The Federal Housing Administration plans to impose new restrictions on reverse mortgages starting next year (i.e. tomorrow). The move will put a small crimp in the sales of homes by seniors, but it won’t really impact the overall housing inventory, as far as we can tell. Remember: Most reverse mortgages, by design, are structured to [...]

The clip below shows how technology will change our homes, workpace and how we shop. Google Glasses:

Deutsche Bank has agreed to settle a housing-investment dispute that involves, of local interest, the Massachusetts Bricklayers and Masons Trust Fund. Basically, the plaintiffs accused Deutsche Bank of lying about the quality of mortgages stuffed  into massive securities products. Can you believe it? A giant financial institution accused of lying to investors? Anyway, it looks [...]

This sounds like an “only in San Francisco” story if I ever heard one. A San Francisco man who paid $621,000 for a condo to share with his 10-year old son is fighting to rescind the deal after learning the other unit in the two-unit building is home to sadomasochism enthusiast who engages in loud [...]

Preliminary data for March home sales and prices are not very encouraging. But a prominent housing economist, Karl Case, thinks it’s time to to give more credence to month-to-month comparisons, rather than year-to-year comparisons, because of how last year’s numbers are distorted by the housing tax credit. Seen from the month-to-month perspective, the market is [...]

Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work. ~Robert Orben

Last week I blogged about how technology is replacing retail jobs. Today, Paul Krugman took it a step further on how technology is replacing college eduacted jobs. The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze [...]

“Very little is written about what will happen when all the dollars, built up as foreign central bank and private holdings, get spent. Indeed, we believe that not only will the dollars get spent, but this spending will have massive inflationary implications for America.” —Richard Branson

As I have stated many times before on this Boston real estate blog, look at the job market as one major (not the only) indicator on forecasting the real estate sales market. Click on the visual video below. The total number of  jobs in America fell by nearly two million over the past decade. That [...]

Here is the video of Professors Paul Krugman and Martin Feldstein (former Reagan advisor and NBER president), and Jan Hatzius, chief economist of Goldman Sachs: The Economic Policy Institute conference on October 5, 2010 File Under:  A group of very pessimistic guys.