Free Republic

Conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck listed his golf-community home in 2018 for $6.2 million; it's now $4.95 million. Take a look inside.

Everybody from Los Angeles to Boston -- your mom, your doctor, your dry cleaner -- is puzzling over which way the nation's real estate market is headed. Up or down? Bubble or not? It's a debate that's been raging for years, and recently that there have been clear signs of a slowdown. It's unlikely, however, that the housing market will come to a screeching halt. To get a clearer picture of how things may play out, FORTUNE turned to Moody's Economy.com and home property-valuation service Fiserv CSW. The researchers crunched numbers on the 100 largest metropolitan regions in the country,...

Angela Brown of Euclid, a single mother living with little income in a government-subsidized apartment, bought five houses in one day, qualifying for hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans that she has no way of paying off. David Crosby of Cleveland, a night-shift postal worker, bought six houses - four in one day - through an identical loan deal that plunged him into a sea of debt. Brown and Crosby were each looking for investment income in 2004: She needed to pay college tuition; he wanted to go into retirement with a healthy nest egg. So when Daryle Rutherford...

Amateur "flippers" in the real-estate market have more to worry about than a bubble. Many of them could be facing an income-tax audit -- and higher tax bills than expected. The popularity of so-called flip deals has made section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code popular with real-estate speculators. In a 1031 exchange -- also known as a "like-kind" exchange -- a person who sells a business or investment property can defer capital-gains taxes by immediately rolling the gains into a similar piece of property. The trouble, tax experts say, is that people don't understand the rules. Many trust the...

I have tried to devise the absolute worst mortgage loan that I can imagine. Fortunately, this loan is nothing more than a figment of my imagination -- at least, as far as I know. But take a cynical guy like me with a looming deadline and this is what you get. This fictional loan would contain many of the elements that appeal to borrowers hemmed in by affordability. Like today's option, adjustable-rate mortgages, borrowers would be able to choose an interest-only payment or even a minimum-payment option. While the borrower is lured by the minimum payment, what results is a...

When we first began writing about the possibility of a housing bubble nearly three years ago, economists who sketched a grim scenario of downward spiraling prices largely were dismissed as overly pessimistic cranks. So far, their harsh projections have failed to materialize. But even the most optimistic housing industry boosters are beginning to worry, to wonder and to wish out loud for a cooling-off period....... Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who as recently as last year dismissed talk of a speculative housing bubble, now acknowledges that there are “a lot of local bubbles” in the housing market, although he sees...

NEW YORK - Are hedge funds fueling a housing bubble? It may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but an increasing number of economists are seeing a connection.Though the Federal Reserve chairman has yet to come right out and say it, economists are adding hedge fund activity to the list of theories as to why long-term interest rates have baffled markets by remaining near historic lows--failing to rise in lock-step with short-term rate hikes. The low rates have encouraged continued buying activity in the housing markets, to the point were practically everyone is talking about a real...

Four points to ponder as you survey the landscape.Whether you're fretting over it, considering speculating on it, or berating yourself for missing the boat, real estate is on everyone's mind these days. Even if you don't live in one of the housing markets that Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan characterizes as "frothy," you've no doubt observed some pretty impressive appreciation in residential real estate prices in your own locale. The fact that housing prices soared during and after the recent bear market for stocks cemented the view that real estate is a can't-miss investment to which the normal guidelines don't...

SAN FRANCISCO - California has a housing bubble, but it may not pop with a bang, UCLA researchers said in a quarterly economic forecast. “There is no reason that a house should be worth 40 percent more today than it was two years ago,” UCLA Anderson Forecast economist Christopher Thornberg wrote in a report. “This is a bubble.”

The end of an inflated housing market will likely lead to a recession after April 2006 that hits hard in Southern California, where so many jobs and so much economic activity are dependent on the real estate market, according to the quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast. Economists at UCLA's Anderson School of Management said in the report released Tuesday that the housing market is artificially propping up the economy, particularly in Southern California. They predicted that falling consumer spending on housing would precipitate a recession as it has in nine of the last 10 recessions. Ed Leamer, director of the Anderson...

U.S. housing bubble may pop Economists warn of slowdown in the economy by year's end By Dean Calbreath UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER June 21, 2005 By the end of the year, America's bubbling housing prices will likely flatten or pop, causing an economic slowdown, economists warned in a flurry of reports yesterday and today. Red flags issued by such diverse sources as the Merrill Lynch investment firm, the University of Maryland and the UCLA Anderson Forecast warn that a stumble in housing prices could take a major bite out of economic growth, damaging the already weak job market. Other signs of...

FDIC warns of housing bubble:- NEW YORK | June 20, 2005 8:22:17 PM IST The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is warning the U.S. housing market is in danger of a serious disruption because some markets are ultra-pricey. FDIC data indicate the nation's most overheated local housing markets now make up such a large share of the total U.S. market, a sharp fall in their values could stall or slow national economic growth, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The agency found the 22 major metropolitan markets with the fastest-growing house prices account for 35 percent of the value of the...

House prices After the fall Jun 16th 2005 From The Economist print edition Soaring house prices have given a huge boost to the world economy. What happens when they drop? PERHAPS the best evidence that America's house prices have reached dangerous levels is the fact that house-buying mania has been plastered on the front of virtually every American newspaper and magazine over the past month. Such bubble-talk hardly comes as a surprise to our readers. We have been warning for some time that the price of housing was rising at an alarming rate all around the globe, including in America....

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan this week added to a chorus of worry about the growth of home loans seen as far riskier than the 30-year mortgage that has been U.S. housing's bedrock for decades. Those alternatives, called "exotic" by the Fed chief on Thursday, have played a big role in sustaining the four-year housing boom by making homes more affordable, which in turn stoked demand and drove prices higher and higher. But these hundreds of alternative mortgage products have also injected more risk into the market -- both for lenders and borrowers, according to...

1st-time home buyers hit hardest, report on sales jump suggests By John Rebchook, Rocky Mountain News June 9, 2005 The 30 biggest lenders in the Denver metro area sold 58.6 percent more foreclosed homes in the first quarter of the year than during the same quarter of 2004, according to a study released Wednesday. The foreclosed sales accounted for 7 percent of all the previously owned homes sold in the first three months of the year, while they accounted for 4.6 percent of the total sales in the first quarter of 2004. And the number of foreclosed homes sold priced...

"Who can afford to buy a house in this place?" my wife asked, when I read her the average prices of homes in various northern California communities. "We certainly can't," I said. Our home has more than doubled in value since we bought it 11 years ago. We couldn't live here if we had to pay today's prices. This is not unusual on the peninsula stretching from San Francisco to Silicon Valley.

<p>PHILADELPHIA - To walk Thayer Street in northeast Philadelphia is to count, door by door, the economic devastation afflicting a working-class neighborhood. On a single block, 18 of the 42 brick rowhouses have gone into foreclosure in the past three years.</p>

Disappointed by the stock market and by mutual funds, Washington architect Joe Wnuk wanted to redesign his retirement accounts. So he decided to move some of his money into real estate. He's looking to buy a second home. "The increases haven't been as substantially as I would like them to be,'' he says of Wall Street. In Washington right now, Wnuk says, housing is just too tempting as an investment. In Washington, the median home price has risen 69 percent in the past three years. Stocks, by comparison, have risen less than 10 percent in the same time. As CBS...

NPR.org, April 2, 2005 · "Tip O'Neill was correct," says Father Tom Reese, editor in chief of America, the Catholic weekly magazine. "All politics is local... even in the Catholic Church." Reese suggests that instead of focusing on the possible papal candidates as a bookie would look at horses in the starting gate, try to think about the election from the point of view of the electors, the cardinals who cast the votes. "Each cardinal is thinking, how will this candidate go over in my diocese?" Reese says. "If you're from the Third World, you're concerned with people who are...

A former college student who befriended two Sept. 11 hijackers says what they did was wrong, but he understood how their hatred for American culture would give them "the courage to do what they did."