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There are things we think about every day, and some of them are pretty weird. But then there’s a whole other class of things that, weird or not, we almost never think about. Like, how do people in other countries buy houses? It turns out, one way they don’t buy them...

The unemployment rate held steady at 5.1% in September, but only because we hit a 38-year low in terms of the total number of people who are either employed or looking for employment (i.e., people not looking for jobs don’t count towards unemployment). That’s not good...

This blog has written a few times over the last months on the influx of foreign capital into the U.S. housing market. This weekend, the major news sources are covering that again, because of the new statistic that almost 50% of these purchases are all cash. But, what...

First, two caveats: with current prices down, probably not many of you are worried about the cost of energy; and consider the source (the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association contributed a lot to the article). That said,, Dr. Jonathan Levy, professor of...

OK, we’re as excited as everyone else for the season premier of The Walking Dead this Sunday; but there’s another kind of zombie we don’t love as much: the zombie foreclosure. What’s a zombie foreclosure? It’s a property where the lender entered the foreclosure...

Well, we’re four days into the new regulations, and — lo and behold — the sky has not fallen. It turns out there was a rush on mortgages last week, in preparation for the new regulations, but in most cases that may not have really been necessary. It appears that...

Memories can be short lived. Sure, we all remember the mortgage meltdown of 2008. But do we really remember it? Would it surprise you to learn (or remember, or fail to remember), that one — and only one — executive from a major mortgage lender was found liable in a...

U.S.A. Today posted a great article on Saturday, that they borrowed from the Motley Fool. The upshot of it is, as a home buyer, you need to keep in mind that the people across the table from you are trying to sell you something. And while clearly, with interest rates...

Well, we’ve been blogging about the tightening in mortgage lending regulations for what seems like forever now, but it finally went live this weekend. The “know before you owe” rules are officially in effect. Of course, in the age of very long internet contracts that...

Last week’s Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast seems to conflict with everything else we’re hearing on the street — including the news from top economists, as we recently reported, quoting Zillow’s chief economist. Christopher Herbert, managing director of the Harvard...