Harvard University professor Nicolas Retsinas talks about the housing crash and recovery. The bottom line: Expect a “trawling-along-the-bottom type of recovery.”

Here’s a peek at the cut-throat world of New York’s luxury apartment sales these days.
Reading the piece and thinking of Boston, it’s almost like a baseball manager walking out to the mound in the seventh inning, reaching out for the ball with one hand and waving in the relief with the other. Starting pitchers [...]

A look at the age-old question: To buy or to rent? Excerpt:
However lawmakers define the government’s role in the housing market, consumers have already begun redefining the American Dream: One where it has become socially OK to mail in a rent check rather than a mortgage coupon.
Hmmm. Is the current trend really about it being [...]

Despite the end of the federal tax credit, housing conditions across most of the country improved in May, according to a new S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices report.
Massachusetts fared pretty well, with home prices increasing about 1.6 percent month-to-month and 4.8 percent year-over-year. The report tends to confirm what Banker & Tradesman is also reporting (see [...]

Actually, the rich are worse than us. They’re now the biggest defaulters on home mortgages across America, according to the New York Times.
It’s tempting to snort with delight at their plight. But here’s the problem: These walk-aways are probably tied to 1.) Loss of jobs. 2.) Loss of wealth due to Wall Street’s crash two [...]

Scott Brown has found new digs in Washington, D.C. It sounds a little pricey at $299,000 for 468 square feet.
But it’s on Capitol Hill and only two blocks away from his Senate office building. Congressman Steve Lynch has a small place in the same building.
File under: Living like kings normal people.

The Treasury’s Inspector General says the government handed out 1,295 home tax credits to prisoners already in jail, some of them serving life sentences, valued at $9.1 million.
What else can you say?
File under: Home, sweet home

Things may be going relatively well here in Massachusetts (see post immediately below). But it’s a different story for housing in other parts of the nation.
It’s hard to maintain with a straight face a recovery is underway when most of the numbers elsewhere are pointing to a different conclusion.
File under: North is south.

The loss of the $8,000 federal tax credit has obviously hurt the real estate market, but picky buyers are also slowing down sales.
One can’t blame buyers too much. It’s the market. If sellers have to jump through hoops to make a sale, then it’s jump through hoops to make a sale.
But sometimes buyers demand [...]

Not quite. But the debate over the extent of home ownership in the U.S. is getting hot and heavy.
There’s definitely a worry that Congress will throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water, eliminating rules and tax benefits that played no part in the subprime-mortgage controversy. Lawmakers will end up harming the entire economy [...]