OK. We hate making predictions about mortgages or the housing market, and we don’t think you should do so, either. But that doesn’t stop plenty of professionals. Here are five predictions for the 2016 U.S. Housing Market from TheStreet.com: prime mortgage rates will rise; both prices and sales will grow, but sales more slowly; cities will…

PropertyWire put out an interesting article last week. They don’t really make any claims in it, and quite frankly, I can’t really draw any conclusions from it. To make matters worse, the title is confusing: “Value of US housing stock in 2015 down from overall growth the previous year”. What they really mean is that…

PropertyWire put out an interesting article last week. They don’t really make any claims in it, and quite frankly, I can’t really draw any conclusions from it. To make matters worse, the title is confusing: “Value of US housing stock in 2015 down from overall growth the previous year”. What they really mean is that…

I really like the way this guy thinks. I’ve written many times before about the futility of making predictions in general, and the weird state of the housing market in particular. Business Insider wrote a very good article for The Real Deal, that asks the simple question “are we in a bubble”. The truth of the matter…

For most people who aren’t economists, we tend to think of markets as singular, localized things (e.g., we think of “the” housing market). But the truth is, markets tend to vary quite a bit regionally, and as this blog has pointed out before, seemingly unrelated markets (e.g., China’s stock market) can have large impacts. CNN…

Whether you think we’re actually in a housing bubble, and whether we are or not in actuality, doesn’t really matter, in the long term. The truth of the matter is, almost certainly we will find ourselves in one again. They happen regularly, and in lots of different countries, and for lots of well-meaning policy reasons.…

Whether you think we’re actually in a housing bubble, and whether we are or not in actuality, doesn’t really matter, in the long term. The truth of the matter is, almost certainly we will find ourselves in one again. They happen regularly, and in lots of different countries, and for lots of well-meaning policy reasons.…

We’ve covered the Fannie/Freddie issue before — the institutions are still precariously balanced, there’s broad support to overhaul them, but there’s huge debate on exactly how to overhaul them. Housingwire has a blog post that proposes one way to fix the problems, and asserts that it is not, in fact, too late to fix them. This…

We’ve covered the Fannie/Freddie issue before — the institutions are still precariously balanced, there’s broad support to overhaul them, but there’s huge debate on exactly how to overhaul them. Housingwire has a blog post that proposes one way to fix the problems, and asserts that it is not, in fact, too late to fix them. This…

The premise of The Big Short, per Wikipedia, is “when four outsiders saw what the big banks, media and government refused to, the global collapse of the economy, they had an idea: The Big Short.” The comedy stars Brad Pitt, and is getting knockout reviews (87% on Rotten Tomatoes; 81% on Metacritic), but not everyone…