Archives: November 2005

A True Housing Bubble

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 30

You have to love it when companies have a sense of humor about their business and that certainly seems to be the case with two big Florida developers, the...

A blog that tracks listing volumes

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 30

What do you call a blog that tracks the number of listings by market? A backlog blog? A B(ack)LOG? In any case, check it out here....

More New Homes for Sale

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 29

Housing bulls are happy about today's Commerce Dept. report on new home sales. They were up 13% from September, seasonally adjusted, and up 9% from a year ago. What's more,...

Rising Inventories of Unsold Homes

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 28

There was worrisome news today in the report from the National Association of Realtors on October sales of existing homes. But the scary part wasn't where you would think to...

A Fun Website for Checking Affordability

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 23

Can an elementary school teacher afford a median-priced house in San Diego? Can a police officer afford a median-priced house in Miami? Can a graphic designer afford a median-priced house...

Finish That House on Schedule ... Or Else

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 22

What's one of the things that most angers buyers of new homes? When builders miss their deadlines. That's what emerged from a survey of customer satisfaction with homebuilders that was...

Guess How Much This Place Is Going For

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 22

Look at this place, guess how much it's selling for, and then, to check your answer, click on Continue reading ......

British Housing's Soft Landing, So Far

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 22

If you're trying to figure out what's likely to happen to the U.S. housing market, check out what's going on elsewhere. Britain's housing market surged more than America's and stopped...

To Grandmother's House We Go

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 21

We all know the Thanksgiving song about going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house. But how realistic is the song from the point of view of...

The Hot New Game of Lowballing

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 21

Lowballing is the profitable game of submitting a ludicrously low bid on a house just to see if the seller goes for it. The game didn't get played much over...

Sam Zell's favorite markets

Posted by: Amey Stone on November 21

Last week I heard famed real estate investor Sam Zell speak at an investment conference. Much of the discussion was about his investments in single family housing in Mexico and...

Making Sense of Average Mortgage Rates

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 18

It seems like a simple question: What's the national average rate these days for a fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage? But the answers are all over the lot. Here are three that...

Is 2 Million Housing Starts 2 Many?

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 18

The optimistic take on this week's housing starts number is that the market remains strong in spite of rising interest rates. The pessimistic take is that the homebuilding market is...

Are the headlines ahead?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 17

A headline on the front of today's Los Angeles Daily News caught my eye. "Housing sales finally slowing," it said. It almost sounded like relief. The information in the story...

New York--A City With a Core

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 11

In 1991, journalist and author Joel Garreau wrote a book entitled "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier." It explained the emergence of new pockets of development on the outskirts...

Reality hits Washington DC market

Posted by: Dean Foust on November 11

Several months ago I related my shock, as a former Washington DC resident, on seeing how home prices had soared into the stratosphere upon a visit back to my old...

New York's Condo Sales Slow

Posted by: Amey Stone on November 10

A new report from Condo-Sales.com shows a dramatic drop in the volume of Manhattan condo sales, but no drop in prices. There were only 386 condo sales in October compared...

Should have seen this coming...

Posted by: Dean Foust on November 09

In case you missed it yesterday, Toll Brothers--a big builder of luxury homes in the Northeast region--warned that there may be a softening of demand for housing. That was enough...

A conservative banker

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 08

Doreen Woo Ho, chief of Wells Fargo's home equity loan business, stopped by the office yesterday. Wells is the largest home equity lender in the nation with some $71 billion...

The Westchester Tease

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 07

Pimco, the big money management firm, has had representatives out riding with real estate brokers in 20 major metropolitan markets across the country to gauge the state of the housing...

Slowdown in new households bodes ill for housing?

Posted by: Dean Foust on November 02

Sara Aronchick, an economist with Goldman, Sachs & Co., released an interesting report late Wednesday that takes on the notion--popular among housing bulls--that the housing boom can continue thanks to...

The tax attack

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 01

The President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, a nine-member bipartisan group created by President Bush in January and charged with figuring out a way to simplify the tax code,...

Florida housing in trouble?

Posted by: Dean Foust on November 01

Despite the fact that he doesn't work for one of the name-brand Wall Street investment houses--or maybe because he doesn't--Dick Bove, an analyst at Punk Ziegel & Co., is one...

A Less Curvaceous Yield Curve

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 01

What could kill the housing boom? David Rosenberg, the chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch, argues that the trigger could be a flattening of the yield curve. Here's what...