Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the U.S. government is seeking forfeiture of property and assets of the Russian spy ring that was exposed in June — including Cambridge property. That probably means the Trowbridge Street house owned by Cambridge’s own Boris and Natasha, who went by the names “Donald Howard Heathfield” and “Tracey Lee Ann Foley.” [...]

Boston Massachusetts Mortgage Rate Update is a resource for potential Homeowners and current Mortgage Borrowers to understand what economic data is relevant and what the situation is with mortgage Interest Rates. Brian Cav will provide a opinion as to whether you should lock or float your Home Mortgage.

Economist Karl Case, most recent comment regarding housing:
 Bouncing along the bottom.
It’s stopped the free fall we saw every month. I don’t think anyone is predicting it’s going to go up very much.

In an exhaustive and highly researched article in the Business Insider today, Keith Jurow makes the argument that the true number of people who will walk away from their mortgage is under counted and will increase dramatically soon.
Conventional wisdom now puts these “strategic defaulters” at around 12% of the defaulted mortgages. But Jurow points out [...]

Average days on the market for current listings on MLS:
Back Bay condos – 165.13 days
Beacon Hill condos – 151.35 days
Charlestown condos – 103.77 days
Dorchester condos – 127.64 days
Jamaica Plain condos - 104.56 days
Midtown condos – 153.65 days
South Boston condos – 97.12 days
South End condos – 97.21 days

The Boston Globe sheds a little more light on the approval process for the 29-story Kensington Place apartment/retail development in Chinatown. The Herald had the story a couple weeks ago, btw, so not much terribly new. Except a glowing quote from the BRA, which is basically the unofficial green light, all-systems-go.
Builder says work on apartments [...]

There appears to be a little shake up going on with Boston proper real estate offices. In the last few days I have received letters and phone calls regarding real estate offices that are up for sale.
Today, I was told that Larry Fiorenza of City-Homes wants to sell his Beacon Hill office, no price was [...]

Hands down the scariest analyst interview of the year, and it’s from Meredith Whitney, who is not exactly known for crazy thoughts. She’s saying the budget crisis within states will cause “systemic risk” to the economy.
Her company looked into state budgets and found:  ”off balance sheet” accounting methods, highly leveraged borrowing, and ratings agency shenanigans. [...]

Amtrak is promising high speed rail for the northeast corridor. Again. Only this time the plans are way more ambitious than the old Acela idea. Here’s a link to the complete proposal PDF.
For a mere $117 billion proposed spending over 25 years or so, Amtrak would build a new high-speed rail system linking Boston-New-York-Philadelphia-DC. Average [...]

Below is a summary from the  Massachusetts Association of Realtors regarding  housing inventory and days-on-market.

Inventory and Days on Market:
The inventory of single-family homes as of August 31, 2010 increased 12.0 percent from August 2009 (28,251 listings in 2009 to 31,560 listings in 2010) which translates into 9.5 months of supply in August 2010.  This is [...]