Homeownership has long been viewed as a true positive to the owners, neighborhoods, communities and society. The National Association of REALTORS® has an extensive list of these positives based on decades of research. While homeownership fell out of favor in the mist of the bursting… Read more

If there was a list of places you would not want to live, Forbes just ranked the 10 most miserable (actually 20, but this is after all, a top 10 list). Criteria ranged from economic (unemployment, taxes) to quality of life issues (weather and commute… Read more

Newton’s third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So an increase in costs in one market will cause business to relocate to another. That is the premise on where companies locate if location is not a factor (such… Read more

Homeownership in the U.S. is good for everyone—correct? And the more people that own homes, the better—correct? Not necessarily so, conclude some individuals. Many would argue that the Federal government’s push to increase homeownership rates from 2004 through 2007 via subprime lending with little or… Read more

Last week I spoke in Las Vegas and thought of the myriad of games that people can play and hopefully win in the casinos.  Each game has a set of rules that the player needs to have full working knowledge of to optimize their potential… Read more

The Tax Foundation, a non-profit organization, is dedicated to educate taxpayers about sound tax policy and the size of tax burdens borne by Americans at all levels of government.  Each year they complete a comparative ‘tax friendliness’ to business for each state.  The 2012 State… Read more

Pensions Push Taxes Higher – WSJ.com Property taxes are a function of the assessed value and the tax rate.  As property values have imploded, economically-challenged localities have been forced to significantly escalate tax rates.  Philadelphia, for example, is seeing a 9.9 percent increase in property… Read more

Economists Speculating That Booming Growth of Government Debt Spells End to Tax Home Interest Deductibility and Property Taxes in the Future — USA Today Article While housing continues the struggle to recover, some economists (not this one) are proposing an end to decades-long favorable tax… Read more

http://www.costar.com/news/Article.aspx?id=CB58F9797974B3A09990193DBF51EC19 In the article accessible via the link above, the CoStar Group reports that Q1 2010 Bank results are better than somewhat expected in regards to continued deterioration of commercial real estate.  The question becomes, however, if we are using the logic “a rolling loan… Read more

NAR summarizes NY Times article on homebuyer tax credits – expensive but they worked.  The linked article estimates that more than $8 billion of payments (through February 2010) went to people that would have purchased the home regardless. http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2010042801?OpenDocument