Godfrey-Lee Public Schools is proud to announce that they will be purchasing Bloom Credit Union’s Wyoming building. The district closed on the deal on Dec. 15.
The Wyoming location of Bloom Credit Union, located on 1414 Burton St. SW, is right next door to Godfrey-Lee’s Administration Building, separated only by a fence.
Superintendent of Godfrey-Lee Schools Arnetta Thompson and Bloom CEO Joe Heintskill in front of Bloom Credit Union (Courtesy, Godfrey-Lee Schools)
Bloom Credit Union is relocating their administrative offices and bank branch to other locations in Wyoming and Grand Rapids. Godfrey-Lee was able to benefit from the move by partnering and purchasing the current building. They hope to create a new administration building with potential for a conference and community center.
Bloom Credit Union has always been a community partner of the district. For years, Bloom has shared their parking lot with Godfrey-Lee due to lack of space at the Administration building, and has consistently provided in-kind donations for students.
Lee High School recently celebrated 100 years in the district and launched a fundraising campaign for a new scoreboard at their athletic complex. Bloom received the campaign postcard in the mail and committed to donating the funds for the scoreboard.
Bloom Credit Union will soon be relocating their administrative offices to a larger space in Grand Rapids. Their 1414 Burton St. SW branch will continue to operate from the same location until they open another nearby branch at a later date.
by Redfin, a full-service real estate brokerage, found that 68.8% of home offers written by Redfin agents nationally faced competition in February. (pxhere.com)
LANSING – “Pretty much every offer I put was a shot in the dark, where you’d just cross your fingers and pray and hope that it gets accepted,” said Corbin Holwerda of Grand Rapids.
Holwerda is a first-time homebuyer who has been looking for a house in Grand Rapids since mid-January.
“I’ve put in seven or eight offers, and it’s really tough because half of those I’m losing to all-cash offers,” he said. “I’m still a young adult. I don’t have $250,000 in the bank that I can just front and put up for a house.”
A recent study by Redfin, a full-service real estate brokerage, found that 68.8% of home offers written by Redfin agents nationally faced competition in February. That’s the highest share reported by its agents since at least April 2020.
“Even if we are able to go above asking (price), there are still people waiving inspections and going $50,000, $60,000 or $70,000 above asking in some cases,” Holwerda said.
According to a new Congressional Research Service report, the main factor causing record-high home prices is that more people are looking to buy houses than there are houses for sale.
Cash offers can help the sale of a home move more quickly. (pxhere.com)
It’s a question of supply and demand, the report said.
“We have people selling homes with 40 offers on one home,” said Shirley Smith, the executive officer of the Hillsdale County Board of Realtors.
“There is a huge amount of competition right now, and the reason for that is because inventory is low. House prices have been going up the last few years and inventory has not increased appreciably,” Smith said.
“I think we’re also seeing more cash offers because those are the offers that get accepted more quickly,” she said.
Sometimes offers are contingent on the sale of the buyer’s current home, a bank loan or inspections to be done, and that can take more time, she said.
But cash offers move the process along more quickly.
“Generally, when we have high housing prices like this, it doesn’t go on forever. I think I, and most Realtors, expect that in the not-so-distant future there will be a change in the trend,” she said.
According to Smith, projections from the National Association of Realtors say housing prices may increase 5% in the coming year, which is much lower than several years past.
“That might be a tapering off in the market,” she said.
According to the Case-Shiller Detroit Home Price Index, home prices in Detroit have gone up about 8.6% per year since January 2012. But from January 2021 to January 2022, prices rose 13.9%.
That can be compared with neighboring states’ large cities, like Cleveland, rising 13.3% and Chicago, rising 12.5%. Nationally, home prices rose 19.1% from January 2021 to January 2022, according to Case-Shiller’s national data.
“The interesting thing here (regarding the increases) is that in traditional years, only 3 to 5% of the housing on the market is actually new houses,” said Wayne State University economics professor Allen Goodman.
“As a result, most housing supply occurs kind of above the middle of the market. We don’t allow people to build new, low-quality houses,” said Goodman, who specializes in housing and health economics.
He said some new houses are resold multiple times and “as a result, the housing gets toward the upper end of the market, and what’s left there is sometimes said to filter down to other buyers.”
“A lot of this goes back to COVID, in part,” said Goodman. “To keep the economy growing, the federal government and Federal Reserve banks have had what were historically low interest rates. What it meant was that people who wanted to buy houses were faced with mortgage rates of like 3%.”
A combination of low interest rates and a smaller-than-traditional supply lead to increases in the price of housing. (pxhere.com)
“A combination of low interest rates and a smaller-than-traditional supply lead to increases in the price of housing,” Goodman said.
Monitoring estimates of the value of his own Huntington Woods home over the years, Goodman said it lost half its value from 2007 to 2009.
The value can vastly change by month. In one recent month, his home’s value was estimated to have increased around $30,000, but in a previous month it was estimated to have dropped $20,000.
“But really over the past year, it’s pretty much been the same, at least according to Zillow,” he said, referring to the online real estate-market national company.
Capital News Service is provided by the Spartan News Room located at Michigan State University. CNS reporters cover state government for member newspapers and digital media outlets across the state of Michigan.
Three years ago, Kristin Ruther found her niche at RE/MAX of Grand Rapids. (Supplied)
By Sheila McGrath WKTV Contributing Writer
Kristin Ruther has a word of advice for women who feel like they’ve somehow landed in the wrong job.
“You’re not a tree,” she said. “You’re not planted. You can move.”
Kristin Ruther and her husband John were college sweethearts, marring while Kristin was still in college. (Supplied)
Over the course of her working life, Ruther has found success in a variety of jobs that made use of her business development skills and her love of bringing people together.
These days, she’s a Realtor who leads the Ruther Daigle Team at RE/MAX of Grand Rapids. She has worked in real estate for the past six years, and as one of the top-selling agents in the area last year, became a member of RE/MAX’s Platinum Club.
But not every job she took over the years turned out to be a good fit. And when it wasn’t, she found a way to move on.
Ruther and her husband, John, got married while she was still in college. Their first child arrived before she graduated, so finishing college and starting a career were temporarily put on hold. Their family grew to include two more children, and she loved staying home with them when they were small.
After going back to school and finishing her degree in 2005, she took a job as a recruiter in Downers Grove, Illinois, with hopes of eventually becoming a human resources generalist.
But the hours were long – she left home at 6 a.m. and couldn’t leave the office until her boss left after 6 p.m. When the opportunity arose to join an architectural firm that specialized in building churches, she jumped at the chance.
“It was really fun to be able to think about architecture and design because that’s what I really enjoy,” she said.
When she joined the group in 2008, the firm’s average project size was $750,000. By the time she left six years later, she was director of strategic partnerships and the average project size had grown to $3 million.
But Ruther and her husband had decided to return to Michigan to be closer to family, and she was once again pondering her next career move. After thinking for a while about becoming a real estate agent, she began taking classes and got her license.
The kickoff to her new career didn’t go quite as planned, though – at her first job, a male colleague introduced her to the rest of her new team by saying “This is my girlfriend.”
“I’m nobody’s girlfriend,” she told him afterward. “It’s not a joke.”
Despite her objections, his behavior continued. So she got out and joined a different brokerage.
“There are so many places where you can feel empowered and strong, and that’s where you need to be,” she said. “I think it’s almost every woman’s experience: of pushing back and saying ‘That doesn’t feel right, I need to move away from that.’”
Three years ago, she joined RE/MAX of Grand Rapids after falling in love with their sleek, contemporary office space on Byron Center Avenue in Wyoming. She describes the office as a “big learning community” where there are always classes going on to help them grow as Realtors.
“There’s always something that you’re learning that they’re pouring into you,” she said. “There’s always something to learn about houses and what makes a good house for somebody, or what some of the red flags are.”
She loves the design aspect of staging houses and helping her clients get top dollar for their properties. And she’s honored by the trust they put in her.
Kristin Ruther and her husband John with their family. (Supplied)
“As agents, we are trusted,” she said. ‘You’re giving me the keys to your house. You’re trusting me with some very big financial things. So there’s a level of integrity you have to have.”
The team Ruther leads now includes her daughter, Lauren Daigle, who does all of her marketing and photography, and her son-in-law, Aaron Daigle, who joined the team as a Realtor.
Ruther said education has been a big part of her success.
“Education is the key. Every time you take a class you gain a little more confidence and a little more competence, and I think all of that really piles up.”
But she said for her, it was also really helpful to have a coach –someone who always has your back.
“There’s always something for you to learn from somebody who has been there, done that,” she said.
