Envy Apartment

House-flipping hit its highest levels last year since before the recession as investors seek to capitalize on rising home prices and a seller’s market with tight inventory. But the process is nothing like what you see on TV, where it looks like a home can be bought, gutted, renovated and resold in less than an hour – not including commercial breaks . The truth is often much messier, real estate professionals in Charlotte said. “It’s a lot easier to lose money in this business than it is to make it,” said Jeff Johnson, owner of NewPath Properties , which specializes in buying and rehabbing distressed properties . Still, that’s not deterring people from giving it a try in Charlotte. First-quarter figures from Attom Data Solutions show flips – defined as the same property selling twice in a 12-month period same year – made up more than 6 percent of sales in the Charlotte region, or 540 sales. House-flipping increased almost 4 percent from a year ago, though it remains well below the cit...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...