Ice Cold Housing (fill in the blank)
April 29, 2008
It doesn’t take much surfing to find anythin
g negative about the current real estate market. Numerous articles and press releases about housing prices continually dropping, foreclosures “doubling,” people sitting on the side lines waiting for any indication that it’s getting warmer. When speaking with a co-worker about the real estate industry, he mentioned that there was “no end in sight.” Coincidentally, while perusing through some articles, I found a similar quote. Did he read the same thing or is this the new message resonating throughout industry info-waves? Whatever it is and if it’s true, it’s definately a huge, horse pill to swallow.
“There is no sign of a bottom in the numbers,” says David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P.
Real Estate Values UP!
April 21, 2008
Real Estate SHOW values, that is. The public is keeping a keen eye on these type of shows. Perhaps, they area looking for market changing signals or possible money making opportunities. Whatever the case… it’s interesting to know that another sector of the real estate market is seeing an uptick (something outside of foreclosures and BK’s).
For the rest of the article, click here.
Housing woes, when will it end?
April 14, 2008
Take a look at these recent poll results. This gives an idea of where the current mindset 
of the industry is…and after assessment, it ultimately paints a picture of where we are heading.
Click here for the poll results.
Real Estate and Moonlighting
April 13, 2008
By Eve Tahmincioglu 
Moonlighting is back.
No, not that TV series from the 1980s that starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.
I mean this: Lynda Nicely, a 28-year-old public relations administrator for a nonprofit in Milwaukee, found it increasingly hard to make ends meet on her $40,000 salary because of escalating gas and food prices. So last month she took on a second job as a cocktail waitress at night.
“I don’t have cable or the Internet, and I’ve cut down everything to the bare minimum. You’d think I’d make enough at my job to pay the bills and catch a Brewers’ game once in a while, but I don’t,” she says. . .
”I’ve run into some of those same real estate agents from the workshop bartending at local restaurants,” she says. “I know one who drives a limo during ‘down times’ to bring in the extra cash. I know three in the industry who launched into network marketing gigs and another who took a job at a bed-and-bath store to help pay bills.”
With housing in the dumps, she says, people fear losing their jobs. “They are crunching numbers and moonlighting to make ends meet. For many the second job is what keeps them in the first job — the one in which they’ve invested a lot of time and money to get rolling.”
Even though there appears to be a growing desire by employees to get a second job, they face an economic conundrum.
The Feds Big Give
April 8, 2008
WASHINGTON—The Federal Reserve, still working to combat the effects of a severe credit squeeze, said Tuesday it had auctioned another $50 billion to cash-strapped banks. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund warned that further actions are needed globally to prevent more wrenching problems. 
The Fed auction marked the ninth in a series that began in December that so far have pumped $310 billion in short-term loans into the nation’s banking system.
Meanwhile, the 185-nation IMF delivered its most detailed review yet of the global credit crisis that hit last August. It said Tuesday that governments must be prepared to do more to support the global financial system if conditions worsen.
“Markets remain under considerable strain” from a variety of forces such as weakened balance sheets from increased bad loans, the IMF said in a report prepared for meetings this week in Washington of the IMF and its sister lending institution, the World Bank.
The global credit crisis is expected to be a top agenda item at those discussions. The IMF report urged policymakers in the United States and other nations to consider what else needs to be done.
“The critical challenge now facing policymakers is to take immediate steps to mitigate the risks of an even more wrenching adjustment, including by preparing contingency and other remediation plans, while also addressing the seeds of the present turmoil,” the IMF said.
Ben Bernanke and his colleagues hope that the increased resources being supplied in the Fed auctions will encourage banks to keep lending to consumers and businesses and alleviate the economic drag from a severe credit squeeze that began last August.
In a related move, the European Central Bank, which serves the 15 nations that use the euro as their common currency, announced Tuesday that it had auctioned $15 billion in short-term credit to European banks. It was the sixth auction conducted in tandem with the Fed as the two central banks continue to coordinate their efforts to battle the credit crisis.
Bernanke told Congress last week that it was possible that all the blows the economy has sustained from the credit crisis, a prolonged housing slump and now rising unemployment could push the country into a recession. But he said he still believed that the period of weakness would be short-lived and the economy would resume stronger growth in the second half of this year.
The Fed has been holding its auctions to supply direct loans to commercial banks every two weeks starting in December.
The auctions are only one of a number of emergency procedures the central bank has employed to battle the credit crisis, which claimed its biggest victim last month with the forced sale of Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth largest investment bank, to JP Morgan Chase & Co.
In addition to the auctions which supply loans for 28 days to commercial banks, the Fed announced last month that it was employing Depression-era provisions to allow investment banks to borrow directly from the Fed. Previously, only commercial banks had that privilege.
