Archives: December 2005

New and Improved

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on December 27

A new year means a new list of home improvement projects. Each year, my husband and I trade off who gets to spend the budget for house projects---2005 was his...

In 2006, a Harsher Reality for Realty

Posted by: Peter Coy on December 27

One of the smartest and best-read publications on residential real estate is the monthly REAL Trends, edited by an industry veteran named Steve Murray out of Littleton, Colo. (Click here...

A Gloomy Christmas for Real Estate?

Posted by: Peter Coy on December 23

The Commerce Dept. put a damper on Christmas for real estate agents today when it announced that new home sales in November fell 11.3% in November, seasonally adjusted, from their...

The Reflex Effect

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on December 22

Paul McCaulley, chief Fed watcher at bond giant Pimco, just shared his firm's latest take on housing. Pimco has identified three key indicators of market weakness: inventory of unsold homes,...

Wealthy Americans believe real estate to go up, up, up

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 20

Remember back in 1999 and 2000, when surveys showed that—even with the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq indices in nosebleed territory—many investors still believed that the market would rise...

An Overhang of New Houses?

Posted by: Peter Coy on December 20

Just when it looks like housing construction is finally going to cool off we get another number like today's stat from the government. Construction began in November on 2.12 million...

A futures market for housing prices

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 19

If you’ve bought a house in a bubbly urban market and are suddenly fearful of losing a big chunk of your nest egg if prices fall, what do you do?...

Interested in reading about the housing bubble?

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on December 19

A day doesn’t go by without an article in some major newspaper about the housing bubble, when it’s going to burst and what will happen to the economy. Personally,...

Rethinking the City of Angels

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on December 14

To the rest of the country, Los Angeles is La La Land, a souless, superficial city, dominated by Hollywood and not much else. But the nation's second-largest metropolis is wrestling...

Talk about being leveraged to the eyeballs...

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 14

This article in one of the San Francisco newspapers talks about a single mother of three, who following a divorce, decided that investing in real estate would be her ticket...

Taxpayer-backed mortgages for undocumented immigrants?

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 14

The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, recently unveiled a proposal that garnered controversy almost before he even finished his speech: He wants to create a new state-backed mortgage loan program...

Are Mortgage Lenders on Thin Ice?

Posted by: Peter Coy on December 13

You know what gets me nervous? When people who usually say calming things seem to be getting a little nervous. Standard & Poor's, which like BusinessWeek is owned by the...

Celebrities

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 13

It seems to me that one of the residual perks of being a Hollywood celebrity is the ability to make a killing in real estate. The easy explanation is that...

Boston bubble bursting...

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 13

So much attention has been paid on the softness in California housing, and here at BusinessWeek, two of my colleagues have an article in the current issue talking about the...

Passing On My Home

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on December 13

The looming threat of a $1.5 million tax bill motivated me to action. How to keep our family home in Aspen and minimize or avoid the potential 50% estate tax...

A Sunnier Forecast in California?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on December 07

The UCLA Anderson Forecast has earned the ire of California's real estate community in recent years by continually forecasting that the state's housing bubble was about to pop. Now amidst...

My house, my home

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on December 06

My 8-year-old son asked me recently what the words, real estate, meant. Simple, I said. Real estate is property, land, and buildings. Like our house. His father and I own...

Real-time indicator local housing prices (Part II)

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 03

Ben Engebreth, the creator of the site that provides "real time" data on seller asking prices, HousingTracker, which I mentioned in a posting a couple of days ago, writes in...

Don't forget the Jumbo risk

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on December 01

Shame on the California Association of Realtors! The trade association for real estate agents is complaining that this week's decision by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lift their single...

Real-time indicator of local housing prices?

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 01

Props to "Wes" on our active "Washington DC bubble" thread for pointing out a neat web site, HousingTracker, that attempts to provide a real-time indicator of housing price trends in...