This week’s Boston Real Estate Condo Market Reports are now available, here.
The market reports provide readers with detailed information on the state of the Boston real estate market.
The reports include data on inventory, recent sales, and price per square foot of condos for sale and recently closed.
In addition to a summary report of sales across […]

Popularity of this post: 12%

The Warren Group weekly foreclosures data, for the week ending 12/27/2007, for all of Suffolk County (includes Boston, Revere, Winthrop and Chelsea-by-the-sea) (compared to the prior week).
New Petitions & Lis Pendens: 76 (70)
Auctions: 45 (35)
Bank Owned REO: 14 (14)
Industry Terms, courtesy of The Warren Group
A Foreclosure Auction: The public sale of mortgaged property, and usually […]

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Mortgage lenders:
Are most loans made these days “non-recourse”?
I guess I assumed almost all of them are.
Never really thought about it.
With a non-recourse loan, if you decide to stop paying your home loan, you can pretty much walk away, your loan is “forgiven”, and you go on with your life.
Otherwise, if you walk away from your […]

Popularity of this post: 19%

I received this email, last week.
Would you be willing to blog about our new consumer site, MapRealty.com. It is a site that allows buyers and sellers to search property records, homes for sale, and recent home sales.
However, our “differentator” is we allow consumers to navigate the Google Map API down to parcel level mapping, […]

Popularity of this post: 13%

Michael R Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City and future United States President was in the news today.
From the Times:
The Bloomberg administration, frustrated by the federal government’s Great Society method of determining who is poor, is developing its own measure, which city officials say will offer a more modern and accurate picture of poverty.
Amazingly, the […]

Popularity of this post: 16%

The Globe is out today with its choice of ‘Bostonian of the Year’.
Who’d they choose?
Well, of course, someone (most of) you have never heard of, and probably never will.
Bruce Marks.
You know, the bully.
The guy that Senator Dianne Wilkerson said was “the kind of person who would throw a Molotov cocktail and then run in with […]

Popularity of this post: 18%

Here’s a couple (here are a couple …) facts & figures about subprime loans, etc., courtesy of the Associated Press:
The No. 1 reason its customers have been defaulting on mortgage loans is because their income was cut. That accounted for almost 60 percent of its loan defaults in the first 10 months of this year; […]

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Recently, a “non-bail-out” program was announced by the federal government, put together with great care by the US Treasury Secretary and many major lenders.
One of the elements of the proposal would freeze the interest rates on many loans. (The program has not been approved or made law, btw, it’ll be another 90-days before […]

Popularity of this post: 12%

A story from the Journal discusses reverse mortgages, and how more and more elderly homeowners are using them in order to save their homes from foreclosure.
With a reverse mortgage, the bank makes payments to the homeowner instead of the homeowner making payments to a bank.
The loan is repaid, with interest, when the borrower sells […]

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Toward the end of the year, everyone’s out with data on just about everything.
Today I read about the number of murders going down in many major US cities, this year.
Year-to-date, at least.
Unfortunately, some cities have experienced increases.
Specifically:
City — 2007 — 2006
Boston — 66 murders — 73 murders;
New York City — 484 murders — 582 murders;
Chicago […]

Popularity of this post: 15%