Greater Baltimore Board

Charles Willis "Bill" Hammond Sr., the retired longtime executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, died Sept. 1 at Gilchrist Hospice Care of complications from a fall he suffered last month. The former Roland Park resident was 92. Born in Baltimore and raised on Oak Hill Avenue, he grew up near Green Mount Cemetery. Family members said that as a child he would scale the cemetery wall and play football with neighborhood friends, including Garry Moore, who later became a CBS television game show host, and Joseph Thomas Mardaga, who became Roman Catholic bishop of Wilmington, Del. Mr. Hammond was a 1936 City College graduate and attended Gettysburg College.

Home values have continued to fall across Maryland, but for the first time since 2008, the average decline in tax assessments was in the single digits, state officials said. "It's showing an improved market, that's really the bottom line here," said Robert E. Young, director of the state's Department of Assessments and Taxation, which will send out tax assessment notices Friday to 678,763 property owners. After several years of disheartening double-digit declines, this year's lesser slump in home values - down an average of 6.9 percent from three years ago - is being taken by homeowners, government officers and real estate professionals as a sign that better times are likely ahead.

Four veteran residential Realtors have left their respective agencies to form an independent brokerage, the group announced yesterday. Michael Yerman, Marc Witman and Brandon Gaines, formerly with Long & Foster Real Estate, and Georgeanna Garceau, a former Prudential agent, have created Yerman, Witman, Gaines & Garceau Realty. "We all enjoyed our former brokers but desired to be owners of something that we talked about and toyed with for years but just in the last six months began to coalesce into a real plan," Witman said.

Baltimore-area home buyers picked up the pace in February ahead of the important spring selling season, helped along by unseasonably mild weather. Real estate agents say they're seeing more activity and hope it's a good sign for spring, rather than simply an early start that will come with an early end. Buyers signed contracts on nearly 2,500 homes in the Baltimore region in February, up 16 percent from a year ago, according to numbers released Monday...

The Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors has scheduled its 17th annual fair for Wednesday in Woodlawn as unprecedented housing sales continue. More than 500 people are expected for the one-day event, which will include seminars to help agents and brokers fulfill their state licensing requirements, networking sessions and vendors who supply services and products for the industry. The group also will hold its annual meeting there. The Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors - founded in 1858 and the oldest real estate board in the country - represents 3,200 agents and brokers in the area.

Virginia Zell Reeves Hall, 75, the first woman president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, died yesterday at Fallston General Hospital, where she had been hospitalized with cancer.The daughter of the late Mallie Moxley and George Carl Reeves Sr., Hall was born in Bel Air and graduated from Bel Air High School. She began her career as a legal secretary in Bel Air.On Nov. 11, 1936, she married J. Vernon Hall of Fork. Together, in 1956, they founded the J. Vernon Hall Inc. real estate company in Fork.

* American Properties Inc. recently donated $12,000 to the Muscular Dystrophy Association for patient care services and worldwide research program."American Properties is pleased to be able to serve our community by supporting the Muscular Dystrophy Association with a donation," said Susan J. Rettaliata, an associate broker and sales manager.* The Steve Campbell Realty Co. announced that agent Janice B. West was named Local and National Realtist of the Year at the Realtist National Convention last month in Las Vegas.

A steady procession of business leaders told City Council members yesterday that Mayor Martin O'Malley's proposed tax package will stifle Baltimore's real estate market and make it more expensive for companies to operate in the city. Representatives from the real estate, telecommunications and nonprofit industries expressed opposition to two elements of the mayor's three-pronged tax plan aimed at eliminating a projected $40 million deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The council's taxation committee held hearings yesterday on O'Malley's proposed $3.50 monthly tax on traditional and wireless phones and a proposed increase in fees for recording real estate purchases, from 0.55 percent to 1 percent.

The General Assembly passed an emergency bill on the final day of the 2002 session, prohibiting municipalities from appealing property tax assessments out of the traditional three-year cycle. The legislation, which passed in the Senate 43-0 and in the House of Delegates 126-1, stops a practice used in recent years by Montgomery County officials who would reassess homebuyers if the property purchased had a value of more than $150,000 over its current assessment. The state estimates the legislation would cause the county to lose $4.3 million in revenue for fiscal year 2003.

Sellers have dropped their asking prices on one out of every three homes on the market in Baltimore, according to real estate site Trulia. The average drop in price was 11 percent. That adds up to $41 million in cuts, Trulia said. Only 10 other large U.S. cities have a greater percentage of homes with reduced asking prices, the company said. It looked at listings on its site at the beginning of the month to see how many were priced lower than they had been within the previous 12 months.

January home sales slipped by 5 percent in the Baltimore area, while the number of homes on the market reached its lowest point in nearly six years, numbers released Friday show. There were 1,334 homes sold in the area last month, down from January 2011 but 4 percent higher than the five-year average for the month, according to data from the Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. The median sale price of a home in Baltimore rose 29 percent, to $93,100, but the city continued to be the most affordable in the region.

Charles Willis "Bill" Hammond Sr., the retired longtime executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, died Sept. 1 at Gilchrist Hospice Care of complications from a fall he suffered last month. The former Roland Park resident was 92. Born in Baltimore and raised on Oak Hill Avenue, he grew up near Green Mount Cemetery. Family members said that as a child he would scale the cemetery wall and play football with neighborhood friends, including Garry Moore, who later became a CBS television game show host, and Joseph Thomas Mardaga, who became Roman Catholic bishop of Wilmington, Del. Mr. Hammond was a 1936 City College graduate and attended Gettysburg College.

Home sales in the Baltimore metro area rose in December, breaking a five-month streak of plummeting activity as buyers were enticed back into the market by competitive mortgage rates and prices. But it is unclear whether the 8 percent increase in the number of homes sold last month signals a bottoming out of the struggling housing market. For all of 2010, the number of homes sold in the Baltimore region fell 3 percent from the year-earlier period, according to figures released Monday by the area's multiple-listing service.

Memo to the mayor of Baltimore and City Council members: The housing bust and the recession have made significantly more homes in the surrounding counties affordable to first-time home-buyers. That means the city could be losing its long-standing edge in affordability. So you'd better do something to reduce the city's ridiculously high property tax rate — and fast — or lose even more potential customers to the suburbs over the next few years. The numbers — and that conclusion — come from Jody Landers, executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, one-time city councilman, and longtime civic activist.

Virginia Reeves Hall, who was the first woman to serve as president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, died Wednesday of cancer at Fallston General Hospital. She was 75 and lived in Bel Air.Services for Mrs. Hall, who was a member of the Real Estate Commission of Maryland, will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Mountain Christian Church, 1824 Mountain Road, Joppa.Last year, she headed the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, which had named her "Realtor of the Year" in 1972. She also had served as president of the Harford County real estate board in 1978.