Willamette likes Weyerhaeuser bid

Willamette Industries said Monday it has agreed to a sweetened $6 billion takeover offer by rival Weyerhaeuser, ending 14 months of jockeying between the two timber giants. The companies said Weyerhaeuser will pay $55.50 per share in cash, 50 cents per share more than what Weyerhaeuser chairman Steven Rogel last month called his final offer. Willamette, which had been entertaining offers from Georgia Pacific, said its board is expected to consider the Weyerhaeuser deal before the end of the month.

A mutual fund with 1.1 percent of Hewlett-Packard Co. shares has endorsed the $24.3 billion plan to buy Compaq Computer Corp., giving HP valuable support as it prepares for a proxy fight over the deal. Lewis Sanders, vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management Holding L.P., told The Wall Street Journal he believes merging would give HP and Compaq the best chance of surviving consolidation in the computer and data-storage markets.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the investment firm headed by billionaire Warren Buffett, has acquired the shares of carpet maker Shaw Industries Inc. it had not owned. Berkshire completed its $2 billion majority purchase of Shaw last January. On Monday, Berkshire said it had acquired the 12.7 percent of remaining common shares in exchange for 4,740 Class A Berkshire shares. The transaction price was not disclosed.

San Francisco no longer tops the list for least-affordable housing in the nation, a distinction that now falls an hour and a half to the south to Santa Cruz. That result comes from the National Association of Home Builders, which compiles the list each year by comparing family incomes and home prices for metropolitan areas around the country. The Santa Cruz metropolitan area’s median income is $65,000, and the median home price is $420,000, up $5,000 from the previous quarterly survey. San Francisco dropped to second, as its median home price fell $10,000 to $520,000, still the most expensive median home price in the country. The Seattle area failed to make the top 10. The most affordable housing was found in Rockford, Ill., which has a median home price of $99,000 and a median family income of $57,100.

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