The Housing Bubble Blog

A weekend topic starting with CNBC. "In the midst of the mad selling and explaining and quantifying and qualifying of potentially the biggest U.S. tax overhaul in decades, President Donald Trump's chief economic advisor stood at a White House podium and made a bold declaration: 'People don't buy...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "While there’s no doubt that a lack of homes on the market means sellers continue to have the upper hand, there are signs of buyer fatigue and flattening prices in the District. 'The housing market is slowing in nearly every metro area in the...

A report from McKnight Senior Living. "An overabundance of unoccupied independent living, assisted living and memory care units means that billions of dollars in capital is not earning returns in the marketplace, Larry Rouvelas, principal of Senior Housing Analytics, and Kurt Read, principal of RSF...

A report from Realtor.com. "Maybe you're addicted to those home-flipping shows on HGTV where glam couples buy grim shacks, spend 22 minutes smashing down walls and adding funky kitchen backsplashes, and then make tens of thousands selling the refurbished places on the open market. Or perhaps you're...

A report from Mortgage News Daily. "New home sales were down again in August, following a 9.4 percent plunge in July. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development said sales of newly constructed homes sold during the month at a seasonally adjusted rate of 560,000...

A report from My Kawartha in Canada. "Prospective homebuyers are looking at reduced costs, longer listings and less bidding wars. At least for now. Following Peterborough’s hot spring market which drove costs up, realtors are saying prices have gone from a boil to a simmer. Leona Lambert owns a...

A report from Barron's on Florida. "To grasp the buying opportunities emerging in Miami’s condo market, it pays to study the prices obtained this year for two remarkably similar apartments next door to each other on the main drag of Brickell, the residential high-rise district in downtown Miami...

A weekend topic starting with Vulture. "HGTV was the third-most-popular network on cable television in 2016, a 24/7 testament to the powers of Target chic, the open-plan kitchen, and social conservatism. It unspools with the same bland cheerfulness as Leave It to Beaver, and its heart is in the...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "That chill in the air? It's called fall...as in falling number of houses sold. 'With pricing on the rise you might think that's a little bit of a concern but we've got int rates that are unheard of and it's been that way for some time so we've...

A report from City Lab. "If renters paid just what they could afford in rent, the average household would have $6,200 a year more in their pocket to spend on groceries, childcare, medical care, and education—things one in five households have been skimping on to make rent. Collectively, that would...

A report from Mortgage Orb. "There’s been a lot of speculation in the mortgage industry lately about how hurricanes Harvey and Irma might effect delinquencies and defaults in Texas and Florida – not to mention mortgage originations and home sales. A high percentage of the homes in the area were...

A report from the Washington Post. "London: They are not hard to spot, if you know where to look, especially at night - the floors of swanky, new apartments, most of the windows dark, almost all the time. The zombie flats. Owned, but empty. There's enough empty property here to be given a name in...

A report from the Boulder Daily Camera in Colorado. "More than 1,000 apartments and rooms for rent are sitting empty in Boulder right now, either too expensive or too old or just too inconveniently located for someone to claim. Renters have never had more choices, as reflected in the 7.9 percent...

A weekend topic starting with Jacobin Magazine. "Richard Florida, one of the most influential thinkers about cities in postwar America, wants you to know that he got almost everything about cities wrong. If you live in an urban center in North America, the United Kingdom, or Australia, you are...

A report from Southern California Public Radio. "With downtown Los Angeles seeing a vacancy rate that's three times higher than the rest of the city, landlords are ratcheting up the competition for tenants. Nina Hu and her husband ended up going with a one-bedroom loft at G-12 Apartments, which...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "About that house in Sunnyvale — you know, the one that just sold for $782,000 over its listing price? In Cupertino, 10 houses sold for $200,000 or more above the asking price. One sold for — get this — $507,000 over the listing price. The young...

A report from the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. "I have a 'liar loan' – a mortgage based on less than absolutely factual information. I've pretty much always had liar loans. And I recently obtained a 'liar credit card.' So what? Given readers' (and therefore the media's) love of stories that...

A report from the Deseret News in Utah. "For the eighth straight year, vacancy rates for rental apartments in the Salt Lake metro area have declined — down to the lowest rates ever. 'This low vacancy is fueling a record-breaking level of construction of new apartment buildings,' said Kip Paul,...

A report from the Bonner County Daily Bee in Idaho. "It’s important to have myths in life. A myth contains elements of truth wrapped into hopeful aspirations. They’re more than fairy tales, but less than scientific fact. Why do we create and believe in myths then? Take 'affordable housing' for...

A report from Quartz. "Yale economics professor Robert Shiller won the Nobel prize for his work on bubbles. As Shiller sees it, 'big things happen if someone invents the right story and promulgates it.' Quartz spoke with him about some of the frothiest assets today, from bitcoin to tech stocks....