From the monthly archives:

July 2012

Global Investment In U.S. Real Estate Increased In Q2

July 30, 2012
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Tweet As global investor activity picked up in the second quarter, a number of U.S. cities saw more than half a billion dollars each in foreign real estate investment. Jones Lang LaSalle revealed in its most recent Global Capital Flows Report that global transactional volumes rose to $108 billion in Q2 2012, up 24 percent [...]

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New Home Sales See Year-To-Year Upswing

July 30, 2012
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Tweet There is some encouraging news on the housing front: New home sales are up more than 15 percent in the past year. With their eye on retirement, Bob and Lisa Shatz have been looking to buy a house along the Massachusetts coast. The Shatz couple is part of a slow-moving but encouraging trend. Though [...]

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10 Things Credit Scores Won’t Say: The Truth Behind The Numbers That Can Determine Your Financial Fate

July 30, 2012
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Tweet Roughly 200 million consumers have a FICO score, which ranges from 300 to 850 and is used by most lenders to determine whether to approve them for financing and at what terms. This score is based solely on the information in consumers’ credit reports. While consumers can check their generic FICO score, which weighs [...]

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Where The Creative Class Earns The Most

July 30, 2012
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Tweet The economic crisis has hit all workers hard. But the creative class – which includes professionals in the fields of science and technology, design and architecture, arts, entertainment and media, and healthcare, law, management and education – has fared better than most. Unemployment for this group never grew much higher than 5 percent, while [...]

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China’s Gift To U.S. Homeowners

July 30, 2012
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Tweet They are increasingly rich, hungry for the good things this country has to offer, buying high-end homes, and don’t mind paying huge amounts of cash upfront to get them without going into debt. If you don’t think this reads like a typical American story today, you’re right – these new homeowners are Chinese living [...]

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New Score Says You Have Better Credit, But Will It Get You A Mortgage?

July 30, 2012
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Tweet The average person’s credit score is 655, according to Credit Karma. Unfortunately, the average credit score you’ll need to get a mortgage is 764, or 770 if you want to refinance. Into this gap, two companies have partnered to create a new credit score they say does a better job of measuring mortgage risk [...]

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Miami Pending Home Sales Increase 22%

July 30, 2012
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Tweet Miami is expecting more home closings in the future with Miami-Dade County reporting a 22% year-over-year increase in pending single-family and condo listings for the month of June, according to data released by the Miami Association of Realtors. The association and the Multiple Listing Service saw pending listings increase to 3,344 in June, up [...]

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D.C. Area Housing Market Recovers

July 30, 2012
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Tweet A new report by research company Delta Associates suggests that the Washington real estate market may be back to full health. “The news is pretty remarkable. The market is in full recovery, with prices up like they were in the early 2000s,” said Greg Leisch, the firm’s chief executive. The numbers tell a story [...]

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Phoenix Foreclosure Sales At Lowest Level Since January 2008

July 30, 2012
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Tweet Foreclosure resales fell to 21.2% of total sales in Phoenix, the lowest percentage since January 2008, helping to push prices up for the 17th month in a row, reported DataQuick. June’s foreclosure resale level dropped from 24.3% in May and 49.6% in June of 2011. In recent months the region’s mid- to high-end markets [...]

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Morgan Stanley: Shadow Inventory Sheared 35% From Peak

July 27, 2012
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Tweet The shadow inventory of homes likely to be sold after foreclosure declined by 35% since the peak reached two years ago, according to Morgan Stanley researchers. There are roughly 5.65 million properties in this backlog now, down from 8.79 million at the beginning of 2010. These homes are either already foreclosed and not yet [...]

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