Category Archives: housing

The NYT talks today of "Mr. Paulson’s long-term desire to wind down the companies’ portfolios, drastically shrink the role of both Fannie and Freddie and perhaps eliminate their unique status altogether". It’s not a bad idea, and I like the … Continue reading →

John Hempton has an interesting take on the Frannie bailout: the markets forced Treasury to take this step by being irrational. It’s almost as though there was some kind of collusion going on. Remember the prisoner’s dilemma? Given the choice … Continue reading →

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae — should shareholders be wiped out, or merely massively diluted? What should happen to preferred shareholders? Can the government create a new class of senior subordinate debt, and if so, should … Continue reading →

How do we know we’re in a housing bubble? One way of knowing is by looking at house prices, which during the bubble were rising much more quickly than rents. That was clearly unsustainable. But today, in a CPI FAQ, … Continue reading →

The housing bubble was not confined to the United States. If anything, the bubble here was later and smaller than in most of Europe. So it’s hardly surprising that house-price declines are not confined to the US either. According to … Continue reading →

Chris Kissell has a great headline over his story that only 26% of homeowners don’t know what kind of mortgage they have, down from 34% a year ago: "Americans less clueless". But there’s also a silver lining to this cluelessness … Continue reading →

Fannie and Freddie are down again; the shares are so cheap at this point that even a relatively modest fluctuation of less than 80 cents in the Freddie share price will hit the headlines as a 20% move. The fact … Continue reading →

Justin Wolfers, meet Tim Wheeler, the CEO of UK property group Brixton. Mr Wheeler said the opening lines of the American songwriter’s All Along the Watchtower “seem to capture the beleaguered mindset of the UK commercial real estate market”. For … Continue reading →

This full-floor apartment on Park Avenue first hit the market in November 2005 with an asking price of $18.9 million, or $3,000 per square foot. Almost three years later, it’s still unsold. Maybe it’s a function of the $17,138 per … Continue reading →

House prices are finally falling in London: Asking prices in London fell 5.3% in August, according to the Rightmove house price survey – equivalent to a ߣ21,000 drop in a single month. Prices in some of the most sought-after suburbs … Continue reading →

Jonathan Miller takes a look at what’s happened to Manhattan apartment prices over the past three years — since, more or less, the national housing market peaked in 2005. On a year-over-year basis, it turns out, Manhattan co-ops have appreciated … Continue reading →

The Washington Post, this morning, fronts a story about the troubles facing renters when their landlords are foreclosed upon. It’s much longer on anecdote than it is on data, but even so it puzzles me. The clear feeling one gets … Continue reading →

John Hempton is doing an admirable job teasing out the dynamics of the US mortgage market, and asking whether the losses we’re currently seeing are due to fraud or to broader economic stress. If it’s mainly fraud, he says, that … Continue reading →

Charlie Calomiris and two co-authors have a piece in today’s Washington Post making an improbable case: Most Americans have not experienced any significant decline in the value of their homes — nor are they likely to. "In our research," they … Continue reading →

BusinessWeek had a good idea this week: look at big metropolitan areas and see how the best-performing zip codes have compared to the worst-performing ones. Unfortunately, the final implementation is atrocious: it involves clicking laboriously through an interminable slide show, … Continue reading →