Inventory is already tight at the low-end, and now local investors and first-time home buyers are having to compete with large institutional funds. This is bad news for all of us little guys. The Wall Street Journal reports: “From the very beginning, we’ve thought of this as eventually becoming a public company,” says Justin Chang, [...]

I have always been a proponent of listening to the people who have generally been right all along about the housing crisis, while ignoring those who are generally wrong year after year (NAR, Mark Zandi, etc.) I pay extra attention to Mike “Mish” Shedlock who recently suggested that the housing collapse is near it’s end. [...]

We’re all aware that the housing market is very segmented. Over the last couple of years I’ve been looking at Oakland/Piedmont single-family home sales and to demonstrate that point I decided to divide those sales into just two segments; under $500k and $500k and up. Let’s look at these two cases separately. First, the under [...]

According to Trulia’s new Price Monitor, the asking prices of Bay Area homes for sale rose in April. Rents didn’t just rise, they exploded upwards. From Trulia: Asking prices on for-sale homes–which lead sales prices by approximately two or more months–were 0.5 percent higher in April than in March, seasonally adjusted. Together with increases in [...]

As foreclosures have continued to slow in the Bay Area and around the country, short sales are making up a larger percentage of the homes sold each month. This trend is expected to continue, which isn’t a positive sign for home prices. DQ News reports on March Bay Area home sales: Last month distressed property [...]