This week’s Boston Real Estate Condo Market Reports are now available, here.
The market reports provide readers with detailed information on the state of the Boston real estate market.
The reports include data on inventory, recent sales, and price per square foot of condos for sale and recently closed.
In addition to a summary report of sales across [...]

The Warren Group weekly foreclosures data, for the week ending 12/27/2007, for all of Suffolk County (includes Boston, Revere, Winthrop and Chelsea-by-the-sea) (compared to the prior week).
New Petitions & Lis Pendens: 76 (70)
Auctions: 45 (35)
Bank Owned REO: 14 (14)
Industry Terms, courtesy of The Warren Group
A Foreclosure Auction: The public sale of mortgaged property, and usually [...]

Mortgage lenders:
Are most loans made these days “non-recourse”?
I guess I assumed almost all of them are.
Never really thought about it.
With a non-recourse loan, if you decide to stop paying your home loan, you can pretty much walk away, your loan is “forgiven”, and you go on with your life.
Otherwise, if you walk away from your [...]

I received this email, last week.
Would you be willing to blog about our new consumer site, MapRealty.com. It is a site that allows buyers and sellers to search property records, homes for sale, and recent home sales.
However, our “differentator” is we allow consumers to navigate the Google Map API down to parcel level mapping, and [...]

Here’s a couple (here are a couple …) facts & figures about subprime loans, etc., courtesy of the Associated Press:
The No. 1 reason its customers have been defaulting on mortgage loans is because their income was cut. That accounted for almost 60 percent of its loan defaults in the first 10 months of this year; [...]

Recently, a “non-bail-out” program was announced by the federal government, put together with great care by the US Treasury Secretary and many major lenders.
One of the elements of the proposal would freeze the interest rates on many loans. (The program has not been approved or made law, btw, it’ll be another 90-days before any action [...]

A story from the Journal discusses reverse mortgages, and how more and more elderly homeowners are using them in order to save their homes from foreclosure.
With a reverse mortgage, the bank makes payments to the homeowner instead of the homeowner making payments to a bank.
The loan is repaid, with interest, when the borrower sells the [...]

Toward the end of the year, everyone’s out with data on just about everything.
Today I read about the number of murders going down in many major US cities, this year.
Year-to-date, at least.
Unfortunately, some cities have experienced increases.
Historic low in NYC, Chicago homicides – By Colleen Long, Associated Press
City — 2007 — 2006
Boston — 66 murders [...]

Dateline, December 27, 2007, Stamford, New York

Yesterday, the Globe ran an article about a woman who owns a three-family home on Callendar Street (actually, Callender Street), in Dorchester.
Still home for Christmas – By Donovan Slack, The Boston Globe
When dawn broke Christmas morning, Kendra Jackson smiled as she watched her 11-year-old daughter tear shiny, red wrapping paper from a gift. Then she [...]