Archive for November, 2008

With the incredible amount of focus on Wall Street of late, as well as a general gnashing of teeth over the compensation to corporate executives of financial services and investment banking firms, the Wall Street Journal points out that lesser know home builders, who have largely escaped public scrutiny of late, often took home more [...]

I read the paper version of the - well, newspaper - today; the Baltimore Sun to be exact. In the real estate section, I read a short article about the various loan modification programs being offered by Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and, on a much more responsible level that DOESN’T induce people to become deadbeats, [...]

Baltimore City, in an attempt to garner more revenue to feed the black hole that is the city’s budget, has recently contacted over 200 property owners whom city officials feel have improperly benefited from tax breaks to which they were not entitled. According to the Baltimore Sun:
Owners are being targeted because city and state officials [...]

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlights the plight of home builders in the midst of what we all know is a rough climate for real estate sales, noting that the builders’ plans to stimulate homes sales may be a bit self-serving and their pleas likely to fall on deaf ears.
The National Assocation of Home [...]

Maryland’s unemployment rate jumped to 5% in October, up from 4.6% in September and the first time it’s been that high since April, 1996. Typically a strong state in terms of employment, Maryland’s 5% mark is still not a major problem, but the fact that the number has jumped so much so quickly does raise [...]

How’s that for a headline? And I’m not grasping at straws here either. The two headlines that immediately caught my attention on this fine morning focused on the fact that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will be suspending foreclosures through January 9, 2009. Call it an early holiday gift and, even though it’s really not [...]

And all the men and women merely players? Well, yes…as far as Williams Shakespeare’s Jaques (As You Like It) is concerned. But that’s not really what I’m talking about. With the advent of home staging, the mind-boggling array of television shows about buying houses, flipping houses, decorating houses, staging houses, rehabbing houses, etc., etc., ad [...]

A small percentage of the population is blessed (or cursed, depending on your view) with the ability to work from home. As one with a finger firmly on the pulse of the online employment “space,” especially as it applies to trends, I know definitively that working from home is the holy grail for a very [...]

I came upon this a bit late, but there is a somewhat angry battle being waged with words online between popular FSBO site Forsalebyowner.com and the National Association of Realtors, Realtor.com and, generally, a bunch of individual Realtors. It started with a press release and this November 12 post from the Forsalebyowner.com blog. The next [...]

How’s that for a headline? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal proclaimed just that, but the quotes around the “back” are, of course, quite telling and lend insight into what is clearly a coy hesitation to make such a declaration “for real” (see what I did there?).
But there’s a real reason behind the [...]