Last week I had the pleasure of finally meeting Jonathan Miller, co-founder, principal, President and CEO of residential real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, co-founder and managing principal of commercial real estate appraisal firm Miller Cicero, writer of the Matrix real estate blog, and, now, co-founder employee of Radar Logic.
Radar Logic is a new company [...]

So, the Herald is going to sell its building and (more lucratively) its six-acres of land.
The Globe story on the announcement includes this paragraph:
Other developers are also looking at the neighborhood. A city official who requested anonymity because no official action has been taken said developers has shown the Boston Redevelopment Authority a preliminary proposal [...]

Buried in an Inman News story about ZipRealty’s second quarter revenues was this morsel:
The company employed 2,070 agents as of June 30, up 24 percent compared to its agent count at the close of second-quarter 2006. ZipRealty’s value of real estate transactions closed climbed to $1.41 billion in second-quarter 2007, up 10.6 percent compared to [...]

Well, I hesitate to mention it, at all, but in the end figured it was alright to say something.
The other day, someone on the Globe’s real estate blog a real estate agent wrote the following:
The opposite of “subprime mortgage” is not “prime mortgage”; it’s a “conforming” mortgage. To get a conforming (or conventional) loan, borrowers [...]

Wait.
Wasn’t the Globe’s real estate blog originally called “Boston Real Estate Blog”?
It’s now called “Boston Real Estate Now“.
Did they blink?

Details:
National Development, Purcell to redevelop Herald site – By Scott Van Voorhis, The Boston Herald
Boston Herald property sold – By Christopher Rowland, The Boston Globe
WHOA.
( ** Reports say that the Herald owns 6 acres of land – what’s unclear to me is what this includes. The Herald building, of course, but what about the [...]

I’m joking!
Interesting set of data released by Jack Guttentag, the self-proclaimed “Mortgage Professor” shows that mortgage loan rates for the best-rated borrowers haven’t gone up during the past three months.
For the typical borrower, however, rates have increased, and may be going higher.
Basically, he looked at rates in early May, and compared them to rates today [...]

Eh, what can you do?
So, Sam Yoon, reckless young city councilor, has proposed a new plan to encourage landlords to negotiate rents with their tenants. Encourage, by which I mean “force”, since if a landlord chooses NOT to meet with their tenants, a letter will be entered into a file (permanently) at City Hall, [...]

The Times put together a couple of pretty graphics showing how home loans are made and then resold on the secondary market.
I’m not sure it’s a subject that needs pretty graphics – it’s a simple concept, really – but maybe it will encourage some people to learn more about it.
More: Housing Busts and Hedge Funds [...]

Well, here’s quite simply one of the best, most-detailed blog entries I’ve ever read.
This guy should send this to a newspaper to be published.
If you are considering buying a property that is a “short-sale”, or you are a seller facing this situation, or you are a real estate agent wanting to know everything about it, [...]