Free Republic

Washington never learns. Never. Politicians are like collective Alzheimer's disease patients. They have no short-term memories. Does anyone remember 2008? It was only 14 years ago. Then, America suffered through one of the most significant and most painful financial crises in our nation's history -- and the worst losses since the crash of 1929. Millions of people lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands defaulted on their mortgages and lost their homes. Trillions of dollars of lifetime savings and wealth evaporated. Central billion-dollar banks and investment houses that were thought to be invincible were swept away like straw huts in the...

With BofA predicting that the US is facing a period of “transitory hyperinflation“, one which could last as long as 4 years, as a result of soaring commodity prices in everything from metals to food and beyond, in what increasingly more warn is a stagflationary burst right out of the 1970s playbook…… it makes sense that home prices are also surging thanks to trillions in stimmy checks, near-record low mortgage rates and an exodus away from cities, and as we noted two last month that’s precisely what they are doing, with Redfin reporting an 18% jump in median home sale...

US Home Prices Just Accelerated At Their Fastest Pace On Record According to the Case-Shiller indices, home prices in America’s 20 largest cities have exploded at 14.88% YoY in April – the highest since Nov 2005…Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle reported highest year-over-year gains among 20 cities surveyed… All cities are seeing home prices appreciate at double digits (a little higher than The Fed’s 2% “goal”). But, on a national scale, it gets even worse. Case-Shiller’s National Home Price Index rose 14.59% YoY in April – that is the fastest pace of home price inflation on record (back to 1988) That...

Yet another overpriced 'starter-home' in the city I grew up in that recently sold at nearly 20% over the asking price... 830k for 1.8k sf. The house last sold for 300k in 2008. What's particularly sad is that Melrose was once a blue-collar middle class city in which the children of residents eagerly wished to remain. Prices have been on a tear since 2012, but they, like those everywhere else, have been accelerating rapidly since the plandemic. I would like to especially thank our clueless, arrogant, obnoxious elites at the Federal Reserve (yes, you JPow), the arrogant, entrenched executives at...

With Joe Biden in the White House you can expect to hear the name “Blackrock” in the headlines connected to a variety of issues from real estate purchasing to green energy projects with massive domestic and international investments. BlackRock, Inc. (together with its subsidiaries) is a massive publicly traded multinational investment firm with over $8.68 trillion in assets under management [December 31, 2020 financial statement] in more than 100 countries across the globe. To say that Blackrock is invested in globalism, climate change and leftist politics, would be a severe understatement {See Here}. Larry Fink is the CEO and people...

New data from online real estate brokerage Redfin further illustrates how wild the Austin housing market has been in 2021. Redfin says more than 1,500 homes have sold for more than $100,000 above asking price since the beginning of 2021 in Austin, and 72 of them sold for more than $300,000 over the asking price. At this time last year, only 22 homes had winning bids over $100,000 over the asking price. The year-over-year gap is even wider for homes that sold in a range of $25,000-$99,999 over the asking price. Last year, from Jan. 1, 2020 to May 23,...

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) rolled out a plan to offer grants up to $25,000 to low-income black individuals to help with a down payment and closing costs on home purchases.At first glance, to the economically uninformed, this seems like it's a good idea. We want as many people as possible to own homes for many obvious reasons.Why not subsidize low-income buyers with a $25,000 grant? This would mean that it would be easier to buy a house in a low-income area. The more houses that are bought, the higher the demand, and prices will rise, benefitting everyone.But as with all...

Rate Up in 53 Percent of Local Markets Led by Metros in Louisiana, New York, Alabama;Dollar Volume of Flipper Financing Rises to Nearly 10-Year High of $4.4 BillionIRVINE, Calif. – Sept. 14, 2017 — ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation’s largest multi-sourced property database, today released its Q2 2017 U.S. Home Flipping Report, which shows that 53,638 single family homes and condos were flipped nationwide in the second quarter of 2017, a home flipping rate of 5.6 percent of all home sales during the quarter. The home flipping rate of 5.6 percent in Q2 2017 was down from 6.9...

No, the crane counters were not wrong. In 2017, the ongoing apartment building-boom in the US will set a new record: 346,000 new rental apartments in buildings with 50+ units are expected to hit the market. How superlative is this? Deliveries in 2017 will be 21% above the prior record set in 2016, based on data going back to 1997, by Yardi Matrix, via Rent Café. And even 2015 had set a record. Between 1997 and 2006, so pre-Financial-Crisis, annual completions averaged 212,740 units; 2017 will be 63% higher! These numbers do not include condos, though many condos are purchased...

In San Francisco, an Indian software engineer on a work permit canceled plans to bid on a $900,000 home. In Washington, a Brazilian nonprofit executive passed on a fixer-upper near her office. And, in Mesa, Arizona, a 24-year-old son of undocumented Mexican immigrants won the trust of a bank -- a green light for a mortgage -- but now fears deportation.

German residential real estate is overvalued by up to 30 percent, the central bank warned as part of its monthly report for February, released on Monday. The Bundesbank said the German economy should retain a strong footing in the coming months thanks to high industrial and construction activity, but warned this could not fully account for a recent surge in residential property prices. […] Home prices in German cities rose by 8 percent in 2016 after rising by an annual average of 6.75 percent in the previous six years, according to Bundesbank calculations based on data from consultancy firm Bulwiengesa....

Taxpayers stand to lose hundreds of millions of pounds if house prices fall, thanks to a gamble the government has been making with our cash for the past three years. Some £3.59billion has been lent to first-time buyers through the Help to Buy loan scheme to help them purchase newly-built properties they may not otherwise have been able to afford, according to the latest government statistics. The scheme was launched by the former Chancellor George Osborne in 2013, in response to a stagnating housing market. It effectively lets borrowers with small deposits top them up with a government loan, worth...

The risk of a real estate bubble occurring in several regions of Switzerland reached its highest level at the end of 2015 since the late 1980s, according to a report from UBS. The bank on Thursday said its Swiss Real Estate Bubble Index reached 1.41 points in the fourth quarter of last year, up from 1.34 in the third quarter and the highest rate in around 15 years. The Lake Geneva and Greater Zurich areas remain the most exposed regions in the country with the highest risk potential for a residential real estate bubble. Other exposed cities include Zug, Lucerne,...

OWNING your own house is as much the Australian dream as the American dream, and it's one that feels increasingly out of reach for many. But when one user on Quora pondered whether it was ultimately better to rent or own your own home, blogger and investor James Altucher penned this highly controversial response: I am sick of me writing about this. Do you ever get sick of yourself? I am sick of me. But every day I see more propaganda about the American Dream of owning the home. I see codewords a $15 trillion dollar industry uses to hypnotise...

People complain about high prices when they’re buying, not when they’re selling, and that’s why housing bubbles are always politically popular: The sort of people who own homes are the sort of people who vote and volunteer on political campaigns and make donations. And the fact that tax revenue tends to increase as housing prices rise doesn’t go unnoticed by the nation’s mayors and governors. Renters tend to have more sensible views — you’ll never hear a renter say, “Hey, my rent is doubling this year — that’s awesome! The economy must be doing great!” But nobody listens to them....

At its height, Nevada was ground zero for the Great Recession. Unemployment topped 14 percent, the highest in the nation. The state led in per-capita bankruptcy filings. And one in every 10 homes faced foreclosure. But while Nevada’s jobless and foreclosure rates still rank high relative to other states, the raw numbers have plummeted. Lawmakers who agonized about public employee layoffs and an overburdened unemployment insurance fund a few years ago are now fretting about a shortage of teachers and want to implement new taxes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And in another sign of the times, they want...

A former member of a panel created to examine the causes of the financial crisis of 2007 says government policies that were really at the core of the crash are being quietly resurrected by the Obama administration, and that they are creating another housing bubble similar to the one that burst more than eight years ago. Appearing Friday on The Mark Levin Show, Peter Wallison, author of the new book “Hidden in Plain Sight,” and the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the federal government “was the central player” in the...

Subprime Scandal: We've long suspected the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wasn't honest in examining events before the meltdown. But an ex-commissioner says the probe was actually a full-blown political cover-up. In a just-released book, former FCIC member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission's Democratic chairman to whitewash the government's central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats' biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal. Wallison's sobering, trenchantly written "Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused...

What caused the financial crisis? How can we prevent another one from happening again? The answers you most often hear to those questions are (1) greed and deregulation and (2) the Dodd-Frank law. But they're patently inadequate. Greed -- or the desire for monetary gain -- has always been with us and always will be. And no one has convincingly linked financial deregulation to the crisis. Dodd-Frank, enacted to increase regulation, confers too-big-to-fail status on very large financial institutions, which incentivizes unduly risky behavior and penalizes smaller competitors. The real problem was housing finance, argues my American Enterprise Institute colleague...

A study from the Texas Association of Realtors shows international buyers pumped more than $11 billion dollars into the Texas economy between March of 2013 and 2014. One Austin Realtor says people from outside of the U.S. are looking for a secure investment. “An international client can come into the Austin market, get a great value for what they’re buying and almost be insured that there’s profitability in that and that’s unique to the world as a whole,” said J Kuper, owner of Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty.