The Housing Bubble Blog

A report from the Sacramento Bee in California. "A bubble in need of bursting. An overheated environment that had to be cooled. A correction for a real estate market out of balance. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has been upfront about the Fed’s motivation for months’ worth of interest rate...

A report from the Marin Independent Journal. "The median price of a detached home in Marin has declined nearly 7% over the past year. The median figure for last month was $1.65 million, down from $1.77 million in September 2022, according to new data released by the county assessor's office. The...

A report from CNBC. "'I think it's painful. I think it's ugly,' Matthew Graham, chief operating officer at Mortgage News Daily, said on CNBC. 'I don't think anybody in my community of mortgage originators would disagree that in many ways, this is worse than the great financial crisis in terms of...

A weekend topic starting with the Boston Globe in Massachusetts. "Steve McKenna, a real estate broker at Gibson Sotheby’s, said he is dealing with an elderly couple contemplating whether to sell their $1.1 million home in Arlington and whether they can live off the proceeds. They bought their home...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Housing inventory in the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area hit the highest levels in more than eight years in September, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. In addition to high inventory, data shows that year-over-year home...

A report from Alabama.com. "Huntsville Realtor Tim Knox said real estate agents are feeling a little bit nervous these days in the Huntsville area. 'We kind of got a little spoiled last year,' said Knox, who is with Leading Edge Real Estate Group. 'When the feeding frenzy was going on here, even...

A report from the Wall Street Journal on Florida. "James and Laura Molinari left Chicago for a two-story stucco home in this city’s historic Flamingo Park neighborhood. The four-bedroom house was a short bridge away from Palm Beach island and walking distance to downtown West Palm Beach. 'The...

A report from CBS 5. "Arizona is still dealing with a major teacher shortage months into the school year, with over 25% unfilled vacancies. Bullhead City has historically below-average housing costs, but Carolyn Stewart, Bullhead City School District superintendent, said the pandemic changed that....

A report from Money Wise. "Home prices in 18 of the largest 50 cities in the U.S. fell between the four-week period ending Jan. 15 compared to the same period time a year before, says Redfin. In San Francisco, prices fell 10.1% year-over-year. Other cities experiencing price drops are San Jose,...

A report from the Philadelphia Inquirer in Pennsylvania. "Student loan payments resume this month, and millions of borrowers across the region are rearranging their budgets. Kenneth Blair Jr. is increasingly anxious as his payment due date approaches. 'My payments are the equivalent of a mortgage,'...

A weekend topic starting with Bloomberg. "A changing of the guard among the biggest buyers of US Treasuries has Wall Street veterans bracing for further pain in the world’s largest bond market. Increasingly absent are steady-handed investors including foreign governments, US commercial banks and...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "When Neil Harris moved his family to Miami from Tennessee in 2020 during Covid, he signed a $29,500-a-month lease for a beachfront apartment that he said was 'well worth it.' In April, Harris rented a six-bedroom house in Miami’s Keystone Islands....

A report from the Boston Globe. "The short-term rental platform Airbnb has come a long way from its 2007 roots. A glut of listings — and a range of hosting types to match — has driven some communities to institute new policies governing the practice. And in New England, where second-home owners are...

A report from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "The metro Atlanta housing market stumbled in September under the weight of the highest mortgage rates since 2000. 'There has been a fairly significant drop-off from last year,' John Ryan, chief marketing officer for Georgia MLS. 'And now we are going...

A report from the Ahwatukee Foothills News in Arizona. "The Valley housing market is steadily becoming more favorable to buyers as it enters the final quarter of 2023, according to a leading analyst of the local real estate scene. 'We can also see that the market is becoming more favorable to...

A report from KELO. "Building permits issued in South Dakota in the second quarter of 2023 were down 37% from the previous year, said Aaron Scholl, assistant professor of economics at Northern State University in Aberdeen. That’s more than twice the amount of downturn reported nationally (15.1%)...

A weekend topic starting with Reuters. "As developer China Evergrande Group lurched from one crisis to another over the past two years, Beijing avoided directly intervening to rescue what was not too long ago considered one of the country's 'too big to fail' enterprises. Despite a growing number of...

A weekend topic starting with Newsweek. "Last month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and policymakers suggested the federal funds rate would stay above 5 percent through next year and could begin to come down to a little under four percent in 2025 and drop to 2.9 the following year. 'The fast-rising...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Sellers dropped prices on more than a quarter of homes listed for sale in the Seattle area in September, slightly higher than the national average, according to Zillow. To entice buyers, Town home developer Erich Armbruster said his firm, Ashworth...

A report from the Santa Barbara Independent. "'We’re seeing a shift in the market here in the Santa Barbara area. There are more price drops, and inventory has slowly increased month after month. Right now, I’m telling my sellers that presentation and pricing are key to a successful sale....