How to buy or sell homes in 2005

How to buy or sell homes in 2005: Ken Harney
http://business.bostonherald.com/realestateNews/view.bg?articleid=118578

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Real estate bubble: Top news story of 2005?

Bostoncom_010106_1For the past month, two Boston Globe real estate articles, one on falling prices and the other on rising foreclosures, have topped their list of "Most Popular Stories" (click on image for larger view).  Now, guess what their cross-town rival, the Boston Herald, has listed as #1 on their "top business and economics highlights of 2005"?

1. Pop goes the bubble — The state’s housing bubble finally sprang a leak this year, with a noticeable slowdown in sales, a falling off in prices and long waits to sell homes. Partly brought about by rising interest rates, the slowdown was evident by May, when housing sales fell by 11 percent over the prior year. The market hasn’t shown much improvement since.

The rest of the Herald’s list includes factors that have contributed to the end of the real estate bubble and will continue to pull down housing prices in coming months and years:  slow job growth in the state, rising gas and energy prices, and loss of major Massachusetts employers through mergers, acquisitions, and relocations. 

Boston housing market 2006: “Hard landing” or “return to normalcy”?

Three weeks after economist Nicholas Perna told the Boston Globe that "both early data and the anecdotes — are pointing more toward a hard rather than a soft landing" for the [Massachusetts] housing market, Perna repeated that assessment in the Boston Herald following news that single-family home sales fell 9.2 percent in November.  Need to confirm, but isn’t that the four month this year of near double-digit decreases compared to 2004?

"It sounds more and more like the housing adjustment is a harder landing in Massachusetts than elsewhere in the country,’ said economist Nicholas Perna. ‘I don’t think we are seeing anything like that in the country as a whole. My guess is that Massachusetts is among the most seriously affected."

Some real estate professionals dismissed the significance of falling sales, calling them a "return to normalcy."   What’s your take?  Your comments are welcome below, or on our readers’ "record your own podcast" line:  617-876-2117. 

God is in the details

Move over St. Joseph, patron Saint of Home Sellers, a new saint’s in Beantown, home of two millions Catholics.  Home buyers who have been praying for a decade for an opportunity to buy a home in Greater Boston’s overheated housing market, can thank St. Jude — patron Saint of Lost Causes — for delivering this long awaited headline to page one of the Boston Globe on his feast day: 

Suddenly, area’s housing market favors the buyers
Cooling of sales to crimp economy

PULL QUOTES:

The fall slowdown not only represents a sea for sellers, who for years have enjoyed multiple offers and higher prices, but also indicates the region’s bull housing market is at an end. Real estate agents say a long-predicted market correction appears underway as the gap between the price of housing and peoples’ incomes — now even wider than at peak of the 1980s housing boom — has become too great to sustain the recent pace of sales and appreciation.

Certainly, few expect an ’80s-style collapse, when home values plunged 25 percent or more.Today, the economy and lenders are far stronger, and mortgage rates, which topped 10 percent when the last boom went bust, are far lower — currently about 6 percent. In the 1980s, overbuilding, unsound lending practices, and intense speculation by investors, along with higher interest rates, sparked a real-estate crash.

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