National market report

Detroit

Detroit’s bankruptcy filing might help to revive the city’s devastated housing market by signaling to investors — and even to average home buyers — that the worst is over, industry experts told Marketwatch. Motor City has struggled with a depressed real estate market for two decades. In the last five years alone, sale prices have dropped by 25 percent; the median price for a single-family home stood at $52,770 in June, down 12.5 percent from the year before. “It’s not as if this bankruptcy filing tells people anything they didn’t already know,” said Stephen Malpezzi, who teaches real estate and urban land economics at the Wisconsin School of Business. “The good news is, it’s a concrete step toward resolving the huge issues Detroit faces.” Malpezzi doubts investors will make bulk buys, but a few just might if the prices are right. If they do, the sales will almost certainly shore up the residential market. For local broker John R. Kersten, the bankruptcy filing could encourage home ownership by showing buyers that Detroit is finally acting on its financial crisis. “This is so needed,” said Kersten, who owns Century 21 Town and Country. “It’s time.”

Boston

Restaurants, supermarkets and fitness clubs are driving the recovery of Boston’s retail sector, according to a report by KeyPoint Partners, a Vermont-based commercial brokerage. The three categories of retailers took over nearly 2 million square feet of space in the last 12 months, bringing the vacancy rate down from 8.9 percent to 7.8 percent — the biggest drop in more than a decade, KeyPoint said. Grocery-store chain Market Basket leased the most space, 230,000 square feet, and Subway opened the most new locations: 34. Sleepy’s Mattresses, Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt, Supercuts and Bay Coast Bank each added more than 10 locations.

Los Angeles

Massive apartment complexes make up half of all the housing in Los Angeles, so the sale of one of the city’s biggest, an 18-acre luxury development in the Marina del Rey neighborhood, is getting noticed by industry insiders. Capri Capital Partners, on behalf of an institutional investor, and Kennedy Wilson paid $225 million for the 18-acre Esprit, which has 437 units in five buildings as well as 227 boat slips and boat storage. The seller was a partnership led by former City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski. The real estate investment firms will spend $5.3 million to upgrade the property.

Denver

Colorado’s attorney general is looking into whether law firms that specialize in foreclosures are gouging homeowners by hiking their process-serving fees as much as six times, the Denver Post reported. Right now, four law firms that have handled thousands of foreclosures are under investigation but have not been charged; for a time, Colorado led the nation in foreclosures, and the amounts that law firms statewide overcharged in the last several years could total tens of millions of dollars, according to the newspaper. Law firms often pay $25 for someone called a process server to post an official foreclosure notice on a house; attorneys then turn around and up the amount that they tack on to the legal fees generated by a foreclosure case. The fee is sometimes as high as $150 and must be paid by the homeowner to avoid losing his house.

Kansas City

A division of Block Real Estate Services has teamed up with a Philadelphia property management company so it can make a run for huge federal housing contracts nationwide, the Kansas City Business Journal reported. Block Multifamily Group and Balfour Beatty Communities will bid to oversee properties under the government’s Section 8 (rent-subsidized) and Section 42 (low-income housing tax credit) programs. Block will handle the administrative and compliance tasks; Balfour Beatty will handle the onsite management duties. Just a week before forming the partnership, Block had announced that it wanted to increase the number of properties it managed by 10,000 units over the next five years. Now, the company expects to have to revise that figure upwards significantly.

Washington, D.C.

Foreign investors are showing that they like the economic stability of the nation’s capital, the Washington Post reported. In just the first six months of this year, heavy hitters from both Europe and Asia have bought $1.9 billion in commercial properties — nearly double the $1 billion that they sank into the market last year and more than four times the $807 million overseas investment total from 2007, according to numbers from Jones Lang LaSalle. Among the projects: the under-construction Marriott Marquis Convention Center Hotel and CityCenterDC. And companies from China, Korea, Germany and Saudi Arabia are still on the hunt for fully leased downtown office buildings.

Los Angeles

Hollywood hottie Scarlett Johansson has unloaded a one-bedroom, two-bath condo for $470,000, a modest price, but $45,000 more than what she was asking. The 1,150-square-foot apartment, in the Hollywood Versailles Tower on Hollywood Boulevard, is average in size but has luxury touches, including a dressing-room vanity surrounded by stage lights and gold sinks in the master bath. Johansson listed her bachelorette pad in May; the buyer wasn’t disclosed.

Atlanta

A 45,000-square-foot mansion that once belonged to Evander Holyfield is on the market for $8.2 million, about half of what the ex-heavyweight boxer paid for it. The listing, according to Curbed, describes the 12-bedroom, 21-bath main house as the largest single-family home in Georgia but makes no mention of Holyfield, who sold the 100-acre property to a bank last year for $7.5 million. (The address, though, is 794 Evander Holyfield Highway.) If the asking price isn’t high enough, Holyfield once claimed that the palace set him back $1 million a year in maintenance costs .

Austin

Lance Armstrong has flipped a 3.6-acre compound near Lake Austin in Texas that he bought just three months ago. The disgraced cyclist paid $4.3 million for the 12,500-square-foot mansion, but what he made off the sale — to race car driver Bret Curtis — isn’t known since the purchase price hasn’t been disclosed, Zillow Blog reported. Armstrong, who confessed to doping after being stripped of his Tour de France championships, has already moved on to another home in town: a showplace on only a half-acre lot that had been the home of former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes.