Six percent of the homes for sale in Massachusetts at the end of April were either resales of recent foreclosures or "short sales" -- basically, last-ditch attempts to sell a property to avoid foreclosure. That's a high level by historical standards, but in better news, it is the same high level for the third straight month.

The data comes from Movoto, a real estate search site. The full report is available here, including data by county:

Essex: 5.5 percent
Middlesex: 5.4 percent
Norfolk: 5.3 percent
Suffolk: 7.7 percent

Part of the reason distressed properties are not swamping the market is that the market continues to expand. More "troubled homes," but also more homes from good families. The number of listed properties in the Boston area rose about 6 percent in April. Altos Research says that was the largest increase for any of the 20 major markets it tracks.

In another sign of seller confidence, asking prices also are on the rise. Altos says average asking prices in the Boston area ticked up 1.2 percent comparing the end of April to the end of March.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

One natural consequence of the housing downturn: Fewer people are searching the Internet for information about homes.

A researcher for Hitwise, which analyzes Internet traffic, charted searches including the term "homes for sale" as a share of all Internet searches. The researcher, Heather Hopkins, writes that "homes for sale" is the most commonly used real estate search term, excluding searches for a particular brand name.

The chart above shows the trend in search data (the blue line) compared to the pace of home sales (the orange line) as reported by the National Association of Realtors.

Perhaps the most interesting question about this data, raised by a blogger at trade pub Inman News, is whether search volume can be used as a leading indicator of sales activity.

In other words, will the first sign of a real estate recovery be more people typing "homes for sale" into Google?

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

It is quite plausible that the majority of people who have lost homes to foreclosure in Massachusetts since January 2007 were renters rather than owners. That's my conclusion after reading a new research note from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The note finds that multi-family buildings comprise 34 percent of residential properties actually or nearly foreclosed in Massachusetts since January 2007, based on data from Warren Group. It then uses a conservative methodology to estimate that those multi-family buildings contain at least 58 percent of the total affected units.

"Actually foreclosed" means repossessed by the lender. "Nearly foreclosed" means scheduled for auction. I wish they'd focused solely on the first category. It ain't over til it's over. But there's plenty of other research supporting the basic point.

Now, some multi-family units are owner-occupied: Think of a triple-decker where the owners live on one floor and rent the other two. If you assume that every foreclosed two- or three-family building had at least one unit occupied by the owner, then rental units make up at least 38 percent of all units affected by foreclosure.

To get above half, you need to assume that 60 percent of the foreclosed multi-family buildings had no unit occupied by the owner. That is, the entire building was owned by an absentee landlord. I have absolutely no data on this point. There is none available to my knowledge. But the math doesn't seem at all implausible to me.

How about you?

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

A 74-unit condominium building in Everett has become, with a generous dollop of state funding, a 74-unit apartment building with 47 affordable units.

The building, Parkway Heights, sits on Chelsea Street. The skyline views from the sixth floor are said to be grand. Also sweet: The developer, Winn Residential, got almost $3 million in tax credits from the state, and a $5.9 million loan from the Mass Housing Partnership, to convert the building from condos to apartments.

I'm not sure I entirely understand why it costs millions of dollars to convert condos to apartments, or luxury to affordable. Shouldn't it only cost money to convert from affordable to luxury? But maybe the building simply wasn't finished.

The initial loan was approved about a year ago. The building is now being marketed. I wandered across it while researching this morning's post and thought, what an interesting example of what can happen during a real estate downturn.

Anyone aware of other examples of condos becoming apartments?

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

Hyacinth and Andrew Doman bought a Dorchester home last August, paid $220,000, and this story isn't headed where you might think. Today I'm writing about good news. The Doman's mortgage bill is $1,350 a month, an amount they can comfortably afford. And this morning, state officials gathered to celebrate Hyacinth Doman as the 10,000th recipient of a loan from a state program designed to encourage home ownership.

The SoftSecond program basically reduces the cost of ownership by as much as 20 percent for buyers who qualify and agree to take ownership classes. The program, which began in 1991, has a foreclosure rate of 0.35 percent, lower than the rate on loans to borrowers with the best credit and qualifications.

Demand is on the rise: The program made 1,138 loans last year, the highest annual total in its history.

"If foreclosures are a hurricane, then this is an eye of the hurricane," said Ruston Lodi, a spokesman for the Mass Housing Partnership, which administers the program.

The report on gas prices I wrote about yesterday includes an interesting chart, based on a measurement called Core Vitality. The basic idea is to compare the average education of residents in the "urban core" with the average education of residents throughout the metropolitan area. It comes from the same group that wrote the gas report, Chicago-based CEOs for Cities.

The definition of the core is fairly expansive: a five-mile radius around the central business district. Draw that circle around Boston's financial district, and the "core" includes Everett and Chelsea, Cambridge and Somerville, Brookline and Dorchester. Not a homogeneous set of places.

Still, the idea offers at least a crude measure of where the people live who can choose to live anywhere they want: Close to the center, or far away?

In Boston, the answer is that residents of the core are slightly better educated than the average for the metro area.

Seattle, Portland, Chicago and New York, in that order, top the list of large cities where core residents are much more educated than the average.

Detroit, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Cleveland top the list of large cities where the opposite is true: The well-educated folks live far from downtown.

One implication I take away (for this and other reasons) is that Boston may experience less impact if Americans do start moving back toward cities, because in Boston, homes near the city already are considered relatively more desirable.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

The decline in local home values means that many people who bought homes or refinanced mortgages in the last few years now owe more to the mortgage company than the value of their home. Such borrowers are said to be underwater, because people don't survive very long under water. For reasons discussed below, their homes are considered the most likely to be foreclosed.

The map alongside, courtesy of Zillow.com, shows the share of homeowners buying since 2005 who are now underwater by town. The data is based on Zillow's calculations of home value, which is an imperfect measure of actual value, but the overall trends still speak volumes about the areas where foreclosures likely will continue to concentrate.

The map is part of a broader report from Zillow on home values.

Borrowers who are underwater can't easily refinance or sell if they fall behind on mortgage payments. They would have to pay the difference between the sales price and debt out-of-pocket. (The alternative is a "short sale," in which the lender agrees to waive the rest of the debt.)

Underwater borrowers also tend to fall behind more easily. People will stretch to make payments, and fight to hold on, if they think their home is appreciating in value. By contrast, if they think the value is falling, the situation is more likely to seem hopeless, the loan is more likely to seem unaffordable, and the lender is more likely to end up with the keys to the home.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

Another contribution to the growing argument that our urban fringes are fraying: A study from a group called CEOs for Cities finds that low gas prices were a key precondition for the rapid rise in housing prices. Now that gas prices are rising, housing prices are falling.

The idea that price decline are hitting hardest in the exurbs -- around here, that means the I-495 corridor -- will not be new to regular readers of this blog. It seems to me that proximity to Boston is a pretty good indicator of how much value your home has lost lately.

The study, "Driven to the Brink," frames that argument about distance in terms of gas prices.

"For decades, the growth of suburban housing was predicated on cheap gas. In effect, the low price of gas made sprawl economical...

"Now that the era of cheap gas is over, demand for development on the fringe is down."

The study makes some interesting points: In 2004, adjusted for inflation, gas prices were lower than in 1990. Since then, prices have more than doubled. The study argues that has strained the budgets of home owners struggling to make mortgage payments and it has reduced the value of their homes, by making the house seem relatively more expensive to potential buyers (who will also have to pay the higher gas prices).

It also includes some pretty sophisticated mapping of price-decline patterns in cities such as Los Angeles and Tampa, showing that prices spiked particularly in the building fields of the Sun Belt, and now are declining precipitously in those same exurban areas. Some of the study's findings are based on the modeling of housing-plus-transportation affordability that I discussed in another recent post.

If you're looking for a home, have higher gas prices changed where you are looking?

Photo: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

Many borrowers understand very little about their mortgages. That was the predictable but dismaying finding of a study published last fall by the Federal Trade Commission. The results were recapped in a recent article at Forbes.com:

Of those surveyed, 25% could not identify the annual percentage rate of their mortgage, and 25% could not identify the amount of settlement charges. Half could not correctly identify the amount of the loan. Two-thirds were unaware of prepayment penalties that could be charged during refinancing. Three-quarters did not recognize that the loans included charges for optional credit insurance.

That's not good. And it has occurred to some people that better-educated borrowers might be less likely to take loans they can't afford. Therefore the Senate held a hearing last week, entitled: "The More You Know, the Better Buyer You Become: Financial Literacy for Today's Homebuyers." You can read some of the testimony. It basically expands and elaborates on the hearing title.

I don't doubt this is true. One of the great mysteries of American life is why so few public high schools provide any kind of financial education. Sex education, driver's education, but no how-to-balance-a-checkbook education. Go figure.

But it's also important to understand the limits of education. Mortgages are by their nature highly complex financial instruments. Mortgage sellers are full-time experts. Borrowers only borrow once every so often. So there's an inherent imbalance.

Even harder to overcome is that many borrowers simply aren't susceptible to education.

An Indian family is building a home in downtown Mumbai that will rise 27 stories and cost about $2 billion. The specs are kind of fun to say: 400,000 square feet, a space slightly larger than the Hynes Convention Center. Nine elevators, six floors of parking, a four-story vertical garden, and three rooftop helicopter landing pads.

Oh, and a staff of 600 servants.

"Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home," Forbes reports.

The Ambanis certainly have the money. Mukesh Ambani, who runs the petrochemical company Reliance Industries, is fifth on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. The family currently live in a 22-story rehabbed building, also in Mumbai. This time, they're building from scratch.

"Reportedly inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the house will be among the tallest structures in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), at the equivalent of 60 stories -- although there will be only 27 livable floors inside, each one with an outrageously high ceiling," Portfolio said last October.

This is my favorite part, from the Forbes article, which also has a photo gallery and a video:

The Ambani home, called Antilla, differs in that no two floors are alike in either plans or materials used. At the request of Nita Ambani, say the designers, if a metal, wood or crystal is part of the ninth-floor design, it shouldn't be used on the eleventh floor, for example.

I don't know of any personal skyscrapers in America. Our wealthiest few tend to prefer vast estates (See: Bill Gates's home). But it does seem odd, now that I know about this one, that no New Yorker has erected such a monument to themselves.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

Here's a bit of a conundrum for the data wonks among you: I wrote earlier this week about the Case-Shiller index, which shows that Boston-area prices declined by 4.6 percent in February. This morning I got a new report from Radar Logic, a real estate analytics firm, showing that Boston-area prices declined by 11.3 percent in February.

Boston-area homes were selling for about $200 per square foot at the end of February, according to Radar Logic. That means a 2,000-square-foot home was selling for about $400,000. Prices per square foot last reached these levels in 2003.

That's the news. Now comes something a bit technical, but hopefully worth the trip.

Prices are falling. Sellers are eager to sell. And you, the buyer, want to get the best possible deal. How low can you go? That's the question posed by a piece on Bankrate.com, which explores the gentle art of making a lowball offer.

First off, I avoid giving real estate advice, but I'll offer this freely: If you like a house, and there is a price you're sure you'd be happy to pay, why not share that price with the seller and see what they say?

Making a bid works the same way as asking for a date: The worst thing you'll hear is laughter.

This is my 100th post since I started flying solo in February. Any excuse for a celebration, I say. And since we've picked up a few new readers along the way, I thought I'd review the five posts that have provoked the liveliest discussions to date.

1. Is Boston Housing Too Expensive?
A recent editorial in the Salem News tells the story of Maureen Hentz, a recruiter for a company based in Danvers, who says that job candidates routinely reject her offers of six-figure salaries because they'd rather buy a larger house in another state.

2. Mortgage Haiku
A California mortgage broker, probably trying to fill time once spent arranging mortgages, has taken to writing haikus about the present predicament. Consider the example at right, which bemoans the industry's plight.

3. The 8 Percent Commission
BusinessWeek reports that 8 percent commissions are becoming increasingly common in some parts of the country.The premise is simple: In a tough market, why not give your real estate agent some extra carrots? But I wonder if paying your agent a larger commission helps more than cutting the price by the same amount.

4. Suburban Decay
A provocative piece in the latest Atlantic Monthly argues that the plague of foreclosures in some suburban areas is an early sign of a broader trend toward suburban decay.
"Many low density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and '70s," writes Christopher Leinberger. "Slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

5. For Sale, This Price Only
Faced with a choice between cutting prices and waiting, many sellers in the Boston area appear to prefer waiting. The number of condos and single-family homes on the market increased 7 percent from January to February, while the number of sales dropped by 13 percent, according to data from the Greater Boston Association of Realtors. A piece in today's New York Times notes that other kinds of sellers don't behave like this.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

One of the alleged legacies of the late real estate boom was a rise in home ownership. Sure, some people are losing their homes, the argument went, but subprime loans helped even more people buy homes for the first time.

Well, the tide is slowly washing the foundations out from under that argument. The Census Bureau reported yesterday that the nation's homeownership rate sank to 67.8 percent in the first quarter, a level last seen in 2002.

Set aside for a moment the questionable character of these new home ownership experiences, which tended to involve no equity, no income tax benefits, and mortgage payments much larger than the rent on a comparable unit. Even if you rejoice in the mere fact that so many people experienced the emotional fulfillment that accompanies ownership, it would appear the thrill is fading fast.

The chart tells the story: After several decades of stability, stretching back to the 1960s, the home ownership rate rose for a decade. Now it's sinking. It will be interesting to see how nearly it returns to its historical equilibrium.

To quote a story in the Wall Street Journal last month,

The nation gorged itself on home-buying, something once considered as American as apple pie. "Let's be honest with ourselves," Richard Syron, chief executive of Freddie Mac and a former Carter Treasury and Federal Reserve official, said in December. "We went crazy as a country with the goals...saying, 'Everybody's got to have a house.'"

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

A new Web site offers instant judgment on the "walkability" of the neighborhood around your home. Enter your address, and Walkscore.com issues a score between 1 and 100 based on the proximity of the places a person needs to reach.

A score above 90 means life is easy without a car. A score below 25 means you probably drive down to the mailbox.

Walkscore has the innate appeal of any quiz that offers summary judgment. It also has the potential to be helpful. A person shopping for a new home -- house, condo or apartment -- can enter addresses and compare convenience.

"Matt Lerner, one of the site's developers, knew the concept had arrived when a condo in Seattle hung out a gigantic banner that said 'Walk Score 100'," The New York Times Magazine reported in its recent Green Issue.

The major flaw, for Boston users, is that the formula doesn't consider access to rapid transit. My home in Jamaica Plain, for example, scores only an 85, in part because one can't walk to the nearest hardware store or movie theater. Of course, both can be reached by T. The site also measures distance as the crow flies, so there could be a highway in the way. And it doesn't consider the quality of stores and services, just the category.

It also seems to me that "walkability" is largely a matter of perception. I have lived in the parts of America where walking is not a common aspiration. Once I was walking in such a place, in Florida, when a police car pulled over and asked if I needed a ride to the nearest gas station. On another day, in North Carolina, I watched a man drive slowly through a cemetery, in a Suburban, while his dog walked behind, getting its daily exercise. And there is the special case of Atlanta, where even downtown, the main entrance to an office building generally is in the parking garage.

In other words, some people will walk half a mile to the post office, and some drive two blocks to the video store.

But the site certainly is fun to play with.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

I'm not sure why we at the Globe focus so much on single-family homes. There were 80 percent as many condominium sales as single-family home sales in the metropolitan Boston area in the first quarter. Furthermore, I live in a condo.

And here's the good news for condo owners: So far this year, condo prices are holding up better than single-family home prices.

Statewide, Warren Group says the median price of a condo fell 3.8 percent in the first three months of the year, compared to the same period last year. My calculations from Warren Group data show similar declines for Metro Boston: 34 percent and 3.3 percent.

Here's the data for towns and neighborhoods with at least 30 sales.

Complete data on every town in the state is available here.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

Greater clarity this morning on local housing prices: The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Prices Indices reports that Boston-area prices dropped 4.6 percent in February. It is the 23rd straight month of year-over-year declines in the index, which has now dropped 12 percent from its peak in September 2005.

Case-Shiller lags the reports from Warren Group and the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, both of which released March data yesterday. But Case-Shiller is more reliable because it is based on repeat sales of the same homes, eliminating any bias caused by a change in the kinds of homes that are selling.

Warren Group reported February sales fell by 9 percent. Case-Shiller says 4.6 percent. The implication is that about half the decline reported by the Warren Group is the result of relatively more sales of lower-priced homes -- and about half is the result of a decline in the sales value of all homes.

(Warren Group yesterday reported an even larger 11 percent decline in March sales prices. It will be another month before we have the Case-Shiller data to help parse those numbers.)

This is the steepest year-over-year decline in the Boston Case-Shiller index since last March. I wrote last month that the pace of price declines had been under 4 percent for several months. The February data breaks that trend.

The relative bright note is that Boston continues to fare better than most other large metropolitan areas. Only Charlotte, Dallas, Portland and Seattle had smaller declines (or in Charlotte's case, a small increase) in sales prices.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

Home prices statewide may be down, but the cost of a home still is rising in Winchester, Arlington and a handful of other Massachusetts towns. You can click here for a spreadsheet showing single-family sales data for every town in the state, and here for a similar spreadsheet of condominium sales data. The information comes from Warren Group, which deserves the thanks of every Massachusetts real estate wonk. There is no equivalent data source in many states.

The map shows the small group of cities and towns where median single-family sales prices increased during the first three months of 2008, compared to the same period last year. (Membership requires a minimum of 30 sales in 2008.)

Here are the Top 5, statewide:

Winchester, up 45 percent
North Andover, 25 percent
Chatham, 22 percent
Arlington, 17 percent
Holden, 10 percent

It's worth noting that the number of sales is down in each of these towns, which may mean the market simply is lopsided toward high-dollar transactions.

The overall pattern returns me to my musings last month about the possibility that towns closer to Boston are becoming more desirable than towns even one step further from the city. Most striking to me is that prices in Boston proper actually rose last month, for single-family homes and condominiums. Basically, Boston and its closest suburbs are chugging along, while almost everything outside that tight cluster looks green around the gills.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

The housing bubble was basically an auction attended by middle-class families desperate to live in the best school districts. Historically, bidders were restrained by lending guidelines. When mortgage companies were allowed to dispense with guidelines, prices went through the roof.

So writes Cornell professor Robert Frank in Sunday's Washington Post. The point of his version of recent history? The federal government should regulate the mortgage industry, basically as a means of regulating the conduct of middle-class families.

Primary responsibility rests squarely on regulators who permitted the liberal credit terms that created the housing bubble.... If a family stood by while others exploited more liberal credit terms, it would consign its children to below-average schools. Even financially conservative families might have reluctantly concluded that their best option was to borrow up....

The financial deregulation that enabled them to bid ever larger amounts for houses in the best school districts essentially guaranteed a housing bubble that would leave millions of families dangerously overextended.

Frank's storyline seems basically sound. Clearly non-parents and empty-nesters also drove up prices, but I'm willing to believe prices generally soared more in towns with the added value of better public schools. The Boston area, with its atomized system of town schools, would appear to offer a compelling case in point.

But Frank's facts strike me as unlikely to move people on the other side of the regulation debate. Some people look at the absence of self-control and see a need for government intervention. Others see a need for more self-control.

What are your thoughts: Do we need the government to save us from ourselves?

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.

The cost of an apartment in the Boston area appears to be rising even as home prices continue to fall. The issues may well be connected: Fewer people buying homes leaves more people renting homes. More demand, higher prices.

Rentometer, a Newton company that aggregates listings data, reports the median asking price for a two-bedroom apartment in the Boston area hit $1,650 during the first quarter of 2008, up from $1,600 during the first quarter of 2007.

"Those people that are typically, maybe would be first-time homebuyers, are waiting just a little bit longer," said Allison Atsiknoudas of Rentometer. "The market has shifted from buyers to renters."

The Rentometer site lets users compare their rent with rents for comparable properties.

Another aggregator, Sunrise Management & Consulting, issues more detailed data twice a year. The New York company has yet to release data for the spring of 2008, but the chart at right shows the trend by unit type in recent years.

The local rental market remains among the nation's most expensive. Only Los Angeles, New York, Washington and San Francisco had higher median asking prices for two-bedroom apartments.

Enjoyed this post? Get blog updates delivered to your reader. Click here.