Okay, most of us are tired of all these city-by-city ranking lists. But this one is pretty cool: Boston is ranked #10 in a list of the world’s most “competitive” cities, which measures economic growth, quality of human capital, and quality of life etc. The list was compiled by Citigroup.
Must be the academic, high tech, finance, and life sciences sectors that propelled Boston into the top 10. It certainly wasn’t the quality of pizza parlors here. That’s a pet peeve of ours. Yes, Santarpio’s and Regina’s are top-notch pizza places, along with a few others. But … where were we? Oh, yeah, economic competitiveness and Nobel Prize winners and industry innovation and diversity. We’re No. 10!
Please let me know if you have any questions, brian.cavanaugh@rmsmortgage.com 617-771-5021
Overall, look for Tuesday or Friday to be the most important day of the week due to the importance of those day’s reports and the FOMC meeting. Tomorrow will likely be the least active day for mortgage rates, but we could see plenty of movement in the markets and mortgage pricing several days this week. Therefore, please be attentive to the markets and maintain contact with your mortgage professional if still floating an interest rate.
If I were considering financing/refinancing a home, I would….
LOCK if my closing was taking place within 7 days…
FLOAT if my closing was taking place between 8 and 20 days…
FLOAT if my closing was taking place between 21 and 60 days…
FLOAT if my closing was taking place over 60 days from now…
This is only my opinion of what I would do if I were financing a home. It is only an opinion and cannot be guaranteed
I’ve been working with this client for several months. We found a property that we both thought might be a good investment for a Boston condo conversion.
This morning, a few hours before we were to submit an offer, my buyer was having doubts about the property and wanted my thoughts.
I told him I’m going to give him the same advice my father told me when I was having second thoughts on proposing to one of my girlfriends:
Here are some incredible photos of the real-life boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, where there’s now literally an old-fashioned oil rush under way, not unlike the California gold rush of the 1800s. No kidding.
A few years ago, you could have purchased rural property there for about $500 an acre. Today, land owners are turning down offers of $200,000 an acre. So many workers are flocking to the area, tiny apartments are being rented out at Boston/New York-like prices. They’re building and selling small shacks that make Levittown homes look like mansions. Wal-mart is having to kick campers/RVs out of its local parking lots.
It’s really historic, when you think about it. America has become such a white-collar, service-orientated economy, you just don’t expect things like this to happen in our life times. But it is. It’s exciting.
File under: Should have bought property in Williston
It’s somewhat an old story, i.e. Empty Nesters flocking to buy condos in Boston after their kids grow up.
But it also can’t be denied, ignored or emphasized enough: Much of the buying going on in downtown Boston continues to be fueled by suburbanites, many of them Empty Nesters, wanting to live in the city, surrounded by all the urban amenities. It’s a welcome demographic development for the market.
Developer Joe Rosenthal has won a major land-court ruling that should allow him to proceed with plans to build a massive $450 million mixed-used project near Fenway Park and partly over the Mass Turnpike.
The Fenway Center project has been held up by a dispute with a nearby landowner who has argued the development will interfere with its operations. The complaint was effectively dismissed. No decisions have been announced yet whether the case might now proceed to trial court.
Rosenthal said his project, which he hopes to start next year, will include hundreds of new apartments, shops, offices and other amenities.
Ah, just another development day in Boston, which seems to be experiencing a mini-commercial construction boom these days, despite the weak economy.
One of the founders of the classic S&P/Case-Shiller Home Prices Indices said it’s about time that economists and policymakers better understand basic human characteristics and traits as they apply to capitalism — such as sleaziness.
He’s not proposing that we try to ban sleaziness within the economy. But we do need to understand it, accept it to a certain degree, and regulate it to a certain degree so it doesn’t get out of hand, he says.
Maybe Shiller can come up with a new S&P Case-Shiller Sleaziness Index? The world could use it. Think about it: Some sort of statistical formula to indicate the probable existence of widespread sleazy behavior at work, and then identifying and solving the problem before it’s too late, such as, oh, when the entire economics establishment missed the existence of the possibly greatest economic orgy of all time, i.e. the pre-2008 housing bubble, and how they should have known about its existence when every other person’s ne’re-do-well brother-in-law was involved.
