Web Wealth: Understanding the real estate market
Understanding the troubled real estate market in the nation, or in your neighborhood, is tricky for most of us. These sites help, with information on price trends, mortgage figures, and choice locales.
Understanding the troubled real estate market in the nation, or in your neighborhood, is tricky for most of us. These sites help, with information on price trends, mortgage figures, and choice locales.
Numbers, numbers. The National Association of Realtors presents recent numbers for existing-home sale prices, the volume of pending real estate sales, market forecasts, and statistics for states and metropolitan areas.
www.realtor.org/research/
research/reportsstatistics
Here is a handy chart from the Realtors that organizes many of the statistics on housing, and the major economic indicators:
www.realtor.org/research/
research/ecoindicator
Yahoo. With its how-to guides on home buying, remodeling, and financing, the Yahoo real estate site is a good stop for getting the big picture. Recent stories we found there include Forbes articles on the homes of billionaires, and on the cities "where it's hardest to get by." In addition, there are calculators to help you decide if it's time to refinance, or if it's better to rent or to buy.
http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate
Top places. Lists of the alleged "best places to live" abound. This one, from Relocate America, says Tulsa, Okla., tops the list. The site appears focused on rental-housing opportunities.
Mortgage rates. Bankrate.com allows you to search by zip code for the average daily rates on mortgages and other loans, including auto loans and credit cards. More generally, the site provides news and tools for deciding how to reduce debts, and how to understand the latest government efforts to ease the housing and financial crises.
Boom and bust. This 2005 "FYI" report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is an object lesson for our times. It explains in some detail - and no doubt to the relief of many at the time - why the history of real estate busts following booms "might not be applicable" to the home price boom then under way.