Great story about open house
disasters.  I haven’t heard many shocking stories about open houses in Boston, but I’ll see
what I can find out.
By Teri Karush Rogers, New York
Times

As
some brokers see it, displaced anxiety or even rage is causing a higher proportion of buyers -
battered by high prices, low inventory and jugular bidding wars – to [...]

This is an adorable story about a real estate agent who went nuts on a
prospective client, while checking out his for-sale-by-owner at an open
house.
From Property Grunt

The
couple advertised the open house, and Gia Wang, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman, was one
of several brokers who showed up to look at the apartment. It is common for [...]

Sh-h-h-h – don’t tell anyone about
this story, lest they get any ideas of creating a real estate blog, here in
Boston.

New York’s
Real Estate Know-It-AllBy Jesse Hempel, Business Week

Lockhart Steele’s Curbed.com blog is a magnet for anyone looking
for the lowdown on the industry’s Gotham gossip
Brokers might tell you
about the two-bedroom co-op boasting panoramic city views from Lower [...]

Everyone was up in arms about this,
yesterday.  I think all of the reporters miss an important point (although I haven’t thought
this through, yet) – How is a lower number of home starts a "good" thing?  There are
so many buyers waiting to buy, right now.  Lowering the number of potential homes for sale
ain’t gonna help them [...]

Good story, in the New York Times, about people buying
investment properties.  It’s about people in New York City, but it’s relevant for us, here
in Boston, as well.  Boston has always been a good market for investing in rental properties,
although things definitely slowed down for the past couple of years, as people bought instead of
rented.  Still, [...]

This is a good article, from the
Washington Post.  It’s about real estate in the Washington DC area, but the points it makes
are relevant to us here, in Boston, as well.  It pretty much says what everyone else is saying
(parts of which I don’t agree with, by the way) – that the real estate market seems [...]

Below is a report of sales and
listing activity for the past week.

Information is derived from LINK, the online
database that is used by most Boston real estate agents.
New listings:
256
Back on market (listings that went under agreement but deals fell through): 8
Price changes (almost always downward, but some go up): 133
Under agreements: 160
Off market (variety of reasons, [...]

Stories in the news,
today:
Complete article:href=”http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-19-gentrification_x.htm?POE=click-refer”>Gentrifi
cation  helps everyone
Everyone knows gentrification
uproots the urban poor with higher rents, higher taxes and $4 lattes. It’s the lament of community
organizers, the theme of the 2004 film Barbershop 2  and the guilty assumption of the yuppies
moving in.
But everyone may be wrong, according to Lance
Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at [...]

I am getting a bunch of hits from people doing research on
the Trilogy project, in the Fenway.
I don’t have many specifics.  However,
first off, you should be aware that this is an apartment building, not condos.
There
have been plans announced for a condo project where the McDonald’s and Domino’s pizza shop are,
but it’s way too early for [...]

I will have to do some research on this, but my
first reaction to the two stories, below, from the Boston Herald, is that they are not reflective
of what’s really happening out there, right now.
First, any suggestion that
Dorchester isn’t hot hot hot is just plain wrong.  I’ve been there extensively over the past
month, and the amount [...]