lloyd, market, Wright

Buying a House in Fall? Avoid These Pitfalls

September 12, 2012 by PeterGreijn

By Jason Notte

The real estate market supposedly shines in the spring and summer sun, but fall is where the deals are found.

Existing home sales are up more than 10 percent since last year, while the price of those homes has risen 9.4% over the same span, according to the National Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the backlog of homes on the market has dwindled 31 percent from a more than nine-month supply of 3.15 million last July to a 6.4-month supply of 2.4 million this summer. As a result, the percentage of “distressed” and foreclosed homes on the market dropped from 29 percent last year to 24 percent in July.

“Mortgage interest rates have been at record lows this year, while rents have been rising at faster rates,” says Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist. “Combined, these factors are helping to unleash a pent-up demand.”

With interest rates on 30-year mortgages dropping from 4.55 percent last July to 3.55 percent today, buyers who’ve been riding out the economic downturn and housing crisis might be tempted to make a move. With real estate site Zillow reporting that 31 percent of American mortgages are still underwater despite rising prices — including nearly 51 percent of mortgages held by homeowners ages 30 through 34 — it helps to look before you leap this fall.

With help from the National Association of Realtors and Zillow, we put together the following checklist of items to keep in mind when approaching the autumn real estate market:

1. Go bargain hunting.

According to NAR numbers, home prices tend to plummet by an average $ 7,000 once Labor Day passes. That’s not always the case out West or in the South, where prices level off or even jump a bit during the cold months, but Midwest home prices fall by an average of $ 10,000 between August and September, while Northeast prices plummet by nearly $ 20,000 by October.

2. Know your market.

If you’re hunting around Stowe, Vt., or Coral Springs, Fla., for deals around this time of year, you may as well be pricing out Caribbean vacation homes in winter. Ski resorts, popular leaf-peeping spots and permanently warm climates in Florida and Southern California just aren’t going to come through with fall discounts. Know why folks in less-scenic Northeast and Midwest towns drop prices so quickly? Because winter’s coming and they don’t want to spend another year digging out the place. Use their years of snowbound misery to your advantage.

3. Sniff out desperation.

Does the photo of the house you’ve been pining over all summer on MLS look exactly as it did when you first saw it Memorial Day? Has the price dropped without eliciting so much as an “under contract” update? Is there yet another open house coming up in a few weeks? That all works in your favor. If a buyer hasn’t budged after one of the hottest real estate summers since the housing crisis began, chances are there’s room to negotiate. If they want the house sold more than they want a tidy profit, that’s how deals are born.

4. Kick the tires.

Fall may be a lovely corridor of copper leaves and crisp temperatures in some areas, but it’s also the time of year the weather takes a turn. When you’re buying a home, the leaf litter and returning rain provide ample opportunities to see where the current homeowners have done work and what they’ve neglected on the way out the door. For the most part, there shouldn’t be leaves piled up in the gutters in late September or early October. There also should be decent gutter drainage that doesn’t involve water spewing from where a drainpipe once was.

5. Remember, you’ll have help.

Census Bureau numbers indicate that fall, and September in particular, is a bit of a rough patch for contractors and home and garden stores such as Home Depot and Lowes. If your dream house could use a kitchen upgrade or central air through its heating ducts, home stores and builders usually start discounting inventory around this time of year and can help you make changes on the cheap. Of course, if you’re looking to build from scratch, those discounts not only add up, but bring in business for a homebuilding industry that’s grown 25 percent since last year but is still building less than half than the “normal” number of homes it completes in a year.

See more on TheStreet.com:
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Filed Under: News on Real Estate Tagged With: avoid, buying, fall, House, Pitfalls, these

Bungalow Style House (Style Spotlight)

July 26, 2012 by PeterGreijn

Filed under: Design, News

bungalow style house

By Bud Dietrich, AIA

As the Great War came to its end and the Roaring Twenties started, America became ever increasingly an automobile-dominated society. Cars, cheap gas and the availability of inexpensive land created a housing boom in the suburbs and outlying areas. A new house style, the bungalow, came about as the result.

Though the particulars varied from location to location (a Chicago bungalow is visually very different from its Southern California cousin), the bungalow was typically small, with all its living spaces on one floor. The houses typically had five or six rooms, with two or three bedrooms and one bathroom.

As much as these homes were brought about by the growing popularity of the car, it would take a subsequent generation of domestic design (ranches, split-levels, 1970s Colonials) and larger lots to fully integrate the garage with the house. In bungalows, the garage was typically detached and accessed by a back alley or, if the lot was wide enough, a side driveway.

Expanded, renovated and updated, bungalows have an enduring quality that make them enviable homes for today’s family. Many cities across the country have actively promoted the preservation and renovation of bungalows. Chicago, in fact, has a citywide initiative, the Historic Chicago Bungalow Association, to encourage and strengthen the many bungalow neighborhoods in the city.

An interesting side note is that the term “bungalow” originated in India and has Hindi roots. It was used to describe small lodgings and later came to mean a one-story, detached home with a veranda.

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Help: Find an Architect in Your Area

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Filed Under: News on Real Estate Tagged With: Bungalow, House, Spotlight, Style

Listing of The Week: A ‘Hobbit House’ at Lake Tahoe

May 15, 2012 by PeterGreijn


885 Hill Lane, Lake Tahoe, Nevada
For sale: $  3,700,000
When Paul Arnold and his wife Elizabeth decided to build their custom home, they wanted something beyond fun. They wanted something fantastic.
Hence, "The Hobbit House" was born.885 Hill Lane, Lake Tahoe, Nevada For sale: $ 3,700,000 When Paul Arnold and his wife Elizabeth decided to build their custom home, they wanted something beyond fun. They wanted something fantastic. Hence, “The Hobbit House” was born.








msnbc.com: Real estate

Filed Under: News on Real Estate Tagged With: 'Hobbit, House, Lake, Listing, Tahoe, Week

Free House!

January 22, 2012 by PeterGreijn

Eric I couldn’t find any house information. Can you post some information about it here? Why not just sell it out right?
BiggerPockets Forums

Filed Under: Investing Tagged With: Free, House

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