I thought this piece from Greg Fielding, a longtime real estate agent, was especially informative. Greg has experience in selling high end property and low end foreclosures, raw land, short sales, development work, apartment buildings, and working with investors, He blogs at Bay Area Real Estate Trends, about both local markets and the bigger...
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> The Palm Beach Post reference was to this group of realtors back in March 2007: Quote of the day: Realtors Get Real. Classic stuff . . . > Source: House Prices Are Still 10% Too High, Says Barry Ritholtz Henry Blodget Yahoo Tech Ticker Sep 02, 2010 http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/house-prices-are-still-10-too-high-says-barry-ritholtz-535388.html
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Is a stealth shift in policy afoot, to find the bottom in the housing market by getting banks to start clearing out their foreclosed and “ought to be foreclosed” exposures?
On Tuesday, Fannie Mae announced that it was not longer giving servicers free rein, and was clamping down on multiple fronts, such as procedures...
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“Lehman was forced into bankruptcy not because it neglected to act responsibly or seek solutions to the crisis, but because of a decision, based on flawed information, not to provide Lehman with the support given to each of its competitors and other nonfinancial firms in the ensuing days.”
-Richard S. Fuld Jr., Lehman Brothers former...
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We have had a god-awful run of Housing data. New and Existing Home Sales, Defaults and Foreclosure data, even the Case Shiller report — all have been utterly horrific.
In light of this, I want to make the following announcement: Attention RE Agents! The National Association of Realtors are doing you a terrible disservice.
Consider the...
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This post first appeared on February 22, 2008
Man, not only does the Administration tell whoppers, but it is completely shameless about them. The latest sighting comes from Reuters:
Treasury Undersecretary Robert Steel told the Reuters Housing Summit it is proper for homeownership to hold a special status….
“If I default on my credit card debt, no...
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Jonathan Miller and I have been kicking around an idea for a “Home ownership is a good thing” OpEd.
Apparently, we aren’t the only ones:
• Five Reasons to Stop Worrying About Your Home’s Value (Moneywatch)
• In Defense of Home Ownership (NYT)
None of these hit the issues and topics that we want to cover — but...
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In case you’ve managed not to notice, the old saw, “the best government money can buy” increasingly applies to our legal system. In ECONNED, I describe briefly how a well funded “law and economics” movement which had corporate backing, including from the extreme right wing that was systematically trying to move America to the...
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I think we all know the answer to the question in the headline, courtesy F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different than you and me.” And the fact that they have more money means their defaults are couched as pure business decisions. But mere homeowners, told to view their house as an investment, are...
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Boy, when you think you’ve seen the worst in utterly shameless, self serving tripe, someone manages to outdo it. Admittedly, it’s awfully hard to beat Steve Schwarzmann’s recent one-two punch of utter canard wrapped in tasteless hyperbole, that of Obama proposals that private equity kingpins pay taxes on what is really the fruits of...
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