Visions of Metro Denver
The Latest From The Berkshire Group
1934 and the Federal Housing Adminstration
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!That was the year that the FHA came into being. The National Association of REALTORS had considerable input into its creation, along with previous efforts to bring stable home financing tools to a large group of Americans that had suffered through the housing crises of the early 1930′s. With the creation of... [Read more....]
The Really Boring Stuff
Over the past few years, REALTORS have become avid watchers of data. Industry professionals, and, to a lesser degree, the American public in general, have been looking daily for positive news about the real estate “market”. The wait is over. The statistics are favorable for the first time since the slide began in 2008. The Case-Shiller Report, the medias darling, showed Denver with... [Read more....]
Flipped
You can flip a house, wear flip-flops, flip a switch, or be a flip-flopper. You have to flip pancakes, omelets, and burgers. You may want to flip a video, watch Flipper, and sometimes you can get flipped-off. Or, sometimes a market flips, just like the real estate market in Denver, or at least half of that market. As noted previously in this column, the housing inventory available for purchase has... [Read more....]
Empty Shelves
On a bicycle trip through the Mexican Baja 12 years ago, this observer was repeatedly struck by the half empty shelves in the grocery stores. There was food and dry goods to buy, but nothing like you might find in your local Safeway today. Just a few items of this or that was all to be found, with stale merchandise and crushed boxes common. Of course the situation then and there was a struggling... [Read more....]
Datalanche!
New word! A datalanche is the condition of too much information falling on the interested observer, creating intellectual numbness. Since the “housing crises” began, the amount of statistical data put forth to explain the crises has expanded exponentially. From Case-Shiller to Core-Logic®, from Harvard to Texas A & M, from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) to the Federal Reserve... [Read more....]
A Better than Expected 2011
After a painfully slow start to home sales in the Denver area, actual sales volume has increased steadily in the latter half of 2011 to the point where the number of closings will exceed 2010. The average sales price is down just barely, by less than $3,000, and the available inventory is the lowest in many years. Area home builders are also finishing the year with the lowest number of new homes... [Read more....]
Goring The Sacred Ox
The media commentary on the housing crises, perpetuated by a plethora of talking heads with all manner of opposing solutions, continues unabated in this country. We are pretty sure that many of the bright ideas offered to fix the problem are emanating from tenured professors with no fear of income loss, hence little risk of defaulting on a mortgage payment. Of course, the simple solution to the problem... [Read more....]
Will the Real Market Please Stand Up!
It would not be difficult to compare the local Denver area real estate market with the 1950′s quiz show “What’s my Line”. The fact is the market is, at a minimum, bifurcated. The lower end, say under $250,000, is selling very well all over Metro Denver, but the high end is not selling well at all. We had more contracts written in September, and more closings, then in September,... [Read more....]
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