[Note: Please go to “Firing Your Realtor – Part 1” to see the beginning of this post] Three. Poor or no feedback from prospective Buyers. As I like to tell clients, the best feedback any home seller can receive is a full-price, non-contingent offer from a financially qualified Buyer (even better: several of them!). However, in...Read More
Is it Too Late to Bail Out Enron?? [Note to Readers: I originally published the following post in mid-December. At that time, the cumulative federal bailout bill was about $2 trillion. Including guarantees of dubious bank assets, that number now is closer to $4 trillion — $173 billion of which has been pumped into just...Read More
Renting vs. Buying: How Interchangeable? Carla Zeineh, 22, and her husband recently began shopping for a home in Irvine, Calif., and discovered that with a 5% mortgage rate, her monthly payment on a $350,000 two-bedroom home with 20% down could be less than the $1,800 month that they pay in rent on their two-bedroom condo....Read More
Underwater . . vs. Drowned According to The New York Times, “about $500 billion in mortgage debt is already underwater” (“Bailout Likely to Focus on Most Afflicted Homeowners“). That’s realtor-speak for a house being worth less than the mortgage against it. Unfortunately, based on my calculations, that number appears to be conservative. Using industry statistics,...Read More
Trulia.com Hits — and (Mostly) Misses Like Zillow.com, Trulia.com promises to arm prospective home buyers with reams of data about homes for sale. Buyers can search by property type, price, square footage, zip code, etc.; get information about schools and other community info; and even pose questions to the Trulia. com “community” that generate email...Read More
Rebutting Ritholtz on “Housing Affordability” The [Housing Affordability Index] as presently constructed is utterly worthless. It provides little or no insight into how affordable US Housing actually is. Further, what is omitted from the index is especially relevant to the problems occurring in the housing market today. The Index fails to account for — or...Read More
