The Housing Bubble Blog

A report from the Agence France-Presse. "Chinese nationals have become the largest foreign buyers of US property after pouring billions into the market in search of safe offshore assets, according to a study. A huge surge in Chinese buying of both residential and commercial real estate last year...

A report from Crain's Cleveland Business in Ohio. "In downtown Cleveland and University Circle, a bevy of new apartment buildings and rehabs of former offices to dwellings have come online, and more are on the way. Consider the last six weeks of insanity: Developers have rolled out more than 1,500...

The Indy Star reports from Indiana. "Tyler and Brenda Ewigleben found out firsthand how competitive the Indianapolis-area housing market is when they decided to buy their first home this spring. When they found a house they liked, they knew their initial offer on the two-bedroom ranch with a loft...

A weekend topic on the global manias, starting with this report by James J. Green. "'The only thing that really matters in asset allocation is sidestepping some of the pain when the rare, great bubbles break,' writes Jeremy Grantham in GMO’s latest quarterly letter to investors, recounting his...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Sales of Chicago-area homes and condos priced over $1 million dropped 9 percent during the first three months of this year, according to Re/Max research. The median sales price of single-family homes dropped 2 percent to just under $1.39 million,...

News Channel 5 reports from Tennessee. "It's no surprise that Nashville home sales are hot, but new numbers released this week have caused some to wonder if Middle Tennessee could be on the verge of a housing bubble. According to the Greater Nashville Association of Realtors, home sales increased...

A report from National Real Estate Investor. "Developers increased the number of new apartment starts every year since the recovery began. But now, the number of new apartments may have finally caught up with the number of new renters who need these units. The percentage of vacant apartments has...

A report from Bloomberg on China. "From the Dutch tulip craze of 1637 to America’s dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, history is littered with speculative frenzies that ended badly for investors. But rarely has a mania escalated so rapidly, and spurred such fevered trading, as the great...

The Lincoln Journal Star reports from Nebraska. "According to the Realtors Association of Lincoln, the median sales price in the first quarter was $166,900. That's up more than 10 percent from the same time last year and the highest local median price ever recorded. Local real estate officials lay...

A weekend look at the housing bubble, starting with this MarketWatch opinion piece by Michael Brush. "Back when the 2005-07 housing bubble was brewing, photos of impossibly small houses selling for insanely high prices famously made the rounds. It was one of those signals that you look back on and...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Home buyers and sellers took off their gloves and went at it in April, with an unusually large share of contracts — as many as 23 percent — falling through, according to a report from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. 'It is unbelievably...

A report from Realtor.com. "Many upper-end renters are now actually seeing price cuts. But some housing experts believe the market could be arriving at a turning point where these discounts begin filtering down to the masses. It’s already beginning to happen in some of the nation’s hottest housing...

The Mercury News reports from California. "More than one-third of Bay Area residents say they are ready to leave in the next few years, citing high housing costs and traffic as the region's biggest problems, according to a poll. Of the 1,000 people polled by the Bay Area Council, 34 percent said...

A report from Bloomberg on Denmark. "In Denmark, where rates have been below zero longer than anywhere else on the planet, the private sector is saving more than it did when rates were positive (before 2012). As the Danes head even further down their negative-rate tunnel, the experiences of the...

A report from the Dallas Morning News. "Hey, real estate is back! It’s not just San Francisco and its new homes 'starting in the $1,000,000s,' as the now famous billboard cries out. I’m thinking about this while spending a few days in Sonoma County. California real estate is headed back to prices...

A weekend topic on the Federal Reserve starting with this MarketWatch interview, "The Fed does what it wants and plays favorites. And as a result it’s lost the trust of the American people. That is the stark view the central bank’s actions in the wake of the financial crisis by Lawrence Jacobs, a...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Marfa is stuck way out in the high desert. On the map, the town measures just 1.6 square miles. Surrounding it is cattle range—an openness that seems as impossible to build on as the ocean. Because so much of the town is low, the sky so big, the...

Lex 18 reports from Kentucky. "Experts said the market in the Bluegrass is hot. It's the best that realtors have seen in years, especially in Lexington. Lucy Clark has been on the hunt for a new home for about a month. However, she said houses are flying off the market. 'It definitely seems crazier...

A report from Bloomberg. "Canadians who collected Sunbelt bargains during the housing crash have shifted from buying to selling. They’re locking in gains from years of soaring values that are even sweeter because the American dollar, in the past five years, has jumped about a third against their...

A report from The Record in New Jersey. "According to the 2015 State of Hispanic Homeownership Report conducted by the Hispanic Wealth Project and National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, Hispanics were the only major ethnic or racial group to raise its homeownership rate last...