Due to HVCC and other changes in mortgage lending, the time it takes to get a loan commitment has increased by a week or two, sometimes three or four. That has caused a lot of stress in my business.

I cried because I had not shoes until I met a man with no feet.

The time between Thanksgiving and the end of the calendar year is prime time for charitable giving. Today, I share a story about someone who has been caught in the shifting maze of the mortgage crisis. Through no fault of her own, S.W. didn’t do as well as many do getting a modified loan with the help of CNAHS.

New home sales get most of the attention these days.

A big jump in new home sales in October helped push stocks up earlier this week.

Yet almost this was primarily a regional increase, not a national trend, with almost all the increased sales activity taking place in the South.

That makes sense give the sprawling geography of the region and the still relative plenty in terms of buildable land.

But it’s a different story here in New England and especially in highly developed Eastern Massachusetts, where buildable lots are hard to come by and town officials are not necessarily welcoming new homes with open arms.

A more meaningful indicator in some ways for the metro Boston housing market may not be new homes, but rather renovation activity.

We don’t have a lot of land to build new homes on, but we sure do have a lot of older homes that need new work.

Hence the latest report out of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which tracks renovation activity, among other things.

If you are psyched to spend half a fortune on a fortune worth of stuff on Black Friday, you should read this entry later.

Today, I present a report from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. They do the National Retirement Risk Index. It measures the share of American households who are ‘at risk’ of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living in retirement. The report is very readable, if you want to see for yourself.

The news is not really news.

Since 2004, the percentage of households who are projected to not be able to retire at 65 with a stable standard of living has increased. Here's the breakdown by age group: Early baby boomers went from 35 percent to 41 percent. Late baby boomers went from 44 percent to 48 percent. Gen Xers went from 49 percent to 56 percent.

The reasons for the instability are not news either.

Almost three quarters (73 percent) of the increase in the percent ‘at risk’ was the result of the decline in house prices, reflecting the fact that housing is most households’ largest asset.

Sales may be up, but prices continue to lag.

The just released S&P/Case-Shiller national home price index reported a 8.9 percent decline in prices in the third quarter.

That is being billed as an improvement, given we saw pretty steep declines of 14.7 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in the previous two quarters, but it’s still a decline.

Meanwhile, home prices in Massachusetts dropped 2.6 percent in October, to a median sales price of $287,000, while condo values fell 4 percent to $240,000, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports.

Even the Boston metro market, a Case-Shiller star over the past several months, showed signs of weakness in the latest batch of numbers.

After a number of month-over-month gains, the Boston metro market actually saw prices drop from .3 percent from August to September. (That said, Boston prices are off just 3.3 percent from September 2008, still making it one of the best performing of the 20 major metro markets tracked by Case-Shiller.)

The continued weakness in pricing comes even as sales have posted some impressive – though arguably tax credit fueled – increases.

Home sales were up for the fourth straight month in Masssachusetts, jumping 17.7 percent in October, while condo sales were not far behind, rising 17.2 percent, according to MAR.

Nationally, resales of existing homes soared 10.1 percent, the highest in two years, the National Association of Realtors reports.

So what to make of this disconnect between rising sales and still falling prices?

Over the river and through the woods… are you singing yet? Do you have older relatives living in Massachusetts who are have a low income? Would your grandmother stay in her home longer if her property taxes were deferred?

Low-income home-owning senior citizens in Massachusetts find it hard to make ends meet. Social security and savings do not go far enough for many. Even when their mortgage is paid up, home-owners still find themselves strapped to pay for heat and repairs and, of course, property tax.

There are two things everyone has to face, death and taxes, right? You can’t necessarily postpone death, but you can defer your taxes. Massachusetts has this law, Chapter 182, § 14 of the Acts of 2008 (G.L. c. 59, § 5(41A)) which spells out guidelines for property tax deferral for low-income seniors.

It’s hard to argue that home sales are not on a roll again, both locally and nationally.

OK, housing bears, feel free to let me have it.

Still, housing sales were up for the fifth straight month in Massachusetts, jumping 17.7 percent in October. Condo sales were not far behind, rising 17.2 percent.

Nationally, resales of existing homes soared 10.1 percent, the highest in two years, the National Association of Realtors reports.

But the number that I have been wrestling actually came out a few weeks ago. And it may speak volumes to what is driving this current sales rally.

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported a dramatic falloff in applications for new mortgages the week of Nov. 13.

That appeared to reflect a widely reported, though temporary lag, in sales activity leading up to the extension of the tax credit by Congress earlier in the month.

Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team reminds you that all advice is not created equal.

If you’re thinking of buying or selling real estate, there is no shortage of advice on the subject.

When friends, family members or co-workers hear that you are buying or selling, they come to the rescue with plenty of well-meaning, free advice. In addition, there are late night infomercials, home study courses, adult education classes, books, CDs and blogs like this one. With all of that information it seems like it should be easy to become a real estate expert.

In my case, I went so far as to take a two-day real estate investor’s course (complete with a two inch workbook and reference manual). Then I enrolled in a real estate licensing course, took the exam and earned a salesperson’s license. I still owned a condo that I bought from a developer and renovated a few years earlier, so I figured that made me an expert. Boy, was I wrong. While trying to buy my next home, I committed avoidable mistakes twice, risked my deposit once and passed on a great third property and regret it to this day.

Over the years, I’ve learned that, first, to be a true expert one needs knowledge and skill, which only comes from doing something regularly. (i.e. imagine a pilot that hasn’t flown in a storm.) Second, trying to represent yourself is not always the best idea, even for a seasoned expert. (i.e. “an attorney that tries to represent himself has a fool for a client”.) Third, executing a real estate transaction well requires an entire team of experts working together to assure that all of the bases are properly covered. Otherwise, if someone drops the ball somewhere, there may be no one to catch it. (i.e. contingency dates that require proper notice or leave deposits at risk.)

OK, if you want to sell your house in today’s market, better get with reality.

Buyers are looking for a bargain. You have to at least create the illusion that you are offering them a deal.

Sounds like real estate 101 - I mean who hasn’t figured that out by now?

Well it’s clearly news to a pair of former Sox stars, who started out pitching way too high and now are having to go steadily lower.

But, frankly, even price cutting may be a little late here. Both former Sox greats are caught on the worst end of a market, with all the action right now in the lower and middle tiers of the market, not the high end.

Let’s take Manny Ramirez’s almost comical attempts to sell his overpriced downtown condo.

This is not the first time, and I regret to say, it will not be not the last… I just saw a house that was in foreclosure. We went upstairs first. The walls, and windows and fittings were all modern and pretty good. It was a nice, but not fancy, apartment. The back door had been opened with a crowbar. There were personal items left behind, sort of sprawled around the floor. There were a couple of pieces of furniture, too.

It looked like a police raid had taken place in the apartment. I was feeling pity for the people who were evicted. There were children’s things left behind along with adult clothes and books. I created a story in my head about how they were tenants who were up-to-date on their rent and losing their home because the landlord defaulted on his mortgage.

Looks like the foreclosure mess won’t be going away anytime soon.

Just as all the hoopla over the extension of the home buyer tax credit starts to fade, along comes the The Mortgage Bankers Association to bring the market back to reality.

One in seven loans is now in foreclosure, up from one in ten at the start of the year. It’s the highest on record since the MBA began track this stuff in 1972.

And forget about all those goofy subprime loans. The driver now is the ever rising jobless rate, which has topped 10 percent and may top 11 percent or higher before it settles out.

Foreclosures on prime mortgages accounted for 33 percent of all foreclosures last quarter, up from 21 percent at the start of the year, the group reports.

The mortgage bankers project rising foreclosures well into 2010, not leveling off unitl the jobless rate starts to moderate.

And the local numbers don’t look much better, either.

Friday was a lousy day for me. It ended with the flooded house I'll tell you about someday. It started with yet another house that is on the market, but not really.

This one is not a foreclosure or a short sale. It is merely a house where the absentee landlord is sick of being a landlord. It’s fully occupied. The agent gave me the lockbox code and confirmed the showing. She told me to knock on the doors. She didn’t call the tenants.

My client and I met some lovely tenants. They were polite and the apartments were clean. They spoke only Spanish. They didn’t laugh at my accent, but then again, I am not sure they understood what I was saying, either.

Welcome to the Boston area, where you will find a wonderful selection of overpriced homes in need of work.

That might be a good way of summing our market to a newbie perplexed at the idea that you can shell out a small fortune and walk away with a fixer-upper that could have cost a fraction of the price in most other markets.

I love living in the Boston area. But when it comes to homes in the broad middle of the market, the selection stinks.

Now that is not based on any scientific survey, though there are hard numbers to back up the idea that inventory levels, as a whole, are dropping and have been a problem for years now.

But when it comes to the quality of what’s being offered up for sale, here I am relyaing on observation and a steady stream of comments from frustrated buyers over the past year I have been writing this blog.

Buyers hunting for homes in the $300,000 to say $800,000 range within Interstate 495 have their work cut out for them.

Today, Attorney Richard D. Vetstein. outlines the changes in lending that we both hope will lead to transparency and the final end to bait-and-switch lending.

New, sweeping changes regulating how lenders, closing attorneys and title companies disclose loan and closing costs are set to go into effect January 1, 2010. The new regulations are part of a long awaited reform to the 30 year old Real Estate Settlement Practices Act (RESPA) aimed at providing greater transparency and fostering better consumer choice in loan and closing costs. The changes are so significant that HUD recently took the unusual step of giving lenders a 120 day reprieve in enforcing the new regulations. The major components of the new RESPA reform are the new and substantially revised Good Faith Estimate (GFE), in which lenders disclose loan and closing costs to borrowers, and the HUD-1 Settlement Statement, which is a detailed financial breakdown of the entire real estate transaction signed at closing.

Ah, to be a renter again.

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the good old days, a decade back when I was a renter.

Especially when I look at the mortgage payment or think about the money my wife Karen and I have poured into our fixer upper in Natick.

Time does wonders in erasing negatives, such as the fact my flat in Quincy was a little too close to the red line - or that the radiator heat would occasionally go bonkers, turning my little piece of Quincy into a steam bath.

Anyway, if you are renting now, or you are just a nostalgic old homeowner like me, here’s another survey about all those supposedly desperate landlords eager for warm bodies to fill empty apartments.

A survey by Rent.com of nearly 4,000 apartment communities across the country came up with some interesting tidbits.

Scott’s bear-baiting entry based on the NAR’s economist’s market predictions was published the same day I got my Greater Boston Real Estate Board (GBREB) and NAR membership renewal bill. These are not sunny times for NAR, even though Dr. Yun saw better times ahead for the market. NAR and its State and local chapters are membership organizations; they depend on dues income to survive. During down times, the number of Realtors* drops along with the number of people in the business of real estate. (Not everyone with a license is a Realtor!) According to a report by Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University,** the number of people in the business of real estate in Massachusetts has dropped 7.5 percent (absolute change) and 17.4 percent (relative change) between December 2007 and September 2009. This is overall drop in membership, not the constant flow of newbies and drop-outs that we are used to. That’s a lot of $660 checks that GBREB and NAR are not going to get.

Well, it’s amazing it’s taken this long.

There have been countless federal and state proposals to shower tens of billions on so-called victims of subprime lending.

But if you simply took out a boring old mortgage years ago and then lost your job in the Great Recession, well that’s just your tough luck that you were so responsible.

Uncle Sam has more urgent problems than helping you. Don’t come back until you really blow it.

Well, until now. Rep. Barney Frank has come up with an idea that, to his credit, is rather radical for an inside-the-beltway lifer.

Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team teaches you how to commit bank fraud. Why would he do that? Because most buyers and sellers don’t understand how easy it is to get into trouble.

Many loan officers and agents don’t understand what the liability exposure is when they are involved in a fraudulent transaction.
Bank fraud is punishable by imprisonment for not more than 30 years, a fine of up to a million dollars or both. In addition, brokers, agents, loan originators and attorneys can lose their license(s) to practice. Obviously, the punishment depends on the severity of the crime. If the perpetrator is a mortgage loan originator (a/k/a “mortgage officer”), broker, agent or attorney that repeatedly helped buyers or sellers commit fraud, the punishment would probably be more severe than it would be for a borrower who lied on one mortgage application. A borrower that commits fraud risks having her loan denied or canceled if the lender discovers the fraudulent statement or omission.

If you doubt that people really get punished, I can tell you about a loan originator that was sent to jail for helping investors make loan applications that intentionally omitted facts. When the properties became vacant, the investors could not make payments and the lenders suffered losses. When the lenders investigated, it was easy to find that the common source was one loan originator that handled the loan applications in a way that hid the applicant’s true financial picture from the banks.

OK, here’s one that is sure to get all the housing bears out there feeling downright surly again.

The National Association of Realtors is forecasting that prices will rise 4 percent in 2010 after hitting bottom in 2009.
Home sales will also rise by 700,000 to 5.7 million, he argued.

Lawrence Yun, the association’s chief economist, made the sure- to- be-controversial predictions to the faithful assembled at NAR’s annual convention in San Diego last week.

He also noted foreclosures will top out in the first half of next year and the “fear factor’’ of falling prices that has put such a damper on the market will fade.

I guess you have to hand it to Yun, if nothing else, he’s not afraid to stick his head out there.

Still, given some of notoriety the real estate trade group earned for some of its predictions during the bubble years, this is risky territory.

What is that stuff in the attic floor bays?

If you are lucky enough to have insulation in the floor bays of your attic, what is it made of?
If you are really lucky, you could have cellulose – stuff made of old newspapers. Cellulose insulation looks like dirty cottony paper-pulp. You are also lucky if you have fiberglass (that pink cotton-candy-looking stuff.) These, fortunately, are the most likely things you will see in your attic floor, besides dust.

You might find one of the older insulating materials, UFFI. If you see it in an attic floor, it looks like gray Styrofoam. UFFI (Urea formaldehyde foam insulation ) does a great job of insulating. But, when it was put in houses in the 1970s, it was found to out-gas enough formaldehyde to make people sick. It was outlawed in the 1980s. That was long-enough ago that the offending gas has dissipated. So, if you had UFFI in your house in 1985, you were pretty unhappy; now, it is a good thing.

Massachusetts is just one of several states weighing plans to legalize casino gambling.

There are all sorts of hand-wringing about evil slot machines luring grannies to their doom.

But the real gambling, involving bets of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, is taking place in the housing market.

A new survey by Move.com finds interest in buying foreclosed homes and condos as investment properties has doubled since March.

And it is just the latest sign of a disturbing, longer-term trend in which a home is seen not primarily as a place to live, but as an investment vehicle.