Beacon Hill, South End condos see price drop

The Herald’s Jay Fitzgerald has the statistics on this quarter’s condo sales - and the data ain’t good, at least for sellers.  Well, there is some good news for them - while the number of sales are down, sales prices have stayed the same - or even gone up, in certain neighborhoods.

Condominium prices on Beacon Hill and in the South and North ends are falling due to a dramatic drop in overall unit sales in those and other neighborhoods, according to the latest data confirming a slowdown in the housing market.

From The Boston Herald

Brokers get creative in hunt for home buyers

The Globe’s Kimberly Blanton reports on the slow real estate market.  She profiles Howe Allen, from Gibson Domain Domain.  He has begun to use clever marketing techniques to get buyers to view his properties for sale.

For the past five years, homes in Massachusetts have sold briskly, close to asking price or above it. But with interest rates rising and higher energy costs hitting consumers’ pocketbooks, houses now on the market are often unable to attract buyers — or lookers.

Blanton points out an important fact, hidden in all the hysteria about housing bubbles:

Massachusetts home sales in 2005 are running just 1.6 percent behind 2004’s record sales pace. The problem is there are more homes on the market: On Nov. 10, there were 25,656 houses for sale in Massachusetts, 39 percent more than the 18,498 on the market a year earlier, according to the MLS Property Information Network Inc.

From
The Boston Globe

The Ten Hottest Trends In The US Housing Market

James R Hagerty lists the biggest trends in real estate right now.  Some are obvious (homeowners keep buying bigger and bigger homes), some are disturbing (using your property as a piggy bank by taking out home equity loans).

There is also a chart that purports to prove that the cost of housing today is about the same as it was in 1990, given low interest rates.

Mortgage interest rates hit their lowest levels in more than four decades, making it much easier for Americans to buy houses. Many people who were burned in the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s decided that real estate was the best place to stash spare cash. The children of baby boomers began buying their first houses even as their parents started purchasing second homes or speculating on rental units. And American businesses finally began creating jobs again.

From The Wall Street Journal

Tree saver:

Holden Lewis wonders if Google Base will change the advertising world.  My opinion?  No, at least in its current permeation.

If I still worked for a newspaper, I would be scared of Google Base, Google’s entry in the race to replace newspapers’ classified ads sections. Google Base needs a lot of work, but it has promise. Here’s what you get when you look for a house in my town. Check out that house for sale on Jupiter Island (not my town, but nearby) for $23.9 million.

From bankrate.com

Home listings set free on the Web

Jessica Swesey wonders the same thing about Google Base.

… Many agents have been using avenues such as craigslist.org to gain more exposure for their listings