I’m not an investment advisor — so don’t take this as advice; this is just me thinking out loud. Berkshire-Hathaway’s shareholder letter came out last week. As always, it’s well worth the read, if for no other reason than to be well humored by the Oracle of Omaha. But it did get me thinking: Warren doesn’t believe…

Crystal balls are great. Averaging everyone’s crystal ball together makes them even better. That’s kind of the way I look at polls about the future. Kind of a meta crystal ball. And to make things even more meta, Reuters has gone and looked at more than one poll! So, never mind a pinch, take this prediction…

MarketWatch reporter Andrea Riquier wrote a great article last week, covering the New York Fed’s quarterly report. She makes a lot of great points, and the article is well worth the read. But my question is, where’s the debt? Overall debt is down from $12.68 to $12.12 trillion. But mortgage debt is down from $10 to…

Four out of five U.S. homes have a DVR, subscribe to Netflix, or use video-on-demand (VOD) service from their TV provider. That’s up from three out of four, last year. And, more significantly, now more than half of adults (57%) get a subscription VOD service (Netflix, Hulu, etc…). What, may you ask, does this have…

I just discovered the coolest thing — The Bloomberg Week Ahead. Maybe you folks already know about it, but it’s news to me, and it seems excellent. Granted, it’s not completely real-estate focused, but it does hit major economic highlights, including those pertaining to mortgage and real estate (e.g., it teed up the National Association of Realtors…

My article on Tuesday may have gotten you thinking about putting your money to work somewhere harder in real estate. And that may, in turn, have gotten you lamenting the fact that you totally missed out on the Detroit recovery. Well, first of all, the Detroit recovery may not have been quite as solid as…

The future of the housing market remains precarious — and remains precariously tied to the overall economy. As I wrote last week, there are a number of reasons that housing starts may be behind schedule — not least of all, a shortage in the labor market. January was also a rough month from a weather…

A few months ago, I wrote about the fact that with U.S. houses priced as they are, and the strength of the U.S. dollar, it was perhaps time to consider shopping for your next property somewhere up north. Since then, the housing market has stayed strong, the dollar has stayed strong, and Chinese investment in…

Throughout the first half of the aughts, U.S. rental property vacancy rates hovered at the high 7% range (between 7.75 and 7.9). With the ’08 crash, vacancy rates jumped substantially, to well over 8%. But since the peak in 2009, vacancy rates have been steadily declining. As I pointed out last week, new houses aren’t…

For almost all of 2015 we had an unusual state of affairs — the housing market looked great, because the filings for new permits kept looking great; but at the same time, housing starts didn’t manage to keep up, and sometimes even fell. The Fiscal Times has an interesting take on this that I hadn’t…