Bay Area Real Estate Trends

Below is the full fact sheet of the Obama housing plan from whitehouse.gov. In his State of the Union address, President Obama laid out a Blueprint for an America Built to Last, calling for action to help responsible borrowers and support a housing market recovery. While the government cannot fix the housing market on its own, [...]

NAR has put out some data showing how much tougher it has become for younger people to sell their home and buy another. Repeat sales for people 44 and younger have fallen off a cliff. Obviously, most of this segment bought during the last decade and are now “equity-challenged.” Generations X and Y are either [...]

Thank God Kamala Harris has the balls to stand up to the Obama administration and actually put the peoples’ interests ahead of the big banks. The $25 billion bailout was just a cheap ticket to legal immunity that never would have done anything for borrowers except strip them of their ability to fight back. The [...]

A lot of people are asking what I think will happen in the housing market in 2012. But rather than just give a laundry-list of predictions, I’d like to share my thoughts within the context of steps that different type of readers and clients may be considering. First, a general note on the housing market… [...]

Selling foreclosures in bulk to institutions is an example of crony capitalism at it’s worst. Keep in mind that our problem isn’t that selling homes locally and individually doesn’t work, it’s that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, and TBTF banks simply haven’t been doing it. Diana Olick reports: The Obama administration, in conjunction with federal [...]

Stand back for a second and take a picture of the housing landscape of America. Lots to survey. Now, look back a month, a quarter, a year – to the moment when the housing bubble first burst a few years ago. You have a puzzle with moving parts. It’s easy to get lost, and there [...]