Category Archives: housing

Robert Shiller vs Superstar Cities

It seems there’s academic backup for my thesis
that New York City property is only going up: a paper
called "Superstar Cities" by Joseph Gyourko, Christopher
Mayer
, and Todd Sinai.
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Paying Down the Mortgage vs Investing in the Market

Should I keep my mortgage balance high in order to invest in stocks and bonds?
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Adventures in Personal Finance, Part 2: The Rich Couple

Sometimes the middle classes have a hell of a lot more financial horse-sense
than the rich, even if the financial press doesn’t like to spin it that way.
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Bernanke on Housing: No Sign of a Rate Cut

Bloomberg says that “Bernanke didn’t discuss monetary policy in his remarks,” but the speech reads very much to me as though he’s saying that the Fed is not going to cut interest rates in response to housing-market weakness.
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New York Property Datapoints of the Day

The average New York City apartment has gone
up 23% in the past year

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Can Mortgage-Backed Bonds be Restructured?

Amidst all the noise and hype surrounding the subprime mortgage market, there’s
one thing which hasn’t got a lot of press. (USA
Today
, astonishingly, seems to be ahead of the curve here.) If loans have
been pooled, tranched, retranched, and sold to hundreds of investors and CDOs
and the like, what happens when the loans goes bad? How much leeway do loan
servicers have to modify loans which are owned by a disparate set of bondholders?
And what kind of mechanism exists for bondholders or ratings agencies to approve
servicers helping out homeowners in distress?
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Were There Accounting Problems at New Century?

The New York Times thinks there were. But the New York Times might not be right.
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Real Estate Datapoints of the Day

New York’s office buildings are expensive. London’s are ridiculous.
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David Lereah, Not Quite RIP

The NAR’s chief economist leaves his pulpit.
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Euphemism Watch

What to say when you’re stuck with a house you can’t sell.
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The Silver Lining to Banking Crises

Prosperity is closely linked to homeownership. But to get there, the occasional banking crisis might not be such a bad thing after all.
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How Derivatives Caused the Property Boom

Sitting on the property panel with Bob Toll was Steven Green, of Greenstreet
Partners. He had a very good explanation for the run-up in US property values
in recent years: financial derivatives.
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Bob Toll on US Housing

Toll Brothers CEO Bob Toll gives his take on the US housing market.
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The Fannie & Freddie Bailout: Less Than Meets the Eye

Yesterday’s announcement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won’t help most subprime borrowers.
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When Homeowners Who Can Pay, Don’t Pay

It’s one thing to make big mortgage payments in order to pay off a house. It’s another thing entirely to make mortgage payments after the house has already been sold.
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Quantifying Subprime Losses

Fremont sells more subprime loans at a loss of just 3.5%.
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The $200 Million Apartment

More
evidence
that house prices are moving towards a power-law
distribution
.
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Why New York City Property Is Only Going Up

New York City is a unique property market, which can and will continue to appreciate even if the rest of the US sees a significant slowdown.
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How home prices can be steady even if median home prices fall

It’s a well-known fact that the average new-home size has been growing steadily for years, and positively booming of late. So if those new homes bear the brunt of the slowdown, and are sold in much lower numbers, that could do nasty things to the median sales price even if any given existing home doesn’t fall in value at all. The new homes don’t even need to be sold at a lower price, there just needs to be fewer sales.
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