Real estate for dummies by Real Estate MAX

The Marketwatch headline today?  New-Home Sales Inch Higher in March:
Boosted by warmer weather in the Northeast and Midwest, sales of new homes increased by 2.6% in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 858,000, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.
That is of course month-over-month.  Year-over-year, [YOY] sales are down 23.5%.  According to the Commerce Department:
Sales [...]

The recent data  that came  out for February, 2007, that housing starts were up by 9 percent  is wonderful news for the building community, but this will be the eye of the storm as building starts as a statistic will collapse in the 3rd quarter of 2007. And that is not all bad.
In the [...]

When the housing boom was going on, the financial markets watched and absorbed the profits without much fanfare or hesitation. But since the subprime mortgage meltdown of the past few weeks housing has been under the spotlight and is making the market have huge swings in pricing.
If you are an investor in both real [...]

This Friday the National Association of Realtors will release it’s "Existing Home Sales Report," which will include data on last month’s median price.  Generally, median price [the point at which half the homes sell for less, and half the homes sell for more] is considered a better indicator of market trends than is the average price.  It is [...]

Lereah’s headline on today’s National Association of Realtors (NAR) press release was "Existing Home Sales Improve in January."  All the Bloomberg pundits this morning were celebrating a 3.5% increase in existing home sales.  According to my version of Excel though, January’s sales number of 6.46 million is LESS than last January’s 6.75 million.  The 3.5% [...]

It’s Lereah Day.[1] Near the end of each month, NAR’s chief economist releases statistics on the previous month’s existing home sales. The Mainstream media avidly follows these numbers and Lereah’s (often hyper-optimistic) comments. The January analysis has just been released.[2]

MSM interpretations are coming in thick and fast. I’ve got a couple of links to these in the [...]

Earlier this month we talked about the benefits of buying into the student housing market, and now Marketplace has an interview on the benefits of owning off campus housing as a investor and landlord.
I still think this a good local investment if you are hands on and willing to get dirty. College students in [...]

It has been a long tradition of developers dealing with a primary brokerage on their properties to manage the sales effort of new development. But an outside the fence brokerage is claiming that the title “official real estate company of Wintergreen Resort” is an antitrust violation of the 1890 Sherman Act and also the Virginia [...]

One of the regions of the country that saw the biggest run up in real estate prices over the past 5 years was Baltimore. So when the slowdown occurred, most were expecting carnage in the city. But as the Baltimore Sun reports, real estate prices can not be quantified by a geographic region such as [...]

I thought as we are winding up 2006, it would be interesting to check the forecasting ability of real estate’s favorite prognosticator, David Lereah, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).  We do have a bit of an advantage, since we’ve got that 20/20 hindsight.  Here’s what this year’s national home sales (seasonally [...]