Housing Sales

If you've been holding back on the new $6,500 federal tax credit for repeat home purchases, you now have all the official IRS guidance you'll need to buy a house, qualify for the credit and pocket the $6,500. That's because the Internal Revenue Service finally published the rules for the repeat purchase credit along with key details for taxpayers that had been missing since President Obama signed the legislation creating the program Nov. 6. The IRS posted its revised Form 5405 on its website ( www.irs.

Actor Pierce Brosnan has sold his Malibu beach retreat for $2.6 million. Brosnan and his wife, environmental activist and former broadcast journalist Keely Shaye Smith, put the property on the market at $3.9 million in 2010 while building another house nearby. The gated Mediterranean they sold has separate space for use as an office or media room and sits on more than a quarter of an acre with lawn space and a courtyard fountain. The flower boxes and hydrangea-lined pathways are perhaps a nod to Brosnan's Irish roots.

MANY see trouble in falling home prices and rising foreclosures. Karen Krynen sees opportunity. So after dropping her two children off at preschool one day last month, Krynen headed for Los Angeles County Superior Court in Norwalk, where foreclosed houses were being auctioned on the steps outside. The ponytailed Krynen spotted a small crowd gathered against the building's towering, black-marble portico.

Actor Tony Danza has sold his longtime Malibu beach house for $8 million. It came on the market in July at $9.1 million. The 1949 traditional main house, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, sits on 50 feet of beachfront. The entire second level of the home is a master suite including a sitting area, fireplace and deck. The property also has two detached guest suites for a total of about 3,000 square feet of living space. Danza, 60, won TV fans with his roles in the sitcoms "Taxi" (1978-83)

Fresh Enterprises Inc. of Thousand Oaks, which owns the Baja Fresh Mexican Grill chain of restaurants, filed Thursday to go public. The firm will attempt to cash in on what has been a hot market for restaurant stocks this year. The company told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it hopes to raise as much as $58 million in the stock offering. Fresh Enterprises has 157 company-owned and franchise-operated restaurants nationwide, with more than half in California.

The recent craze for converting apartment buildings to condominiums, which is drawing political heat in Los Angeles and elsewhere, may be slowed by market forces before City Hall has a chance to act. One possible indication of a coming slump was the number of people willing to pay $1,800 for investment advice on the topic.

Home prices are way down in Southern California. But the real estate information service Zillow.com says the median values in Los Angeles and Orange counties may not have fallen quite as much as is often reported. That's because the median sale price -- which provides a quick market snapshot and is reported each month in the Los Angeles Times and other media -- can exaggerate the extent of a market downturn, economists say.

The top two floors of a Century City residential tower still under construction have been sold for a record $47 million to Candy Spelling, the widow of TV mogul Aaron Spelling. A $47-million price tag may seem like an enormous sum, but this is all about downshifting in the fast lane.

The workmen spread across 17 acres in Woodland Hills cut a tableau of movement. Kneeling in dirt, their arms pumping like pistons, they hammer together wood molds so new home foundations can be poured. Nearby, an earth mover carves out a street from mounds of weeds and a water truck sprays behind to keep down the dust. All of this activity is the handiwork of Kaufman & Broad, the state's biggest new home builder.

Two feng shui methods are popular in the United States. Each has many nuances and employs a complicated and often conflicting array of options that adherents believe can be used to rejuvenate the energy, or chi, in an environment. The compass method evolved in northern China hundreds of years ago and is routinely practiced in parts of Asia.

Actor Ethan Suplee has listed a Studio City house for sale at $2,295,000. Formerly Jane Fonda's residence, according to listing details, the country English-style home of 3,787 square feet was built in the early 1950s. It sits on nearly an acre of wooded grounds with a detached office/guesthouse, a gym and a swimming pool. There are three fireplaces, seven bedrooms and three bathrooms. Suplee, 35, appeared in the action-adventure film "Unstoppable" (2010) and starred in "My Name Is Earl" (2005-09)

Actress-producer Jodie Foster has listed her Beverly Hills estate for sale at $9,975,000, the Multiple Listing Service shows. Climbing vines and red brick accents give the seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom compound an East Coast vibe. Encompassing nearly an acre of land, the compound includes a 1949 main house, a tennis court, a swimming pool and a guesthouse. Foster, 48, won her Oscars for roles in "The Accused" (1988) and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991). She stars in and directs "The Beaver," released Friday, and will star in the upcoming "God of Carnage.

Time shares are tough to sell, even in the best of times. But now the shared vacation properties and their hefty annual fees have become nearly impossible to unload and are breeding a horde of scam artists preying on eager sellers. Nearly 8 million people ? about 7% of U.S. households ? own a time share, a vacation property owned by many people who take turns using it. The slow economic recovery, and the fact that the first generation to buy time shares 35 years ago has been retiring, means many people are looking to sell.

Call it three birds with one stone: The federal government hopes simultaneously to help low-down-payment home buyers, investors who fix up foreclosures, and local communities burdened with too many bank-owned and foreclosed homes -- all with one potentially far-reaching policy change. The Federal Housing Administration is revising its long-standing "anti-flipping" rule starting Monday and just might score a hit with all three target groups. For years the FHA has had a strict prohibition: It wouldn't insure a mortgage on a house whose seller had owned it less than 90 days.

Home prices inched up in November, a closely watched national index released Tuesday showed, but the monthly increase was so small that it shed little light on whether the U.S. housing market was headed for a full recovery or another dip. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 metropolitan areas increased 0.2% from October on a seasonally adjusted basis, with 14 cities posting gains. Compared with a year earlier, the index was down 5.3% in November, but the year-to-year rate of decline moderated in all 20 cities.

Sales of previously owned homes nationwide plunged steeply in December, raising concerns that the housing recovery could lose steam after government policies intended to support it expire in the spring. For now, California appears to be bucking the downward trend. U.S. sales in December fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.45 million units, down 16.7% from November, the National Assn. of Realtors said Monday. It was the biggest drop in the 42 years that the group has been measuring home sales and comes after first-time home buyers raced to close on their purchases before a federal tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time purchasers was set to expire Nov. 30. Congress in early November extended the deadline to April 30 and expanded the credit to include up to $6,500 for some buyers who already own homes.

Like bread crumbs in an urban forest, the telltale open house flags have been planted along a tantalizing route in Brentwood, leading from Mandeville Canyon to a little street called Kimberly Lane. At the end of the trail is not grandmother's cottage, however. It is a driveway. A very long driveway, where a black Ferrari is parked, not quite perfectly.

Time shares are tough to sell, even in the best of times. But now the shared vacation properties and their hefty annual fees have become nearly impossible to unload and are breeding a horde of scam artists preying on eager sellers. Nearly 8 million people ? about 7% of U.S. households ? own a time share, a vacation property owned by many people who take turns using it. The slow economic recovery, and the fact that the first generation to buy time shares 35 years ago has been retiring, means many people are looking to sell.

Many people would like to know when the housing market is going to hit bottom. But those who plan to stay put don't care as much about the bottom as they do about when their home values will return to where they were before the bubble burst. HSH Associates, a Pompton Plains, N.J.-based financial publishing house, ran some numbers to address that question recently, and the findings aren't terribly encouraging. "It's going to be a long time coming," HSH Vice President Keith Gumbinger said of the prospects of rebuilding equity.

If you've been holding back on the new $6,500 federal tax credit for repeat home purchases, you now have all the official IRS guidance you'll need to buy a house, qualify for the credit and pocket the $6,500. That's because the Internal Revenue Service finally published the rules for the repeat purchase credit along with key details for taxpayers that had been missing since President Obama signed the legislation creating the program Nov. 6. The IRS posted its revised Form 5405 on its website ( www.irs.