It’s now officially a lost decade for home prices. With the release of the January data for the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes, prices in a national composite dropped 3.8% from a year before, rolling back to the levels of early 2003.
However, the good news is that the pace of existing home sales is picking up. …
Corks must be popping in Cincinnati—albeit from bottles of Bonnaire—now that the Queen City has finished first in the U.S. in a recent ranking of the costs of doing business. That’s first as in cheapest: Thanks in part to especially low property taxes, transportation costs and leasing rates, Cincinnati was rated the least-costly city …
Sterilized bond buying could help lower interest rates and boost the economy a bit without adding to inflation, but don’t expect a major impact.
Attracted by the promise of jobs and tax revenue, most towns would offer significant economic incentives to attract a large corporate headquarters. But being the home base of a corporate giant like Facebook has its challenges …
After the Great Recession, there were some pundits who theorized that real estate would make a “W-shaped” recovery. With the S&P/Case-Shiller housing prices out this morning, it’s now clear that there are not one, but two “Ws” in the chart — and that’snot a good thing. Index prices fell 1.1% from November to December. In …
One of the many cans being kicked down Washington’s boulevards these days is the government conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Congress and the Bush administration …
It’s wild to think that a strawberry picker who earned $15,000 qualified for a $720,000 mortgage in 2005. But it’s just as ridiculous to think that a buyer with a credit score of 720 and who can put 20% down may not have …
A key step was taken yesterday in moving the country beyond the housing crisis, a crisis that triggered the worst recession in decades and whose lingering effects continue to hinder the nation’s nascent recovery. The deal, which …
This post was updated at 1:25pm
It’s been a long slog, but government officials and representatives from major U.S. banks have come to terms on a settlement that would put an end to federal and state investigations into …
Recently, there have been lots of positive signs coming out of the real estate market. Foreclosure rates are down, housing starts are up, and homes have appreciated in value in some markets for the first time since 2006. Even so, …
President Obama held a rally yesterday in Falls Church, Virginia, where he provided more details concerning his plan, mentioned briefly in his state of the union speech, to stabilize the housing market. The centerpiece of the plan is a new program that would expand HARP to many homeowners whose loans are not backed by government-owned …
