Today, Bill Kuhlman, CRS, who is the broker/owner of Kuhlman Residential Real Estate, in the Greater Boston area discusses negotiation for cash buyers.

What can a cash buyer expect a seller to give up in return for a quick, financing-hassle-free transaction?

I wish it were possible to give you a simple answer that applies in all situations, but it isn’t. The only correct answer is, “It depends.”

It depends primarily on the seller’s circumstances, such as their level of motivation, their current financial situation, and their experience to date with trying to sell their property, including the number of days on market.

But it can also depend on recent developments, be they personal, local, regional, national, or global; the seller’s general personality or their mood on a given day; how effectively the listing agent explains the tangible benefits to working with a cash buyer; and any number of other factors.

The fact is that, despite the many benefits of accepting an offer from a cash buyer, most sellers are merely going to weigh it in among the other terms of an offer. Being able to buy without having to kowtow to an appraiser, an underwriter, and the lender does give a cash buyer a distinct advantage, but the amount of leverage the buyer gains from it will vary from seller to seller.

OK, just call this the Valentine's Day edition.

Men and women fall in love for very different reasons, not only with each other, but when it comes to buying a house as well.

Or so says Trulia, which just released a survey of what features men and women go gaga over when looking at a house.

Let's start with the men, where the priorities seem to be grilling, football and sex, in about that order.

Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team is our Monday guy. Today he discusses what to expect when making or receiving a real estate offer.

Whether it is a short sale, lender owned property (REO) or market sale; there seem to be many different ideas about how buyers should submit offers and how sellers should respond to offers. Today, I want to clarify some of the rules of engagement for buyers and sellers in the Greater Boston market.

Here are the most common misconceptions that I hear from buyers, sellers and agents:

All offers must be in writing.
WRONG. A buyer can make a verbal offer to a seller and a seller can respond verbally to a buyer’s offer. The important thing to know is that in Massachusetts the final deal must be in writing and signed by both parties or it is not enforceable. (Many agents and sellers won’t get involved with verbal offers for that reason.)

Counter-offers must be in writing to be valid.
WRONG. The same rules that apply to offers apply to counter-offers. (If a seller puts a counter–offer in writing, he/she may not be able to accept other offers while the counter-offer is still active.)

OK, I just love it when Realtors invoke the weather, typically when things don't go right.

Like it never snows in New England - duh - or blaming sunny summer for luring buyers to the beach instead of open houses.

But we don't have to consult a meteorologist to know that this has been an exceptionally mild winter.

And in this case, our friendly local real estate agents may be right on in attributing a big increase in pending sales this past January to the spring-like weather.

I am in a generous mood this morning, so I'll even buy the second part of the argument as well. That not only good weather, but an improving economy may be behind the rise.

While sellers across the country are piling on the concessions, not here in the Bay State.

Just 21 percent of sellers offered a sweetener to move their homes, compared to 41 percent nationally, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports in its annual survey of buyers and sellers.

Sellers who threw in a few goodies typically chose to fork over money for closing costs and home warranty polices, or offered a credit towards home repairs and remodeling, according to MAR.

Those of you that are already out there looking for property, do you think spring is in the air? My experience last weekend was that there continues to be a lack of decent property and fair prices out there.

I start to anticipate spring at Groundhog’s Day. But for those who don’t love marmots, the midpoint of winter is Super Bowl Sunday. Last weekend had more the usual number of early open houses on Sunday and more Saturday open houses. That way, the faithful fans could get to their drinking and praying by 2 PM. Wait until next week...

Since I am based in Cambridge, I wonder what people who don’t care about either Groundhogs or Patriots use to mark the turning point of winter toward spring. Valentine’s Day? How do you judge the point when the winter market starts turn towards spring?

There is typically an uptick in listings right after Super Bowl, even when the Patriots are not playing. Last year, there were 222 new listings in my area the week after the game. Remember that last winter, there was a good bit of snow and ice on the ground at this time of the year.

As I write this (before the game), I am wondering how many listings I will see come in next week. Do you want to venture a guess?

Even during tough times, buyers still go gaga over the surface things - fresh paint, hardwood floors, hip appliances.

And the allure of the fresh and new is particularly strong here in Greater Boston, where so many homes are older and in need of fixing up.

However, given how inflated home prices are within I-495, losing your head over a home that has been all dressed up to sell is a luxury most of us can't afford.

If you are fine paying an extra $20,000 for what amounts to a nice paint job, then go ahead, it's your life and your money.

But if you want to break into the Greater Boston market without saddling yourself with backbreaking mortgage payments, you have force yourself to see beyond hideous wallpaper, scuffed floors, dingy bathrooms and battered doors.

Today, a lawyer's look at short sales with our Attorney Richard D. Vetstein.

Sam blogged about short sales last week. I will go one step forward and predict an increase in short sales for 2012, with distressed homeowners and lenders opting for the more cost effective method of disposing distressed realty. With some early success, I’ve been advocating for a better way to legally document short sale deals. It’s better for real estate agents, attorneys, sellers and lenders alike.

The Offer to Purchase: Now the operative contract document

I am seeing a shift to making the offer the operative contract in a Massachusetts short sale transaction. And for good reason. A short sale, by definition, is subject to a critical contingency: obtaining short sale approval from the seller’s lender(s). No short sale approval, no deal.

Why should a short sale buyer and incur the expense of drafting a comprehensive (and contingent) purchase and sale agreement when there is no guaranty of getting short sale approval? Furthermore, short sale lenders will accept a signed offer from the buyer during the approval process.

When we were first doing short sales, there were many instances where we drafted up purchase and sale agreements and then the short sale approval fell through. We had to charge the client for the drafting work or eat the cost. No one was happy.

Certainly seems that way to me after reading the comments on one of my recent posts.

Having been in this situation myself, I took to heart Brendan's story about his so far fruitless house hunt in the western suburbs.

Brendan and his wife, Emily, want to say goodbye to their urban apartment and find a four bedroom, 2000-square-foot home in reasonable condition.

They'd like to start a family and are looking to spend in the $400,000 to $500,000 range.

Yet the one home he liked, in Natick, he wound up outbid on. Since then, it has been a dreary march through a series of oddly configured, overpriced fixer uppers.

Sounds all fairly typical - to me it was pretty clear that it was just another buyer grappling
with the often tough reality that you can spend a lot on a house inside the I-495 beltway and not have much to show for it.

But Brendan's story, unfortunately, and, to me, inexplicably, struck a very different chord among some of those who follow and comment on this blog.

Today, Bill Kuhlman, CRS, who is the broker/owner of Kuhlman Residential Real Estate, in the Greater Boston area is back to say that some people should not buy real estate.

In response to my post last week, one reader asked, “Has a Realtor ever answered ‘no’ to the question, ‘Is this a good time to buy?’”

He also asked me to list some personal characteristics that would make this not a good time for someone to buy. I’m not sure if these questions mean he thinks this is or isn’t a good time to buy, but thanks for providing me with a lead-in for this week’s post, which is really Part II of last week’s.

Here are a few circumstances which may make this not a good time for someone to buy:

1. They don't want the responsibilities of being a homeowner.
2. Their credit or finances are problematic.
3. They believe the market will move downward at a faster actual-dollar rate than the cost of their housing rental.
4. They like giving their landlord $18,000 to $24,000 a year (and up) for a decent Boston-area apartment or $30,000 to $42,000 a year for a single-family home.
5. They could be looking to pay cash for a property in an area of declining values.

There they go again, those Massachusetts liberals, now pushing for "principal forgiveness" for deadbeat homeowners.

That's been the theme on the comment board of this blog since Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley the other day publicly urged federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start writing down the principal on mortgages held by struggling homeowners.

But I find it somewhat ironic that many of the folks who are steamed about Coakley's comments - and the fact that the state's congressional delegation is predictably jumping on the bandwagon - are often the first to blast off about Greater Boston's ridiculous home prices.

Here is a sampling Coakley's fairly modest proposal has generated.

This afternoon we learn that the Congressmen Capuano (of Somerville!) teamed with "Bailout Barney" to pen a letter to the FHFA endorsing Coakley's request of principal forgiveness for Massachusetts homeowners.

Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team, discusses the importance of having a team that works together when buying or selling real estate.

Whether you are buying or selling, I believe that a successful real estate transaction requires a team of skilled professionals on your side to give you the best information and protection.

Since most of us watched the Superbowl yesterday, let’s use football as an example.

The quarterback starts with the ball. At some point, the quarterback will either be tackled or will need to pass the ball to a teammate in a better position on the field to continue toward a goal. Good quarterbacks know that they can’t go for glory alone. They survey the field and pass the ball to the player that they feel will be able to gain the best advantage for their team at that moment or they make the run knowing that they will be protected.

Depending upon whether you are the buyer or seller, a good team in a real estate transaction could consist of an agent, attorney, home inspector, contractors, exterminators, financial advisors and/or a professional stager. The strength of the transaction is usually only as good as the weakest member of the team.

Just as a football team needs to be led by the quarterback, a real estate team needs to be led by someone who knows the game, can see the entire field and knows who to pass to at the right time. Obviously, the more often that a team works together, the better the results are likely to be.

OK, maybe this is a stretch. I'll let you decide.

But will the Pats crushing Super Bowl loss wind up having an impact on the future direction of home prices in Foxborough and in neighboring bedroom communities like Norfolk, Walpole and Wrentham?

A Super Bowl win would have arguably bolstered Las Vegas tycoon Steve Wynn's drive to build a mega casino on what are now parking lots owned by Robert Kraft across from Gillette Stadium.

But as Wynn prepares to make another offer to so far recalcitrant Foxboro officials, he will have to do so without being able to wrap himself in Patriots glory, even if only through association with Kraft.

So what does that have to do with home prices in Foxboro, Norfolk and Wrentham? Well, potentially a lot if the Super Bowl loss tips the scales against Wynn's big Foxborough casino.

The discussion about the heating system in one of my client’s condos brought an email about a different configuration.
Here’s a configuration in a newly rehabbed condo that caused problems for the people living there:

The furnace is in eaves on top floor.
Top floor vents are on ceiling.
Lower floor vents are also on ceiling.
The return vent is on top floor, on ceiling above stairway. (So heat goes from first floor ceiling directly up the stairs without reaching warming the lower level.)

There is one zone. The original thermostat is located on an exterior wall at the base of the stairway from lower to upper floor. This gave very false readings. The owners bought a wireless/portable thermostat that they keep downstairs in the winter and bring upstairs in the summer.

The condo downstairs has her heat vents on the floor so the upstairs owners don't get the advantage of her heat rising to heat up our floor.

The problem they experience in winter is that it is cold downstairs and then very hot upstairs. To resolve this, they partially close the upstairs vents in the winter to minimize the heat in the bedrooms. They had to add electric baseboard on the lower level.
In the summer, they open the vents fully to get the AC upstairs.

The other question I have is whether I should remark on solutions, like the electric heat. Is that a solution or is it a sign of a problem? I have a similar question about sump pumps. Are they a solution or a sign that there is a problem? I have concerns that some clients will rule out any house with a sump pump. This could be a mistake, since sometimes a sump pump is a solution and a house without a sump pump could have a water problem, unsolved.

Groundhog’s Day corresponds to the Pagan holiday of Imbloc. I enjoy thinking winter is half over. Have you noticed that there is daylight again at 5 PM? Happy Groundhog’s Day!

This time of year is high season for “cabin fever.” If you are unhappy with your living situation, this time of year, you are not alone. Sometimes the decision to move or not is not so simple. For those of you who are unhappy every winter, how can you know if the house is making you unhappy or the household is?

Here’s an example: Recently, I heard met a woman who recently bought another house and was selling her current one. She was surprised what went into choosing to sell her house and move to a quieter setting. She said something like this, “I liked my house but wasn’t content here. My husband and I had to figure out if there was something wrong with our relationship that we weren’t facing, or if we were just in the wrong house.”

If you find yourself unhappy when you get home, how can you figure out if it’s the house or the people in it? The key is thinking about whether you are annoyed when you are with people or when you are alone. The more you are annoyed alone, the more likely the problem is the house.

Sorry, but the great home price collapse is looking about as likely right now as a visit from the Great Pumpkin.

It's hard not to come to that conclusion even with the latest Case-Shiller report.

The picture nationally is rockier than what analysts had predicted. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had predicted a 3.3 percent drop in home prices nationally for November in the latest Case-Shiller report.

We wound up with a 3.7 percent drop and a 1.6 percent drop in Boston metro prices.

That puts housing values back at spring 2003 levels, or about an 18 percent decline locally, compared to as much as 30 percent nationally.

However, the numbers mask the unfortunate reality home buyers sooner or later find out about the Greater Boston market. The fact is, there really are no bargains out there, just homes, often in need of work, that are somewhat less inflated in price than they were five years ago.

Today, I would like to introduce Bill Kuhlman, CRS, who is the broker/owner of Kuhlman Residential Real Estate, in the Greater Boston area. He is the founder of TheCashBuyerNetwork.com.

Bill writes:

Though I might cover any question posed by a reader or some other topic of the day, my primary focus here will be issues of interest to cash buyers of real estate.

The term cash buyer is anyone who plans to buy real estate without using a mortgage. The term can also apply to a buyer who plans on using a mortgage, but doesn’t plan on using a mortgage contingency with the purchase contract. (This carries significant financial risk, so do not do this unless you’re absolutely certain you can show up with the money to close.)

Help me help you. Before addressing the main topic for today, my question for anyone contemplating being a cash buyer is:

How can I help?
I want to know what you want to know. Your questions will drive my content on Boston.com each week, so feel free to ask any question you like. Other topics, not specific to cash buyers, are welcome, as well.

One question I get all the time is, “Is this a good time for me to buy?” For most buyers, especially anyone planning on financing their purchase, my answer today is, “A lot depends on your personal circumstances, but if you’re in a relatively stable market, as in most communities in Eastern Massachusetts, and if you expect to be in your new home at least four years, this is probably a great time for you to buy a home.” This is especially true for first-time buyers and for trade-up buyers.

For a real estate rebound to take hold, prices don't have to soar. They simply have to get off what has been a relentlessly downward track.

There are signs that this is already happening in Greater Boston, with some towns having actually seen prices rise over the past year while others saw modest declines.

Sales are now starting to rise again, though it's a long climb up from anemic levels not seen since the early 1990s.

Crucially, more buyers may also encourage more sellers to take a chance - right now, as my Monday post noted, the pickings are pretty slim for house hunters right now.

It's hard for the market to gain traction when there is not much to look at.

Brendan and his wife, Emily, thought finding a four bedroom home in the suburbs would be a cinch.

After all, we are in the midst of a seemingly never ending real estate downturn, right?

Well yes and no.

Home sales have been skidding along at record low levels not seen since the early 1990s, though activity has begun to pick up over the past few months.

But prices in more than a few suburbs within have held fairly steady or have gone up over the past year. (I quote Brendan and look at prices in the western suburbs in this Globe West piece that ran yesterday.)

Back to Brendan and his wife, who found themselves outbid for a 1950s colonial in need of work last spring. The Lois Street home, on the market for $430,000, wound up fetching $450,000 after a short but furious bidding war.

OK, silly me. I had no idea know the federal government's latest undertaking involves a tipster hotline to ferret out complaints about bad appraisals.

It was apparently one of ten million sundry items apparently packed into the sprawling Dodd-Frank overhaul of our nation's financial system.

But, in true Washington fashion, the obscure Appraisal Subcommittee was given the mandate to set up a national complaint line, without enough money to do it.

It turns out that this ten person agency with a budget of $2.8 million has been given the job of overseeing the enforcement of tough new appraisal standards in states across the country.

That includes running the tipster line - my wording on this - which appears right now headed nowhere fast.

Here's the latest idea for bailing out the troubled housing market, straight from the Left Coast.

James Wilcox, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wants the federal government to guarantee homeowners they won't lose money if they buy a home.

If prices fall after you buy that Medford two-family or Plymouth ranch, the government would send you a check based on the decline. If prices fall far enough, you could get your whole down payment back.

Such a guarantee, in turn, would convince wary buyers, now sitting on the sidelines as prices continue to fall, to instead take the plunge and sign for a home, Wilcox writes in the Times today.

Sounds like a classic liberal free lunch, right? Well, not quite.

Saturday was the first snowy showy day of the year. Roads were not so bad away from town, but Arlington, Cambridge, and Somerville were pretty miserable. One agent (Arlington) bailed out of her appointment with us (we saw it Sunday.) I moved an office discussion meeting to Davis Square because I was unsure my office parking lot would be clear enough to use.

Generally, I think showing property in dismal weather is a waste of time. Safety should be first and foremost. If it really dangerous on the roads; stay off them. From a purely real estate perspective, it is hard to judge a house in poor natural light conditions. You cannot get a good sense of a house in poor natural lighting. In the middle of a storm, you don?t get to see how a house handles the storm either; that happens later.

If you are picking through the winter leftovers, there are things you can see now that you may not notice in the spring. There are also things you cannot see.

Some things to look for after the storm:

Walkways: Look for places where melting water will puddle and refreeze along walkways. These will need your attention anytime there is snow on the ground. Also notice how much sidewalk needs to be cleared. This time of year, that house on the hill is much less attractive with its 32 steps! Also corners are a lot of work.

Landscaping: snow-cover covers flaws in landscaping. You need to look more carefully, and study snowless pictures, to avoid surprise craters and rocks. An extreme version of this is a story I heard recently about an abandoned car being left on a property. The property closed during last winter and the new owners discovered the abandoned wreck after closing. (I am not sure that one passes the smell test, but it is a great image.)

Good old 1990. The Massachusetts Miracle had just gone bust and banks across New England were tottering under crazy office development and condo loans.

Well you have to go back that far to find a year when home sales were as low as they were in 2011, real estate publisher and data firm The Warren Group reports this morning.

Sales of single-family homes dropped 6 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, to a grand total of 38,994. That's just as few thousand above 1990's anemic total of 35,819 sales.

Worse, the year ended with a thud, with December sales having fallen 5 percent compared to December, 2010.

But at the risk of sounding like a born-again housing market bull, a closer look at the numbers points to some reason to hope that we'll see a modest sales rebound in 2012.

Today, our Monday guy, Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team, discusses discusses retaining walls.

It's not uncommon to see brick or stone walls around the outside of homes. When the walls are holding up part of the yard, they are known as retaining walls.

I have seen all types and sizes of retaining walls. They range from low walls that create terraces for landscaping to the 20 foot tall by 130 foot wide stone wall that I saw last week. That one held up the entire back yard of the house (including a tall old tree.) That wall is the inspiration for this post.

When a retaining wall is located at the front of a house, it makes sense that the owner of the house owns the wall. It gets more interesting when a retaining wall is located at the side or back of the lot.

Roughly three-quarters of homeowners polled across the country say they are satisfied with owning, reports HomeGain in its latest survey.

But the reasons have little to do with prices, which have been down, but rather the traditional reasons often cited as benefits of home ownership. These include having control over the home and what types of upgrades are made, as well as pride of ownership.

Meanwhile, 28 percent are not so thrilled with home ownership, with two-thirds of these unhappy campers disgruntled over the direction of real estate prices.

Instead of the silent majority here, we have the happy majority.

When I began to write about the winter market, I drew a comment from my friend and ally, Bill Wendel. He and I met in 1992, when we had allied interest in the development of buyer agency, MABA and NAEBA. During December, Bill began writing about the winter market, including expired and canceled high-end listings.

Timing the market is not as simple as just showing up at the low-demand time of the year. There is leg-work involved in finding the properties that have not sold because they are over-priced or otherwise mis-marketed. Like jj24, successful buyers watch long-standing listings until the time is right to make a good deal on it.

Bill writes:
This year, we realized that focusing on seller-initiated mega price reductions caused us to miss some significant savings, like price concessions negotiated by exclusive buyer agents and price reductions that effectively occur when listings expire or are canceled. Is "timing the market" really be the most effective way to get a price reduction on a luxury home in Boston or elsewhere in MA? That's a possibility, based on the success of past clients and our ongoing analysis of expired & canceled listings across Massachusetts during the final weeks of 2011.

During 20 day period between St. Nick's Day and Christmas (12/6-25/11), approximately 234 residential MLS listings priced over $850,000 expired or were canceled. As noted in our previous blog posts in this series Sellers with high end homes seemed less likely to reduce their prices than less expensive listings which often expired even though they were priced well below their assessed value.

Home ownership has been very good to Mike, thank you very much.

We are bombarded with stories these days about underwater homeowners and the never ending travails of the housing market.

You would think everyone was on the edge of foreclosure. Yet we are still talking about a small minority of market, even with the record number of bank repossessions.

Frankly, for the majority of homeowners, life goes on as it did before the big real estate bust. And for some, who were smart enough to buy within their means in a community with relatively stable pricing, real estate has turned out to be a pretty darned good investment as well.

Just ask "Mike," whose name I've changed to protect him from the retribution of grumpy housing market bears.

Among the winter leftovers, every year, are nice houses (and not-so-nice houses) that were built close to major highways, like I-95 or I-93 or Route 2 or the Mass Pike. Being near a highway will ding the price of any house. The closer you get, the bigger the ding.

In a down market, these houses get even harder to sell, no matter how nice they are inside. Yet some do sell, and resell. Belmont Hill is an example of this. I haven’t been hunting there this year, but I’ve seen many nice houses very close to Route 2 in that neighborhood. Some of those houses sell for very hefty prices even though the yards have highway noise. The neighboring houses with less noise sell for even more. But, in more ordinary neighborhoods with more ordinary houses, the houses with a view of the highway may end up on the leftover rack.

There are some things that make highway noise less intrusive. I was recently at a house that was close to 1-95. We could see the cars through the trees from the back yard. However, it was much less noisy in this back yard than it was in the street in front of the house. The house had two defenses against the sound: evergreen trees and topography.

OK gang, I am working on story for the Globe West on prices in the western suburbs. If you are looking at buying or have recently bought, email me at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.

For that matter, I am also interested what buyers have to say, whether they are looking in the western suburbs or not, for future posts on this blog. So if you have a story to tell, regardless of where you are looking, let me know as well.

Attorney Richard D. Vetstein explains the law developed to prevent oil spills from residential heating oil tanks.
As a buyer's agent, I have been aware of the addition of the protective sleeves on oil lines. I have been seeing more and more of them, as time goes on. (They are easy to spot, since many are bright blue or orange.) Are you still seeing out-of-compliance oil systems?

Under a new Massachusetts oil heating law which went into effect on September 30, 2011, every homeowner with an oil heating system is required to install an oil safety valve or an oil supply line with protective sleeve in their system. The cost is approximately $150 to $350 depending on the system. The required upgrade is to prevent leaks from tanks and pipes that connect to your furnace. The upgrade will reduce the risk of an oil leak so by making a relatively small expenditure now, you can prevent a much greater expense in the future.

Who Must Upgrade?
Owners of 1- to 4-unit residences that are heated with oil must already have or install an oil safety valve or an oil supply line with a protective sleeve. Installation of these devices must be performed by a licensed oil burner technician. Technicians are employed by companies that deliver home heating oil or are self-employed. It is important to note that heating oil systems installed on or after January 1, 1990 most likely are already in compliance because state fire codes implemented these requirements on new installations at that time.

At least when it comes to the battered housing market, consumer sentiment may have finally hit bottom.

Americans see housing prices finally stabilizing in 2012, predicting, on average, a modest .8 bump up in real estate values, according to Fannie Mae's latest monthly survey of the national housing market.

Some of it is clearly tied to the economy, with more people now saying their personal financial situation will be better over the next year than those predicting no improvement at all.

Roughly 71 percent said it is a good time to buy a home, up three points from Fannie Mae's November survey. However, just 11 percent believe it is a good time to sell.

Although every year is a little different, there are general patterns for the real estate year. In temperate areas, both supply and demand are at their lowest in December and January. (It is different in areas that don’t have winters.) Here in the Boston area, my clientele changes after Thanksgiving. Generally demand is down because buyers are turned off by the choices. They also have better things to do with holidays and football season. It is harder to get around if it is snowy, some prefer to stay home (true last year, but not this year, yet.)

The new people coming in are one of three types of buyers:
People who are planning ahead for next spring.
Bargain hunters who are looking for a project house.
People with a compelling need to buy (like pregnancy or a strong displeasure with their current school district.)

These are added to clients who are still looking since this autumn.

Many of the properties for sale were on the market during the autumn, or even longer. If a house doesn’t sell in the high-demand areas that I work in, there is either something wrong with the house or something wrong with the marketing.

Why buy a condo now when you might finally be able to afford a single family home here in Greater Boston?

I recently posed that question and got quite a response from condo buyers.

Some argued I am missing the intrinsic good things that come with condo ownership.

Well having just shoveled my driveway here out in Natick, this is one of those days when I wish I was a condo owner too.

If you want to own a house, that's great, but you had better either learn how to be handyman/handywoman or hire one.

Here's what CentDonation wrote:

I bought a townhouse condo even though I could have afforded a single family home. Why? Lawn care and snow plowing. If I had a single family home my yard would have been the one with waist high weeds, and my sidewalk would have been the impassable one. Also, I'm not a big hanging out outside person, so the lack of a private yard isn't as big a deal for me.

That's exactly what a proposal now being hotly debated on Beacon Hill right now would do, turning what is now a months-long process into one that could drag on for years.

But you first have to cut through a fair amount of baloney - from both the activists and the banks - to figure that out.

A coalition of anti-foreclosure activists and union officials wants to give homeowners facing foreclosure the chance to make their case to a judge.

As it stands right now, lenders in Massachusetts simply have to file a petition to foreclose if you fall behind on your payments, and, within a few months, your home could be on the auction block.

And that's more in theory than in actual practice, with state land court already so backlogged it now takes on average just over 11 months from the time of the first foreclosure notice to auction.

"Banks and lenders, through their predatory practices, put people in positions where they can too easily rip away their homes and their property," Tim Sullivan, spokesman for the AFL-CIO of Massachusetts, argued at a State House hearing yesterday, according to this account in State House News. "How do we make it harder for them to rip away the American Dream?"

OK, there is clearly a fairness issue here. But if the experience in other states that have judges review foreclosure cases is any indication, we are looking not a minor tweak here, but a pretty sweeping overhaul of the state's current foreclosure system.

If you are asking yourself this question, you apparently are not alone.

Pending condo sales plunged 20 percent in 2011, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports.

That's compared to a much smaller slip of just under 2 percent for pending sales of single-family homes for the year.

Condos emerged as Greater Boston's answer to the starter home during the bubble years - as a way to get into the real estate market for less than $300,000.

But as home prices in middle class and blue collar towns have slipped, some buyers who would have been forced to settle in years past for a condo have found new options in the single-family home market.

Home prices may be finally stabilizing, if not headed back up, says Clear Capital in new report.

OK, granted we are talking about pretty minimal gains overall - a projected 1.4 percent bump up for Greater Boston in 2012 compared to an incremental .1 percent increase in 2011.

But not all towns are created equal - the most expensive suburbs may just start to see prices take off again in 2012, while more middle-of-the-road towns find stability.

Now there's a long commute!

OK, just kidding about the commute, but not the move. Greyphysics, who some will surely recognize from the comments section of this blog, recently moved to Ontario after she and her husband came to the painful conclusion that Boston area real estate prices were not for them.

The couple, who work in the sciences, traded in their Boston area apartment for one near Toronto that, for roughly the same cost, is bigger, better laid out and includes everything.

Here's greyphysics.

So far it is a huge improvement. Our rent is about the same but includes heat, hot water, electricity and a garage parking space. No more shoveling or running out to move the car for street cleaning. The apartment is updated and perfect for starting a family, unlike most of the apartments back home. We will probably buy something someday, but there's no rush and no need for it to be in Boston.

It wasn't an easy conclusion to come to, though.

Like a lot of government news this winter, changes made to help the economy are not actual changes. They are, instead, extensions of changes already made that were set to expire. One of those was an extension of the waiver on anti-flipping regulations. (found in right-hand column)

Before the waiver, buyers were unable to get FHA-insured funding to buy houses that they intended to sell within 90 days. The prohibition was designed to stop speculators during the ya-ya years, when house prices were rising in the bubble. It’s been extended a couple of times now.

The idea out of Washington is that it should be easy to buy a distressed property, improve it, and flip it. The hope is that this will help communities with large areas of distressed houses.

HUD writes:

FHA research finds that in today’s market, acquiring, rehabilitating and reselling these properties to prospective homeowners often takes less than 90 days. Prohibiting the use of FHA mortgage insurance for a subsequent resale within 90 days of acquisition adversely impacts the willingness of sellers to allow contracts from potential FHA buyers because they must consider holding costs and the risk of vandalism associated with allowing a property to sit vacant over a 90-day period of time.

This year, I worked with distressed properties that closed in less than 90 days. From what I read from agents across the country, it does not seem like the norm. Distressed house sales still seem pretty slow, according to agent reports. Is your experience more in line with FHA’s research?

Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko is predicting big things this year for "smart cities."

They are hot, hot, hot, according to Kolko, with thriving high-tech and knowledge sectors priming the economic pump and ready to chase away the housing market blues in these lucky markets.

And our western suburbs, defined generously as the broad sweep from Cambridge to Framingham, are high on his list. As "honorable mentions," he throws in the northern suburbs, and, less clearly, Worcester.

Hi honey, I'm home. And have I got a big surprise for you! Guess what I bought today?

Those words are just dandy if you are talking about flowers or a new set of golf clubs for that someone special.

But if the gift is 2,000 or so square feet and costs $2,500 a month to keep, you may have a world of trouble on your hands.

I recently observed, from a distance, just such a bizarre scenario playing out here in the western suburbs.

I met with returning clients who plan to trade up in 2012 to begin the planning. First, I reviewed their last purchase. Did they like the property? Was there anything there that they would like to avoid in the future? Did they like their team: the inspector, the lender, the attorney?

Kudos for the condo. It served them well. It was a new reconstruction. The quality has held up well, with one exception. They blame the inspector, not the builder, for their unhappiness. Here’s what happened:

During the home inspection, the inspector noted that the hot air heating system also ran the air conditioning. The ducts were near the floor, upstairs, on the bedrooms level. The ducts were in the ceiling on main floor. The furnace was in the eaves on the top level. Because heat rises, the main level could be drafty in the winter, the inspector said. He suggested that fans might help.

My clients were never happy with the heat on the main level of the condo. Fans didn’t help. Although the inspector identified the problem, they think that he under-reported it. When they buy again, they will be using a different inspector.

I am curious about whether you agree that the inspector made a mistake by not stressing more about how the heating system, as designed, would be drafty.

After years of rising appeal, tough times are back for American cities, Boston included.

From crime to schools, the bloom is off the rose when it comes to city living, or at least the pioneering brand that involves buying a diamond in the rough on the edge of some poor but up and coming neighborhood. The folks living in the Mandarin Oriental or the Clarendon don't count - that's just living in a luxury bubble with an urban backdrop for some glamor, not real city living.

Still,my hunch is this is not a permanent shift, but economy related, but more on that later.

Here are two starkly different views of where gentrification is headed in the Boston area, culled from the comments section.

So argues one of the most respected economics blogs around.

Once inflation is accounted for, the real estate downturn has succeeded in wiping out all the price gains of the 2000s, Calculated Risk contends.

Of course, all real estate is local - there are a few tony suburbs and hot urban neighborhoods in Greater Boston that have seen prices go up, not down, during the downturn.

But that's not been the reality of much of the rest of the country - or for most of the middle of the road towns and neighborhoods around here, for that matter.

I seem to be in a minority in my outrage over the National Association of Realtors numbers mess.

As noted in yesterday's post, NAR recently owned up to overstating home sales by more than 14 percent since the real estate downturn kicked into high gear in 2007.

Basically, the trade organization reported nearly 3 million home sales from 2007 through 2010 that simply never happened.

More seriously, while owning up to the mistake, NAR has stopped short of pledging to thoroughly revamp what appears to be a flawed methodology.

That means we may very well be in for similar surprises in the future.

But reaction in the comments section was muted. Basically, no one believes NAR's numbers in the first place, so what's the big deal?

Let's not beat around the bush. The honors go to the massive screw up by the National Association of Realtors, which has been dramatically overstating the number of homes sold for years now.

In a recent release, NAR states that its estimates of homes sold across the country were off by more than 14 percent between 2007 and 2010. Nearly 3 million fewer homes were sold over the past three years, when the bottom fell out of the real estate market.

It's clear now the housing downturn has been even worse than we all assumed.

Still, it's hard not to get a kick at how the trade group reported this piece of embarrassing news.

The revision is tucked into a cheery press release headlined, "Existing-Home Sales Continue to Climb in November."

I will get the ball rolling with a few of my own. Feel free to let me have it and offer a few of your own.

I will feature some of the more insightful commentaries in a post next week as 2012 kicks into gear.

Kudos to James in Cambridge for his great analysis of the bleak outlook confronting homeowners with dreams of moving up to bigger spreads.

Basically, given the likelihood at best of anemic price increases over the next five years, hoping to cash in on your current home in order to pay for the next one could be a pipe dream.

"If you want to "move up the housing ladder," you're going to have to earn more money. Your house won't do it for you," James notes.

Great point. The other option, I'd add, is playing the old location game, taking on a longer commute for a larger house. Given ever more clogged roadways and the decrepit state of our public transportation system, that's an option you should think long and hard about before moving out to East Nowhereville.

The nights are about as long as they get. It has just started to feel like winter. Today, I bring a review of the pluses and minuses of heating systems commonly found in New England. I asked James Morrison to write up a primer on heating, for those who don't know a furnace from a boiler:

Understanding what you’re looking at will help you recognize the practical implications of the heating system in a house you may want to buy. Here are the basics:

How they heat:
Boilers send hot water or steam through pipes to radiators in each room.
Furnaces send hot air through ductwork to registers in each room.

What you see in the rooms:
Radiators hold steam or hot water. Those big old honkin’ cast iron radiators might do either, -there are lots of permutations like: baseboards and fancy-pants towel-warming racks.

Vents distribute hot (and sometimes cool) air from furnaces throughout the house. Look for rectangular, or square, or circular openings in heated rooms.

Pros and cons:
Hot water- This is the preferred and most common heating system found in New England. It is considered the most comfortable way to heat. It is also fairly versatile and relatively easy to add onto.

Steam- Steam is also comfortable, but less so. We stopped installing steam heating systems in structures just after WWII. Adding onto these old steam heating system can be (though it isn’t always) complicated. Since trapped steam bangs, it takes skill to add on correctly.

Also, the radiators get pretty hot, so some folks install radiator covers on them. Radiator covers retard the convective process, so they reduce efficiency and raise operating costs.
In most residential steam heating systems, the air vents on the radiators will hiss intermittently when the system is operating. That’s normal, but it annoys some people.

Hot air - Benefits include: the registers don’t take up space like radiators, the same ductwork can often be used for air conditioning systems, and the installation and operating cost of the equipment is low. However, the heat is appreciably less comfortable than forced hot water systems in our climate.

It's tough to buy a home around here, even if you have one or two decent incomes to work with.

And the hyped up competition to snag a home, any home, is far from the norm.

That's a crucial question for anyone hoping to eventually move up the housing ladder.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that moving up in this market is going to be pretty tough, especially if you bought your home during the bubble years.

But what will the market look like five years from now in 2016?

Zillow.com put that question to a panel of more than 100 economists from across the country and came back with some pretty interesting answers.

Today, our Monday guy, Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team, looks back over the past year for a final wrap.

Last January, I predicted what I thought was going happen in the 2011 real estate market by saying that 2011 would be “the year of confusion and reconciliation.”

I wish I had been wrong, but I think that 2011 was indeed a year of confusion and reconciliation in the Greater Boston real estate market. Buyers and sellers were confused about what was happening nationally vs. locally. Buyers leapt into the market expecting to bargain prices and motivated sellers, only to find many over-priced junky properties in challenging locations. Statistics may show abundant inventory, but most buyers can’t find a decent house or a condo in a financially stable, well maintained association.

Successful Sellers finally reconciled that if they wanted to sell, they need to get realistic about pricing and present their home in marketable condition for their price range. Last year’s most successful listing agents began working with their seller-clients well before their property hit the market to assure a good product at a competitive price and then they marketed it aggressively to the brokerage community. The days of “pocket listings” (where agents don’t share a listing with other agents) are distant memories.

Interest rates keep flirting with new record lows.

The rate on a traditional, 30-year mortgage fell to a record 4.19 percent last week, reports Bankrate.com, which I occasionally write for. And at 3.42 percent, the rate on a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage tied a record low.

That's good news for home buyers, who can save hundreds on their monthly mortgage payments.

But too often, this fact becomes part of a hackneyed sales pitch - better buy now before rates start rising again.

Well don't fall for it.

The report card on affordable housing is in. Affordable housing has failed in 2011. As you go about your celebrations this December, consider that a full time income is not enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment for many people. For some, one full time job does not cover a median-priced one-bedroom apartment.

Researchers at the Center for Housing Policy took a look at this question: have falling home prices brought housing within reach of the retail workers who are critical to the success of the gift-giving supply chain?

Nationally, the answer is “no.”

“Despite years of falling home prices, many of the workers most visible during the holiday season are unable to afford a place of their own,” said Center researcher and report co-author Laura Williams. “And the problem is not limited to homeownership. In many cities, rentals are also beyond the reach of workers in the jobs we examined.”

None of the 210 metro areas studied in Paycheck to Paycheck offered a fair-market rent on a two-bedroom apartment affordable on a retail salesperson’s salary, and in only 2 out of 210 markets could a janitor afford the mortgage on a median-priced home. In the most expensive markets covered, even relatively high-earning mail carriers could not afford the typical rent on a two-bedroom apartment.

In the Boston area it is even worse. Cambridge and Boston both appear in the top fifteen most expensive purchase markets. They are tied for sixteenth place on the rental list.

Elementary school teachers, police officers, and nurses join janitors in not being able to buy a house here. Nurses can’t afford to rent a median two-bedroom apartment on their salary alone. You can look up some other occupations here.

The picture is bleak when the income needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment is almost $54,000 a year. No wonder so many young people are packing in with their parents until they can get ahead a bit.

Let's face it, the real estate downturn is not all that bad.

After all, it is helping at least keep prices in check here in overinflated Greater Boston.,

But as potential buyers decide to stay put and make do with what they have, is this also spurring some badly needed creativity in home design?

So says Connecticut-based architect and author Duo Dickinson, in this piece just out in U.S. News & World Report on home design. I guess still do more than just the college rankings.

That's the latest prediction from Freddie Mac chief economist Frank Nothaft.

He see's home prices dropping another 1 percent across the country in 2012, followed by a 2 percent jump in 2013.

Mortgage rates will stay low through at least the middle of next year, Nothaft contends.

Here's a lesson for anyone tempted to get greedy with the listing price of their home.

Building in a big premium, far from guaranteeing a nice gain at the end of the day, instead may be a ticket to multiple price reductions. And when you do sell, you could wind up parting with your house at a sizable discount.

Certainly that's what many frustrated sellers and their agents are discovering as homes come on the market at lofty prices, only to die a death of a thousand price cuts.

And as it turns out, there is academic research out there to back up this up as well.

Consider a little known - in consumer circles anyway - study from 2002.

Barney Frank is retiring and as some see it, he is one of the big culprits behind the housing market crash.

Yes, Barney was as clueless as Greenspan during the bubble years, as were many other national leaders. But Wall Street depravity and the gutting of decades of financial industry regulations were arguably far more meaningful factors behind the collapse.

Love him or hate him, Barney is both brilliant and ready to tell it how it is. My favorite was his smack down of the Tea Party type who, at a forum on Obama's health care plan, asked Frank, "Why are you supporting this Nazi policy."

Said Frank: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table."

When push came to shove in the fall of 2008, Frank put himself squarely on the right side of history, helping push through $789 billion-plus bailout that saved both the banks and the auto industry from collapsing.

If you think the housing market in trouble, then what it would be like now without an auto industry and with most of our major banks in cinders?

In the transaction I wrote about yesterday, the seller’s agent disclosed that the sellers were moving because of bad health. This is a risky thing to do. It could either bring out a level of decency and understanding or it could bring out a jerk who wants to take advantage of the situation.

The previous would-be buyer was the jerk. My client benefited from his jerkiness. They got a good price on the house and a great deal of goodwill. There were complicated requests after inspection that seller accepted. Every step was done thoroughly, although a little slower than if the sellers were healthy.

I learned this lesson when I was in my 20s. I learned that decency is the way to go in life. Aggressiveness, especially when the other side has a stated weakness, will backfire. Back then, it had nothing to do with real estate.

Some fear that demanding 20 percent down would be a major shock to a housing market still struggling to get up off its knees.

It is certainly the big question amid a raging debate in Washington on whether to return to the 20 percent down rule, the long-time gold standard in real estate that was thrown to the winds during the bubble years.

Yet a new survey of what home buyers are putting down reveals we are already more than halfway there.

Amid the now years-long housing downturn, the down payment has morphed from a small or token entry feet to a substantial, upfront payment.

Nationally, banks and other lenders across the country are now asking for, on average, 12.29 percent down, according to a new report out by LendingTree.com.

Here in Massachusetts, the average is a shade below 13 percent, making us No. 10 in the country for states with the highest down payments.

I was talking to a listing agent recently about an accepted Offer to Purchase. My client made an Offer in competition that was well below full price. Their Offer was accepted and I was fishing for information about why. I believe they paid just a few thousand below what the market should bear for the house.

The agent said something like this: “Your Offer was almost as good as this other buyer who had been inching up, over and over. The sellers were sick of them.”

We started talking about where we thought the tipping point was, when the negotiation was about ego and no longer about buying and selling. I thought egos get into it after three rounds. This agent said two.

Pending sales are up - but so are cancellations

There has been a modest bump in sales activity -  in Massachusetts and across the country - as we head into December.

Pending home sales posted a 5.2 percent, year-over-year increase in November, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports. There were initial sales contracts inked on 3,580 homes last month.

That mirrors the 10.4 percent jump in pending sales across the country the National Association of Realtors recently crowed about.(Though, to be clear, that was a month-over-month increase, as in October over September, raising some basic seasonal issues with those numbers.)

Yet how many of these deals will make it to the closing table?

Some sellers here in Greater Boston contend they are being abused by pushy buyers.

My post yesterday - My home is worth more than that! - got some pointed responses from sellers.

One commenter in particular, Temporarily, offered up a compelling defense of sellers who have done everything right, only to wind up getting walked all over by buyers who want it all, and then some.

Temporarily bought for $625,000 in 2004 and then put another $80,000 into various renovations. The bathrooms were gutted, new windows put in, not to mention a new patio and some nice landscaping work as well.

Even so, Temporarily listed at $629,000 and would have bargained down to $615,000.

Instead, Temporarily got just one offer - for $599,000.

One of the best training tools for me, as a buyer’s agent, has been to take classes designed by seller-centered real estate companies to teach agents how to “handle” house buyers. I got most of my early education in a real estate world that expected all agents to be working for the seller. That’s where I first heard “buyers are liars.”

A little history: Until the mid-00s, there was a relationship called “seller’s sub-agency.” A seller’s agent drove buyers around, opened the door and sold the house for the company that was on the sign outside. If the seller’s agent worked for the company on the sign, it was seller’s agency; if the agent worked for another company, it was sub-agency. The sub-agent never met the seller, but had the obligation to work for the best price and terms for that seller. The real estate agents knew the buyers, asked lots of questions about what they wanted, but the negotiation was stacked against the buyer.

When I first started in real estate, residential buyer’s agency was just beginning. I did a handful of transactions as a seller’s subagent, then went to buyer agency only. Although the days of treating buyers like a customer are over, legally, some of the bad attitude that the buyer is just not buying to annoy the agent, lingers. Thus, the old saw “buyers are liars.”

OK, the market may be down, but I don't care, because my home is different. It's so special and I am entitled to a nice premium, thank you very much. And don't you dare offer a penny less than the listed price.

This continues to be a common refrain among homeowners, and no more so than here in Greater Boston, land of perpetually-inflated home prices.

Despite the bursting of the real estate bubble and a near Depression, many still believe their homes are undervalued, HomeGain finds in its latest quarterly market survey.

Here's a particularly telling stat. More than three quarters of homeowners nationally - 76 percent - believe their homes are worth more than the listing price urged by their real estate agent.

Yes, personality could be the deciding factor in whether you are better off renting long-term or buying.

That's my take on new research, soon to be published in Real Estate Economics, by Eli Beracha of East Carolina University and Ken H. Johnson of Florida International University.

The title says it all: "Lessons from Over 30 Years of Buy versus Rent Decisions: Is the American Dream Always Wise?"

And the short answer, after getting a chance to read through the entire paper the other day, is that renting can indeed trump buying, at least on a purely financial basis. But it's also clear that to make renting a successful financial strategy for you, you need to have the right mix of personality and personal circumstance as well.

If you are looking at buying a home right now, whether you realize it or not, you are a dying breed.

Panicked over rising prices, first timers helped drives sales during the housing bubble, eager to grab a home, any home, while they still could.

First-time buyers made a short-lived comeback in late 2009 and early 2010 when Uncle Sam started doling out $8,000 a pop to anyone buying a house for the first time.

But we all know what happened after that. The tax credit money stopped flowing in April 2010 and first-time buyers went into hiding again, triggering the double dip in home prices we are now mired in.

Here's a pretty interesting take on some of the barriers that are keeping first-time buyers out of the market. These range from a high unemployment rate for younger workers, to skittish banks seeking downpayments that now average 22 percent.

Who is better off financially now, renters or buyers?

Homeowners long held an edge in this perennial argument.

After all, prices just kept on rising year after year. Throw in that nice federal tax break and why rent?

But that may be changing, and fast. Price increases, unless you live in a boutique town or neighborhood in high demand, have become a thing of the past.

And suddenly homeownership is no longer the savings/investment vehicle it once was. For the unwise or unlucky, it's now clear it can be one way ticket to foreclosure and financial distress.

Now researchers in academia are starting to come up with some hard numbers that could help those on the fence, wavering between buying and renting, make better decisions.

Home sales are up and prices are down across Massachusetts, new reports out today show.

Sales rose more than 5 percent in October, to 3,189, while prices fell 7 percent, to a median price of $270,000, from October, 2010, reports The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors released similiar stats showing  a 2.7 percent bump up in sales and a 5 percent drop in prices.

Landing a decent home can be a challenge in Greater Boston. Despite the downturn, prices remain high and decent inventory remains hard to find.

But for the lucky ones who manage to snag a house, there remains the challenge of getting to know the neighbors and making new friends. While that might be a cinch in oh-so-polite Atlanta or sunny San Diego, we live in a part of the country where outward displays of friendliness to anyone outside of a select circle of family and friends are seen as an oddity or worse, a dangerous aberration. (You know, it's the old subway rule: Avert gaze, stare straight ahead and make absolutely no attempt at eye contact or conversation.)

New Englanders are a chilly bunch, but Bostonians are even worse.

Well it's an important question to ask before you decide to liven up your holiday festivities with a few open houses.

In fact, there a lively debate out there in Realtor Land as to whether you should either keep your home on the market between Thanksgiving and January or even put it on as a new listing.

OK, there appear to be more than a few agents out there ready to try and sell your house between now and New Year's Day.

After all, times are tough in real estate right now and they need all the listings they can get.

Malls and retailers are pulling out all the stops to get shoppers in their stores come Friday morning.

And, as savvy salespeople, they know that the lure of good stuff cheap is enough to draw a crowd in the chilly early morning hours after Thanksgiving.

Now it would be going too far to say that real estate agents are taking weekend after Thanksgiving off.

I did find listings for a couple hundred open houses this weekend scattered across Eastern Massachusetts.

But I saw only a few efforts, all from past years, to try and make any connection with Black Friday - such as "Black Friday open house."

Too bad given all the shoppers who will be out on the roads come Friday.

If you are holding off on having children, you are certainly not alone in during these hard times.

The number of births across the country has fallen to the lowest levels in more than a decade, Bloomberg reports.

It follows a now well worn pattern in which couples put plans for children on hold during tough times, with the most dramatic example being the Great Depression, when birth rates fell 20 percent.

By contrast, Massachusetts has seen a decline of about 4 percent, in line with the national average.

So what does this have to do with the housing market? Well a lot.

Yes, families with children are just one segment of the housing market. That said, an expanding family can often be found behind many a house hunt, whether it's a couple making a jump from an apartment to a starter home or a small but growing family looking for something bigger.

Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team, shares his first impression of home buying reality shows.

Since I deal with the often-stressful work of advocating for buyer and seller clients every day, the last thing that I do to relax is watch TV show about home buying.

Recently, my wife stumbled across the channel that features such shows and I had time to check out a couple of real estate home buying reality shows. Here are my first impressions:

It appeared to me that the buyers in the first show were being shown property by the seller's agent until I later realized that she was actually the buyer’s agent. I was confused because of her abundant salesman-type comments about various aspects of the home and virtually no critique about the home’s weak points.

During both shows, I noticed that the agents offered very little insight to the buyers about the properties price and condition in relation to its price point and there was no on-screen discussion about the buyer’s other options. At least the agent in the second show took the initiative to show several other properties in the buyer’s price range so that they could see what they could get for their money.

I didn't see any discussion about agency disclosure, which is required in most states, to help buyers understand if they are working with a buyer’s agent, seller's agent, dual agent, designated agent or facilitator. (Those are the options in Massachusetts, where one of the episodes took place.) Hopefully, disclosures were handled before the show was taped.

OK, so where are local buyers looking as they hunt for a home they can afford?

I had Trulia send me a couple lists. The first is the top ten markets local buyers in Greater Boston are looking at, as measured by queries on the search engine.

The western suburbs - Cambridge, Newton, Framingham - are the top market in terms of searches. Buyers, even here in pricey Greater Boston, are still inclined to look in their back yards.

But after that it gets interesting, with lower cost markets like Worcester, Portland, Providence and Southern New Hampshire rounding dominating the top ten.

Check out this new report by Trulia. It puts Boston - and Washington, D.C. as well - at the bottom of the heap in terms of interest by potential home buyers from other parts of the country.

Trulia takes a snapshot of online house hunting habits and comes away with some interesting findings. In particular, the online real estate site looks at the markets potential buyers, and for that matter renters, are searching from, and then matches it up with the metro areas they are looking at.

Basically, Boston comes in No. 3 in the top 10 markets where there are lots of people looking elsewhere for new homes and apartments, but not a lot of folks looking in.

Yes, we are seeing a mini boom in new rental construction. Developers with plans for five new apartment high-rises are set to get a green light from the Boston Redevelopment Authority tonight, the Globe reports.

That should add another 1,400 units to the thousands already in construction or in the pipeline, both in Boston and the suburbs.

But don't get your hopes up that this flood of new supply will magically bring down now soaring rents. It's just not going to happen.

Downtown apartment towers are for the young and upscale and the older and wealthy - these are hardly bastions of middle and working class family housing. And while many of the new suburban rental developments may not pack the height of the urban counterparts, but they are pitched at a decidedly upscale market.

Nothing wrong with that, but there's not going to be much trickle down here when it comes to lowering rents for the rest of the market. Sure, there will be more luxury units for well off empty nesters to pick from, but it's hard to see that having any impact on apartment rents in Hyde Park or Dorchester.

Would you buy in a town that had a casino? Moreover, what are some other potential deal breakers?

This is no longer a theoretical discussion. State lawmakers last night passed a casino gambling bill. Once signed by Gov. Deval Patrick - he's on board, so no issue there - Massachusetts will be on track to get three casinos and a smaller slot hall.

The leading candidates, in terms of locations, are Palmer and East Boston. Still, given that it's going to be a competitive bidding situation, at least one, maybe two of these gambling complexes could end up anywhere.

The likelihood of a mass jail break is pretty unlikely in this day and age. That said, there can be a stigma to having a prison in town. There's a reason Walpole prison, that formidable, white walled, high security fortress, got renamed Cedar Junction. It's unfair, but the perception is there.

OK, Gerri Willis certainly doesn't mince words.

I chatted with the Fox Business Network anchor in advance of a "housing summit" she hosted on her nightly consumer and personal finance show, The Willis Report.

Willis can hold forth with the best of them on the latest housing market woes and how the sector's implosion is dragging the whole economy down.

But when it comes to doling out the individual advice, Willis, whose specialty is personal finance, is very much a housing bull.

Basically, rates are at historic lows and prices are down roughly 30 percent. If you want to buy a house, this is the time to do it. Look carefully, though, at the health of your local economy - in the end jobs and real estate are closely intertwined, she argues.

OK, to put it another way, is the media to blame for keeping buyers on the sideline?

That's what the chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders appeared to be getting at during a panel discussion Friday evening on Fox Business Network.

"Basically, buyers are being misled by these scare tactics of big drops in individual (markets)," argued the NAHB's David Crowe in a "housing summit" led by anchor Gerri Willis.

Instead, buyers should be focused on the market in their town or neighborhood, he said.

Maybe, given the latest grim tidings on the nation's battered housing market.

The Fiserv Case-Shiller Indexes are now projecting another 3.6 percent drop in home prices across the country through next June.

Ouch!

And the Bay State is not likely to escape the undertow, with various submarkets expected to see declines of anywhere from 2.8 to 4.5 percent, according to the Wisconsin-based housing market tracker.

He certainly stirred the pot. Commenting on my post yesterday on how the Boston area remains one of the most expensive in the country to buy in, VincenteP argued a family needs to make $250,000 to buy a house and live a typical middle class lifestyle here.

In Boston a family needs to make $250K just to have a "middle class" experience that $70K would buy in most other parts of the country. Oh the culture, right. Except that companies have started to realize this as well and have moved their jobs elsewhere. No jobs, housing prices will come down.

Not surprisingly, that $250,000 number got some people pretty worked up.

Here's Lance:

Anybody who can't make $250K/yr work in Boston is either spoiled, financially clueless, or has an inveterate gambling/drug habit.

While I think $250,000 is too high, it gets to a key point. It takes more to live a middle class life - complete with a single-family home large enough for a kid or two - than in most other parts of the country. And to do so, you need to earn considerably more than you would than, say, in North Dakota or Upstate New York.

Only New York and California's top three metro markets are more expensive to buy a house in, Zillow finds in its latest quarterly report.

Of the nation's 25 top metro markets, the Boston area comes in at No. 5, with a median home value of $319,000.

While San Francisco remains king, at $467,400, we are not that far behind New York ($348,000), San Diego ($344,000), and Los Angeles ($387,000).

And we are still near the top despite a nearly 20 percent decline across the Boston area in median prices since the market peaked here in 2005.

Home buying has gotten pretty complicated.

There is an ever growing list of things to consider, well beyond the old standard of school system, neighborhood and - hopefully, but no guarantee these days - potential resale value.

Buyers are supposed to endlessly obsess about the energy footprint of a house and how much damage their commute will do to the global climate.

But there are even more basic issues to consider, especially in an age where weather patterns are becoming more unpredictable and storms more intense.

This past week of mass power outages across Greater Boston, triggered by a freak October snow storm, is a good reminder of how vulnerable we all are when it comes to nature's wrath.

Here's my quick list potential weather/nature related hazards to mull when house hunting. OK, if you think I am being paranoid, feel free to tell me so, because I am to some extent - and I always enjoy a good argument. But here goes.

The latest homes sales numbers are out and they look tough.

Pending home sales - contracts signed but not closed yet - fell 2 percent in October over September across the state, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports.

Instead of hitting open houses and putting houses under agreement as the fall market kicked in, home buyers instead appear to be taking a step back.

Nationally, pending sales fell 4.6 percent in September from August, the National Association of Realtors reports.

I’m dreaming of a white Halloween. Well, it is a nightmare for those who took the brunt of the early snowfall in the northeast.

Trick-or-treating was cancelled in Lexington this year because of the snowstorm. I first heard of this on Sunday afternoon when a FaceBook friend mentioned it. Schools were closed for Monday, so Halloween was cancelled, too.

Is this good public safety? Does trick-or-treating create more cars on the roads? Should families without power be exempt from candy-giving?

My first impression was that cancelling trick-or-treating was overkill, but then I drove around Lexington. I was working in Lexington on Monday and was detoured off a main road (Pleasant Street) because trees or tree-removal equipment was still blocking the road. I passed several clusters of tree-removal trucks. There were branches all along the roadways on many streets.

OK, no one is going to hunt for a house on the basis of whether the area is prone to power outages.

Still, as we endure the second week-long power outage in three months, it might be an issue at least considering.

And, oddly enough, if you are so inclined, there is a way to figure this out.

As you look at a community's schools and other services, also check out whether the town runs its own electric utility or relies on one of the big power companies, NStar and National Grid.

If it does, there's a good bet that your lights will be coming on much faster than those of your friends in the town next door serviced by one the big utilities.

It's Monday! Happy Halloween. Today, Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team
discusses how different agents view inspection reports.

During the course of a recent transaction in which I represented the buyer, the listing agent called me to tell me that she did not want me to send a copy of the inspection report to her the next time that I represented a buyer that was buying one of her listings. She went on to explain what I already knew; if she received a copy of the inspection, she was obligated to disclose that information to other potential buyers if she had to put the property back on the market. The problem, she explained, is that two different inspectors might come up with two different sets of findings on the same property. I presumed that to mean that it was possible that a second inspector might not find some of the problems that the first one found or that it is possible that the first inspector might have found “defects” that are not really defects at all, so why open up a can of worms by disclosing the results of the first inspection?

During the same week, I received an offer on one of my listings from an agent in one of the big franchise offices. That offer included the franchise’s inspection contingency clause, which stated that if the buyer terminated the agreement based on an adverse inspection, that the buyer should send only the relevant portions of the inspection report only if requested by the seller.

Here's a scary number. As many as 42 percent of homeowners across the country think prices typically rise about 7 percent a year, according to a new survey by Zillow.

Of course, the real number is much lower, on average 2-5 percent a year. And of course, that's an historic average with the ups and downs of the market smoothed out.

The last time I checked - just this morning actually - we are still locked in a historic downturn that has seen home values fall as much as 30 percent or more in some markets.

She's been at it for ten months now, but Dionysia can't find a buyer for her renovated Victorian.

In fact, she's hasn't even gotten an offer on her house, located in the downtown of a "small MetroWest city," with just a modest pickup in traffic through the house this fall after a completely dead summer.

Dionysia wonders where she has gone wrong.

After all, she's priced her house at just $6,000 above what she paid for it eight years ago. And that's despite having pumped more than $100,000 into everything from a new roof.

Here's what she had to say in a comment on my recent blog on sellers who get insulted by low-ball bidders.

The Bay State may still be perceived as a liberal stronghold, but the president does not appear to be getting a lot of love from local real estate agents.

A startling 78 percent of Massachusetts real estate agents polled by HomeGain "strongly disapprove" of the Obama's performance.

The survey, taken in the third quarter amid a pileup of bad housing market news and the fallout from a tough spring market, is a big jump from the roughly 50 percent who gave the president failing grades at the start of the year.

It is further reflection of the deep quagmire the housing market has bogged down in. And while it would be unfair to blame the president for creating the housing mess we are in, he has arguably taken a bad situation and made it worse.

I'll lift here from my weekly Banker & Tradesman column, which came out today, which delves into the HomeGain poll numbers.

Sorry, but if you get offended because a buyer tries to strike a hard bargain, please don't come crying to me.

You may not like the offer, but to take it as a personal affront?

We are living in 2011, not 1811.

Frankly, here's where I think some sellers desperately need a reality check.

Everyone haggles over everything these days. But some sellers apparently still get miffed over what they perceive as low ball offers.

That's what our friend "Frank," who surfaces from time to time to share his experiences, is finding out as he continues to look for a deal in suburban Boston.

Spying a promising $470,000 colonial north of Boston, Frank offered $425,000.

While that might sound low, it is roughly 10 percent below the asking price and above the assessed value, Frank notes.

Besides, the owners had already cut the price twice before.

But instead of countering, the owners are apparently opting to cut the price again, to $465,000.

Today, I celebrate the home purchase of L and J. This purchase is cause for celebration. Sometimes, the transfer of a house from one person to another is just a business deal. Sometimes, it becomes a joyful transfer of the best parts of a life from one family to another.

The house in question was in the same family for 66 years. The family that was selling had owned it since the (now deceased) father was a teenager. He later bought it from his parents and raised his family in it. His adult daughter was selling it. The house had 66 year’s worth of stuff in it. Making it even harder was that the (now deceased) mother was a hoarder.

One of the hardest seller situations is when someone is selling their parent’s house. Handling a parent’s things and making decisions about throwing things away, selling things, and keeping things, is very difficult. For agents, it requires tact. Working in a compassionate way goes a long way to making things work out for everyone involved.

The sellers were under the gun to get the house cleared out for sale. It was a Sisyphean task. They couldn’t market the house, generally, until it was cleared out. My clients saw the house while it was still cluttered, but could see through the clutter and knew the house would work for them. They were able to see beyond the clutter and had faith in the seller’s ability to get the house cleared out for closing. A deal was struck.

Buyers should be cashing in right now, scooping up homes at bargain prices, but they aren't.

Instead, many sellers are refusing play, either pulling their homes off the market or opting not to sell in the first place.

A growing problem locally - I recently blogged about it here - the decline in decent inventory is also starting to become a major issue in other metro markets across the country.

The number of homes on the market has dropped by 20 percent across the country through the end of September, according to a new report by Realtor.com.

Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team discusses the biggest challenge that he feels condo buyers and owners face.

The lure of carefree condo living is enticing: buy a condo and someone else will take care of the maintenance, freeing condo owners to attend to their other priorities.

The reality of condo living is that someone else has to make sure that the property is cared for and the bills are being paid. The “someone” is the group of owners that run the condo association.

Those who buy units in professionally managed buildings (usually buildings with over four to six units) typically, but not always, have the advantage of buying into better run buildings than the smaller self-managed associations.

Even the best manager has to follow guidelines set by the condo association’s board and live within the budget that the board approves. In tough economic times, some professional managers are finding it challenging to get the funds needed to perform all required maintenance and keep a healthy reserve account.

For-sale signs are a little harder to spot this fall.

The number of homes for sale is dropping, both across the country and here in Massachusetts.

And while the drop in "inventory," as it's called in the business, might be good news in a grossly overbuilt market like Las Vegas, it is definitely bad news here, especially in still pricey Greater Boston.

Here are two numbers to munch on from a piece in this week's Banker & Tradesman.

The number of homes on the market was down 5.3 percent in August compared to a year earlier. July saw a 1.7 percent year-over-year drop in inventory.

Meanwhile, sales activity, while still anemic, has begun to pick up after hitting rock bottom last summer with the expiration of the home buyer tax credit, may it rest in peace. Sales rose 15.8 percent in August compared to August 2010, the paper reports, citing figures from real estate data firm, The Warren Group, its parent company.

It's a significant finding for Greater Boston, which suffers from a chronic lack of decent inventory.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino has been an unflagging cheerleader for urban life, overseeing an explosion in new condo development downtown.

But his decision to effectively bar Walmart from setting foot in Boston - and in particular Roxbury - raises one of the major drawbacks of urban living.

Yes, if you trade in your suburban home for a condo or house in Boston, you might just be able to ditch your car as well.

And for someone who hates cars as much as I do, that's an attraction.

But carless or not, you are then stuck with a limited array of shopping options, of which the lack of a Walmart is just the tip of the iceberg. Major grocery stores are hard to find, and, with a captive audience, the prices are invariably higher at the few that have managed to squeeze their way into the city.

A client of mine asked:

During our condo meeting, there was talk about changing our HOA bylaws regarding pets and smoking. There wasn't a clear consensus on what we should do. As it stands now, we have no limits on smoking and a limit of 2 pets that weigh less than 75 lbs. One of my main concerns was how a non-smoking or an even more-limited pet policy could hurt or help our property value (one tenant wants to ban all pets and at a minimum ban dogs.) I've done some searching on the web, but I'm not narrowing in on an answer…

I replied:

Pet and smoking bans are both an ongoing condo association dilemmas. My sense is that enforcement is where the problem comes in. You either need to enforce the no pet policy or the pet behavior policy. It creates a cop-neighbor tension between the pet owning condo owner and the non pet owning condo owner. Same goes for smoking bans. Either can harm condo owner’s relationships.

In my practice, there are condo buyers who will refuse to buy in a pet-free building because they have pets or plan on having pets. I have not run into a single buyer who would refuse to live somewhere because pets were allowed. I did a quick search of condos in Somerville, Cambridge and Brookline. At this moment 474 are for sale, only 18 have a no pet policy posted on the MLS.

I couldn’t find any good statistics on the economic impact of a no-pet policy. Anecdotally, I have noticed some drag on resale when a building has a no-pet policy. It is more about it taking longer to sell, not a noticeable drop in price. I haven’t seen a similar drag on resale based on buyers rejecting properties that allow pets.

Allison Oropallo may be poised to make a big splash this Sunday during the season finale of HGTV’s “All American Handyman.”

An Arlington middle school teacher, she is the only woman in the show’s seven year run to make it to the last stage of a grueling, months-long competition that involves, among other things, building an Adirondack Chair in 90 minutes.

And if she can smoke the show's other three male finalists in the last big challenge - building a shed, followed by redoing a kitchen in five hours - then HGTV should rename the show, which does seem a bit dated.

“It’s absolutely insane,” Allison says of the challenges she faces on the show.

But in real life, she faces an equally daunting task ahead as she contemplates someday buying a home in still ultra pricey Greater Boston on a teacher’s salary.

I got a phone call from a client of mine. He wanted to know what to do about his garage, which was destroyed by a tree on the day Irene blew through. Is it better to replace it with a garage or, instead, put up a shed for the bicycles and enjoy more yard space? Does removing the garage put a ding on the property value for potential resale?

Here is the information he told me:
The property had a metal pre-fab garage that was rusty and in poor condition since before they bought it, nearly ten years ago.
They have a three-car wide driveway in front of it.

Additional information:
The house is a two-family building located in Somerville, north of Porter Square. Their lot is about 6000 square feet. The back yard is tiny. The house is long and thin and sits to one side of the lot, making most of the potential yard on the side of the house where the garage is.

Here is what I answered:

You called about the question of what is the best economic decision to make about the garage. I have to give you a non-answer answer, unfortunately. There is not clear economic advantage either way. Here’s why:

An appraiser may calculate the value of the house based on the garage being there or not, but the buying public is likely to see the garage as equal value to the bigger yard. In my experience with buyers in towns near Boston, I frequently hear buyers wish the garage was not there, since it ruins the yard space. Some people do want garages, but just as many want a good yard.

I wouldn't bet the house on it.

Yes, there certainly seem to be many more cash buyers out there than before. The Globe and WBUR both recently did pieces on this - more than a third of all home and condo sales across the state so far this year have been cash deals.

Yet with home sales across the state having fallen to anemic levels and banks skittish, it may also be the case that cash buyers are among the last guys standing here. (Thanks to Markus for this common sense observation.)

Yes, the cash buyer may be king now, but the realm is shrinking fast.

Here's a revealing stat. In 2004, as the housing bubble was reaching its peak, there were 50,561 homes sold across Massachusetts. But by 2010, that number had plunged by more than 25 percent, to 37,326, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

My hunch is that more than just our incredibly shrinking real estate market is at work here - there is also a surge in speculative buying of the kind that always takes place in the wake of a market crash, whether on Wall Street or Main Street.

The apartment market has long been a haven for skittish buyers in Greater Boston.

But soaring rents may be poised to shift that calculus, making renting as costly as buying in some cases.

The median rent for a two bedroom in Boston and its suburbs is nearing the $2,000 mark, according to a new survey by Champagne, Illinois-based rental market data cruncher Cazoodle.

That's a 13.3 percent jump this year through September compared to the same period last year.

It's also far above a handful of other cities that Cazoodle ran stats on, with Washington metro, at $1,875, the closest, and Chicago, the Twin Cities and Baltimore well behind these market leaders, so to speak.

So what does this do to the rent-versus-buy calculus?

Cash buyers are the hot topic this weekend. Both the Boston Globe and WBUR published on this.

Generally, about ten percent of real estate transactions are paid with cash. This year, the average in Massachusetts for the first three quarters is forty percent. It is this change that piqued the interest of both the Boston Globe and WBUR.

Jenifer McKim at the Boston Globe mentions some overlapping categories of cash buyers:

Very rich cash buyers purchasing deeply discounted high end condos.
Speculators buying distressed properties at deep discounts to flip or rent.
Investors buying rental property near colleges.

Over at WBUR, Curt Nickisch was working on a similar story this week. He also added this statistic to the mix:

In some Massachusetts communities, more than half of home sales this year are have been paid with cold hard cash. Those communities include Provincetown, New Bedford and Cambridge.

I am not sure how to categorize these cash buyers. Some are downsizers buying retirement properties, some are investors, and some are purchasing “kiddie condos.” (Parents buying condos for their student-children. This is a hybrid between investing and buying a second family home.)

Are you laying you cash down for real estate this year?

That's what the nation's bankers are predicting in a survey just released by FICO.

Nearly half  - or 49 percent - of risk management officers surveyed at banks across the country don't see home prices climbing back to 2007 levels for nearly another decade.

By comparison, just 21 percent thought prices would rebound before the decade ends.
An even larger number - 73 percent - are banking on foreclosures being a major problem for at least another five years. About half, 46 percent expect mortgage delinquencies, the first step towards an eventual foreclosure, to rise over the next six months.

OK, I haven't exactly been breathlessly following FICO's surveys, so I guess I missed this, but the bankers are apparently feeling markedly sour as of late after a burst of relative optimism early this year.

So what does this mean for Massachusetts, and in particular, for the Greater Boston market?

After reading another lame ranking of the "best places to live" that mixed in some randomly chosen Greater Boston towns, I was fairly disgusted.

So I threw the question out - as to the best places to live locally - to the readers of this blog.

Here's a list, based on your nominations:

For their quaint, picture perfect, walkable downtowns: Concord, Newburyport and Winchester.

OK, here's your chance to weigh in and share what you know. Fire away. I will feature the most scintillating entries in a post next week.

Now here are my questions for you.

For buyers looking at homes or condos, here in Greater Boston, or elsewhere, for that matter, what is your impression of prices and selection? Are there attractive options in your price range? Are sellers still holding out - or ready to cut a deal?

What towns and neighborhoods have the best bargains right now? Conversely, what zip codes are overpriced, in your estimation?

For sellers, what kind of demand are you seeing? Are you getting traffic at open houses? Have you had to cut your asking price? And if so, by how much? Also, are you using a real estate agent, or are you going it alone?

Half decent homes at more reasonable prices - that sums up we need more of here in Greater Boston.

We can poke fun all day at Miami and Las Vegas and other grossly overbuilt markets, but at least there is no lack of new homes to pick from.

But instead of new homes or at least older ones in good repair, we are getting more getting more foreclosures, according to a report out this morning by The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

Foreclosures took a nose dive last fall, both in the Bay State and across the country, after the robo-signing scandal blew and revealed that major lenders were running shoddy, assembly-line style foreclosure mills.

Now foreclosure deeds - the last step in the process - are on the rise again across the state. And with the steady proliferation of distressed properties into the suburbs - I have one right around the corner from me here in Natick - the increase could cast a much wider pall than in years past.

I'm still waiting, but so far the double dip has failed to bring about the deep home price reductions here in Greater Boston that some frustrated buyers are longing for.

The latest Case-Shiller numbers show a 1.9 percent decline in Boston area home prices this July from July 2010.

Frankly, it's modest decline. And it's far from the wrenching realignment that seemed in order after the expiration of the home buyer tax credit last year sent sales plunging off a cliff.

The most common reason that sellers are underwater now is not because of their initial mortgage. It is because they kept borrowing against the bubble-level equity of their house. Some did it to improve the house with a new kitchen, put on an addition, upgrade some of the systems, or just for good-quality maintenance. Others floated their vacations, cars or paid college bills. Some hedged their periods of unemployment or underemployment with their home equity loans.

When the bubble began to deflate, they found themselves stuck in their homes and in their mortgages. If they are lucky, they still have the income to pay the mortgage and keep the house. What they don’t have is the cash to leave the house.

The cash?

Here’s a rough case in point to show how owners can be underwater without being slammed by large-scale depreciation. I chose a middle-class example, because the example of people who bought with no money down at tippy-top peak is just too obvious. Those buyers had not equity to begin with.

Instead, I also used a town where the deflation has been relatively small, compared to most of Massachusetts and tiny compared to the rest of the country. I used a steady 5 percent loan rate, even though these owners would have started higher and refinanced down through the time period I am describing:

J and J bought a smallish house is Lexington in 1996 for $250,000. They added an addition in 2000 for $100,000. Today, they are still sitting pretty. They can still sell that house for $600,000 or more and walk away with a profit.

Here's how the the water rose:

As I sip my morning coffee, I am looking over a list of the nation's top 20 metro markets sent over by Trulia.

It was set up to mirror the cities in the much watched Case-Shiller index, the latest installment of which is due out later this morning.

And the Boston area leaps out for having the smallest average price cut on a list of markets that stretches from San Diego to Dallas to New York.

When Miami area homeowners decide to lower their asking price, they knock it down by a meaty 11 percent.

In Atlanta and Tampa, it is 9 percent, and in 11 other markets the average cut weighs in at a still substantial 7 to 8 percent.

But in Greater Boston? Our home sellers can muster up only a relatively measly 5 percent discount.

Pamlow thinks we spend too much time on this blog debating the dollars and cents side of home buying/selling/ownership. We are missing the bigger picture, she contends.

And frankly, I think she's right.

To boil it down to its core, buying and owning a home is part of the recipe generations of Americans have been following in their efforts to build a "nice life" for themselves, as pamlow notes.

Renting is fine, but it's still not comparable, especially for young families, when it comes to the much wider array of home sizes, styles and locations that are available on the for-sale market.

And guess what, the fast and furious romance with apartment living is already entering its final 15 minutes as landlords big and small scramble to jack up rents.

So how far have prices fallen in the Boston area since the peak of the bubble in 2005?

Well, about a whopping 3 percent, according to quarterly numbers put out by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

We do a lot of jabbering on this blog about the big decline in home prices.

And yes, statewide, we have been hit pretty hard - nationally even worse.

But when it comes to Boston and the cities and towns that make up its western and southern suburbs, it's a much different picture.

So says Trulia in its latest American Dream survey.

More than 65 percent of Millennials consider home ownership as part of their "personal American dream," according to a recent Harris Interactive poll commissioned by the real estate website. R

It's an age group - 18 to 34 - where renting has supposedly become the new ideal amid the never ending downturn in home sales and prices.

In fact, the Millennials are almost as bullish as the somewhat older Gen Xers, 66 percent of whom are still sold on the idea of homeownership.

Yet it's the Baby Boomers who are the most bullish of all. Of those in their pre-retirement years, 74 percent are still high on homeownership, with the number rising to 76 percent for those 55 and older.

A home inspector of my acquaintance wrote to ask me this:

It recently struck me that most of my clients are part of a couple. Two people buying a home. That makes sense. It pretty much takes two incomes to support one for most folks.

But when I have a single client who is buying a home, it is almost always a single woman. I work with very few single men.

SO I have two questions:

1) Does that mirror your experience?

2) If so, why do you think that is?

I took a quick look at my client list over the past three years and replied:

Yes, single women outstrip single men for buying solo by 3:1 or so, depending on the year. Couples outstrip singles by 3:1 or 4:1.

Looking beyond my little office, the National statistics look like this for 2010:

First time house buyers: 48 percent married, 12 percent unmarried couples, 23 percent single women, 15 percent single men.

Recent buyers (not first timers): 68 percent married, 4 percent unmarried couples, 17 percent single women, 9 percent single men.

I am not going to venture a guess as to why single women buy independently more than men do. In my experience, the pattern holds for always-single and newly single. Here are some broad generalizations:

Today, Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team discusses the types of sewerage systems that buyers might find, depending on where they are looking to buy.

Most City Slickers rarely think about the sewerage system in their home or condo. Their waste water just goes down the drain and disappears into the city/town sewer system unless the toilet or pipes get clogged or break. Homeowners pay the city/town sewer bill and enjoy almost no sewerage system maintenance hassles.

On a rare occasion, I run into a private sewerage system in a city. (I’ve seen them in some parts of Newton and the Boston neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Roslindale.)
Those that are moving to less densely populated communities may find that homes in some of those communities or neighborhoods are not connected to city sewers. Instead, they may find private sewerage systems on the property like septic systems or older cesspools. (There are also some newer innovative and alternative technologies, but I have yet to see them installed.) When working properly, private systems don’t usually require much maintenance and there is no sewer bill to pay.

As technology has advanced, municipalities have adopted strict rules for the installation of private sewer systems, particularly when they were in close proximity to drinking water wells or other water (ponds, lakes, underground streams, etc.) In Massachusetts, private sewerage systems are now subject to specific regulations
and must pass a Title 5 test before any property can be sold.

OK, you can pick Bermuda if you want, but I am thinking much more locally, such as Greater Boston.

My inspiration on this chilly but bright Monday morning comes from CNN Money's list of the top 100 places to live.

There are five Boston area towns on the list - thanks to Banker & Tradesman for pointing this out. Milton is No. 2 on the CNN Money list, followed by, in no particular order, Sharon, Acton, Chelmsford and Easton.

All fine towns, but reading the descriptions, it's hard not to have the sneaking suspicion that these communities were simply drawn out of a hat.

I wear a bunch of hats and I don’t have a place to hang them all. Like most people, there is at least one room in the house that gets out of control. For me, it is my home office.

My home office that wears too many hats, too. My home office is the writing center for this blog, my company blog, and my book. My home office is also where I do some of my work as a buyer’s agent and as the owner of my real estate company. My home office is also where I find myself when I am planning things with friends and family, since I schedule out of my computer calendar. My home office is where the TV lives, so it is where movies are watched, yoga and fitness DVD are followed, and -- as of this week -- where football games are watched. My home office stores my books and my office supplies.

My professional office does not have this identity crisis: it is just a professional office.

The reason that I bring this up is because it is an issue for house buyers. It is a hard question for most:

Do you have too much stuff or do you have too little space?

Today, I want to outline some of the most common things that my buyers mention about their lifestyle and the house choices they make to accommodate their clutter weak-spots. Many focus on these things:

The kid who got busted after turning his apartment on a quiet Arlington Street into an urban pot farm got me thinking.

Despite the windows being covered with dark plastic, neighbors of the $520,000 Cleveland Street duplex, some of whom have lived on the street for decades, never noticed anything amiss.

Still, the college student has good taste in real estate. After all, you could do worse that Arlington - you could easily shell out $550,000 to $600,000 to buy a home in the area.

There were a couple stories after that about even more flagrant neighbor antics - this Roxbury house was being used as a brothel.

When you are looking at buying a house or condo, you inevitably end up gambling when it comes to your new neighbors.

Dana Hollish Hill, a fellow buyer’s agent from NAEBA, wrote this as her FaceBook status this week:

How I love seeing homes after a huge rain.

There is a lot to be learned about a house if you see it just after bad weather has rolled through. Here are some things that I look for. What would you add to the list? Some of these may turn out to be easily fixed. However, you would not get the same warning if you saw the same house during a dry spell.

Bad signs:
If you see a wet vac (shop vac) plugged in and looking recently used it could be a bad sign. Did the owners need to vacuum up water during or after the storm? This is a red flag that needs to be investigated.
Damp marks on the exterior walls or floor show that water was able to get in during the extraordinary conditions.

A damp smell or seeing damp wood still in basement is a bad sign. Owners need to be careful to dry out any wood that got wet to avoid mold. Anything that is porous that got wet should have been thrown out by now.

Buckling vinyl or wood parquet floor tiles can happen over a long period of time or can happen suddenly from standing water. Either way, dampness is getting in.

Short sales are slowly on the rise, now accounting for 12 percent of all home sales, USA Today reports.

That said, real estate agents selling homes across the state report that the short sale process is still anything but short.

In a recent survey by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, just over half - 54 percent - reported they had handled at least one short sale over the past year.

Here's a breakdown of how long it took:

• 22 percent reported it took an average of 1-3 months to close on the home
• 46 percent reported it took 4-6 months to close 
• 25 percent reported 6-12 months to close
• 7 percent reported it took over 12 months on average to close a short sale
  

The short answer is everywhere else but here.

A survey just out by HomeGain suggests a big shift in attitudes toward the real estate market.

Half of all homeowners across the country now believe prices are headed down over the next six months.

That's a marked increase from the second quarter, when just 30 percent of homeowners were bracing for more price declines.

Despite now years of falling sales and prices, the ever optimistic American homeowner has been confidently predicting a real estate market turnaround is just around the corner. Until now that is.

Yet as usual, homeowners here in the Bay State, are once again defying common sense as they buck this trend towards greater realism.

I went to some open houses last Sunday with people who are not buying a house this year. What was I doing there? The goal was to see houses that will be comparable properties for their proposed house hunt next year. They currently own a starter house and intend to trade up before September 2012.

This is what happened:
House Number One was solidly in their preferred price range. Not a stretch. It was in a neighborhood they are very fond of.

He said: “If this was on the market next spring, I’d want to make an offer!”
She said: “This is close, but it isn’t my ‘forever house.’”
They both agreed the yard was too small. She would solve it with landscaping; he would solve it by using the local park.
Location: A, Size: B+, Condition: A. Price: Acceptable.

House Number Two was over their price range.
It was in a different location, where there was a lot more space between the houses. The yard was big and flat, but abutted non-residential property. The house, itself, was much too big for them.

If you have money to burn and want your children to go to school in Dover - where the median sale price tops $1 million - well then go for it.

I'd still take a bookworm in a middling school system any day - I think chasing academic brands is foolish.

But that's just me. I must fess up here - I hated (K-12) school and spent as much of my time buried in a book - often at home - as possible.

Still, even here in pricey Greater Boston, most of us can't buy our way into the elite towns - and maybe wouldn't if we could.

Boston magazine's ranking of the area's schools has some big flaws, but at least it provides a rough sketch of what's out there. (The Dover-Sherborn district is No. 1 on the magazine's list.)

In my post yesterday about town/school shopping, I thought woodenhippo offered up a good, no nonsense analysis of how to squeeze some value out of the rankings.

Today, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team continues the discussion about living area that he started on August 8th. That discussion was about single family living area calculations. Today, Sam discusses condominium living areas.

Condominium and single family living areas are calculated differently.
While single family living area is calculated from exterior dimensions of a home’s living area, a condominium’s living area is calculated from interior dimensions. (The outside perimeter walls of a condominium unit are usually part of the condominium association’s common area.)

Unfortunately, all kinds of “extras” are often added into the living area of condominiums to inflate their size and value. This starts when a developer insists on including the square footage of garages, decks or porches in “living areas” stated in condominium documents. That living area is typically used to market the condos and the town assessor usually uses the inflated living area to assess the value of the condominiums for taxation.

The living area for a condominium unit is supposed to include all heated finished spaces, including below grade (basement) spaces that are legal living areas. (If not part of the original condo construction, added living areas should be heated, have proper ceiling height, windows, entrance and egress, and town building inspectors should have signed off on the permits for its construction.)

For upscale buyers with school age children, the answer is pretty simple: A whole lot.

Despite the downturn, the bidding wars to get into towns with the best school systems - as measured by test scores, teacher-student ratio, and other metrics - are raging unabated.

That's my quick take on Boston magazine's annual ranking of the area's top school systems.

A quick look at the top 15 reveals communities that also boast some of the highest home prices in the state, if not the country. And some have seen just nominal declines and even gains over the past few years, when the real estate market in general has gone haywire.

So says Clear Capital in its latest survey of real estate values across the country.

Plummeting consumer confidence and stubbornly high unemployment could make for a tough fall and an even gloomier winter, the housing market tracker predicts.

Don't worry. I am sure everyone is feeling a lot better now after Obama's big jobs speech last night!

Still, Greater Boston heads into the fall in a better position than many other markets.

I guess that's for you to decide. One thing is for sure, though, the prices at the DNA Lofts have certainly come down.

The Davis Cos., a veteran local developer, recently acquired the downtown-style condo project on Dot Ave after the builder lost it to foreclosure.

The new owners are now putting up 25 of the remaining DNA Loft units up for sale at an auction on Oct. 6. The condo project is located at 944 Dorchester Ave., where Dorchester meets South Boston.

Minimum bids range from $115,000 for a 665 square foot studio, to $275,000 for a roughly 1,600 square foot penthouse. The penthouse had previously been on the market for just under $500,000.

When the house next door gets foreclosed on, it can be an absolute nightmare for the neighbors.

Just ask "Carol." She lives in a neighborhood here in Greater Boston, a short walk from the ocean in a location that would not seem like a hot spot for distressed properties.

Yet Carol's life has been turned upside down since the bank seized the house next door.

For starters, Carol and her husband, having bought their house seven years ago, would like to move on to bigger and better things.

Yet the problem property next door - not to mention a tough market - have helped drag down the value of their home by a hefty $100,000. Among other things, the house next door is in need of repairs, while the yard outside is trashed.

So much for that idea.

But if Carol can't move, staying put is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

There's a now a steady stream of occasionally rude bargain hunters gawking at the foreclosure special next door, including one couple who swung by at 10:30 p.m. one night for a quick peak.

Worse, despite exchanging words with Carol's irate husband, the couple was back the next day with their real estate agent.

If there is any etiquette related to how and when a house is shown, Carol would sure like to hear about it.

Hi gang,

It may seem like I'm missing in action, but I'm not. My post went up this morning, but for some reason it got stuck farther down.

Here's a link to it.

Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. Time to get geared up for more real estate fun this fall.

All for now,

Scott

Here's my long-term real estate strategy, and it's pretty simple - buy and hold. My wife Karen and I spent roughly $200,000 renovating and putting a modest addition onto our Natick fixer-upper.

We have young children just starting school, we like our town, and we have no plans to move until retirement, or, more likely, we get too old to work anymore.

Is my house underwater? Who knows, but frankly, I don't really care much either. A lot can happen in thirty years and it seems unlikely that Greater Boston is going to morph into Detroit.

If anything, maybe the bubble and now the crash will bring back the old buy and hold mentality that our grandparents had.

To me, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

If so, well then join the club.

An often overlooked problem in our now completely dysfunctional housing market is the bruised and battered seller.

Yes, buyers are increasingly hard to find as the bad economic times roll on and home prices fall again.

But sellers who have a half decent home to unload - at a reasonable price - are the other endangered species out there in the real estate jungle.

And it is an especially chronic problem here in the Greater Boston housing market, which is overloaded with overpriced, aging homes in need of work.

Fred Breimyer, regional economist for the FDIC in Boston, offered up a telling stat when I caught up with him the other day.

What you see online is often not anywhere near what you are going to get.

In fact, I have the perfect example of this right in my Natick neighborhood.

The light blue home around the corner from me at 17 Marion St., a ramshackle 1930s home of no particular style, was foreclosed on a couple years ago.

In fact, it enjoyed a pretty nice run during the bubble years, fetching $249,000 in 2002 and then getting flipped a couple years later for more than $284,000.

Then the economy came crashing down, with the home taken back by the bank for $175,000 in 2009.

After sitting empty but inconspicuous for a couple years, 17 Marion has morphed into the classic foreclosure special, with the recent addition of plywood over all the windows in advance of Irene the icing on the cake.

Now it's being marketed, intermittently, for the unbelievably low price of $205,000. (Yes, I am being sarcastic here.)

That's the reality - but you wouldn't have a clue just looking at the online listing for the home.

Boston is one of the cities that led a modest June rebound in prices, according to the latest Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller report.

The Hub was behind only to Chicago and Minneapolis, with a 2.4 percent gain in home prices in June. Chicago led the 20 cities covered by the Case-Shiller index with a 3.4 percent gain.

Monthly numbers, especially when you are dealing with the spring market, the traditional sales season, can be tricky if not downright misleading. A lot of this is just probably hype based on season changes.

In fact, on a year-over-year basis, home prices are actually down in the Boston metro market by 2.1 percent.

But there's the catch as well - the market began falling again a year ago and all we have to show for it is a lousy 2.1 percent drop in home prices? Hardly red meat for potential buyers.

The double dip in prices, at least when it comes to the core of the Boston market, so far is shaping up to be fairly wimpy. Sure, sales are down and have yet to recover, but prices remain extremely sticky.

Anyone banking on the Boston area finally become a buyers' market may have a very long wait ahead of them.

I am not a typical real estate agent. The thing that sets me apart more than anything else is that I do not subscribe to the tactic of selling homes. I work with people who buy houses. There is a lot to this distinction.

People who own (or rent) houses (or apartments) make them into homes. People sell the homes they have made out of condos and houses. Buyers walk into someone else’s home and want to buy it. On closing day, that home has reverted to its natural state; it is a house or condo. Then, the new owner has the job of making it a home, or not. I have seen million-dollar houses that are not homes and small apartments that are homes.

The bottom line is that a house is a box where you keep your stuff and live your life. There are many houses that will work for a buyer. There is no perfect house or dream house. Even if you have a romantic notion about a particular house, you could find the same utility elsewhere. If you are inclined to make a home, you can make it in any private dwelling. Being in love with a house is a choice.

A home is a place integrated into your life. The physical house becomes the backdrop for your sense of self and memories. I frequently hear buyers say that their current apartment will always be “the place where my daughter was a baby,” or “the first place we lived together.” Sellers are often even more attached to their house than a renter to their apartment, since owners tend to live in the house longer and made more physical changes to it.

Mother Nature has been busy reminding us that a house is a box where you keep your stuff and live your life. A house is vulnerable. If the house gets destroyed, you can lose your home.

Life, liberty, and a guaranteed, rock bottom mortgage rate?

A proposal for a great, big national mortgage refi party may turn out to be more than talk radio/blog fodder after all.

The Obama Administration is studying plans that would guarantee a 4 percent interest rate for tens of millions of homeowners with federally backed mortgages, The New York Times reports.

I blogged about the proposal a couple weeks ago after hearing one of the proponents, a Columbia Business School prof, make the pitch on Tom Ashbrook's On Point radio program.

There are appealing aspects to the plan - bondholders, not taxpayers, would take the hit. Better yet, it would act as a giant stimulus plan for the economy, freeing up as much as $85 billion in potential consumer spending that is now being sucked into mortgage payments.

Moreover, it may not need Congressional approval, the Times notes. That would let the Obama folks sidestep all the Tea Party rock heads.

It may be a buyers' market in the rest of the country, but not so here in the Boston area.

Despite weakening prices, landing a half decent home at a price that won't break the bank is still challenging. And the closer you get to Boston, the harder it gets.

Just take Adam Waitkunas, who runs his own high-tech public affairs firm, and his girlfriend and now fiance, Kelly Mitchell.

They finally landed a Cape in Carlisle - but not after nearly a year of hunting that took them through as many as many as 30 homes. And not after having to drop hopes of landing in Lincoln or Weston.

After you close, your closing “goes to record.” This is the process of getting your mortgage, deed, and other paperwork into the system. Someone paid by the closing attorney will go to the registry to get the paperwork filed into a registry of deeds database. (It can be done by a non-lawyer. There are errand services to do this for attorney’s offices.) Within a couple of hours of most closings, a new owner can see his/her deed on line at the local registry. The original paper deed will show up, by mail, months later. You can file it, but you don’t need to take extra-good care of it. To sell, you do not need an original deed; it is not like the title you have for your car. The important thing is that your deed is recorded at your local registry of deeds.

A registry is an old-fashioned system. The filing is done by Book and Page. This corresponds to big books with big pages. On-line searching can be done by document (Book and Page number or type of document), name (of buyer or seller) or address.

My buyers check to see that their purchase has gone to record. The ones that haven’t been patrolling the databases for months find this really neat. They also realize anyone can see it. They wonder about their privacy. What is not on record is your interest rate, what you paid along the way, or your social security number.

Getting the purchase to record is the easy part, and it goes well almost all the time. The problems develop later. Buyers rarely check later to see that the discharges (which take a while to process through the lenders) get to record.

It's been a tough year for home sales in Massachusetts, which are down more than 16 percent so far compared to the same period in 2010.

But in a break from this downward spiral, Bay State homes sales actually jumped 7 percent in July, reports The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

It was the first increase since January.

So are we finally seeing the start of the long-awaited rebound in the real estate market?

Today, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team writes about lease to own arrangements. It's a way for tenants to become owners and a way for accidental landlords to sell.

What is leasing to own?
Under a lease to own agreement, a potential buyer leases a property from the owner using an agreement that allows the buyer/tenant to purchase the property at the end of the lease period, typically at a pre-determined price.

Usually a portion of the rent goes toward the down payment. If the buyer/tenant does not buy at the end of the lease period, the amount set aside for the deposit is often forfeited. (Note that lenders want to see proof of a separate account for the tenant's portion of the rent being used toward the down payment.)

Who benefits?
This arrangement can benefit sellers who are having trouble selling their property and do not want to leave it vacant.

Buyer's who have had "credit events" or other issues that prevent them from qualifying for a mortgage for a pre-determined amount of time are ideal candidates for a lease to own arrangement. (Prospective buyer/tenants are likely to have experienced recent divorces, death of a spouse, extended unemployment prior to current employment, job transfers, etc. Many have good income and credit but need more time to qualify for a mortgage based on their new circumstances or they need to accumulate a larger down-payment.)

This stat in a Globe story yesterday on poverty in Western Massachusetts jumped off the page at me.

The study paints a stark picture of two commonwealths, in which the gap between rich and poor, east and west is growing. For example, the inflation-adjusted median income of affluent families in Greater Boston has grown 54 percent since 1979, to $230,000 from $150,000 a year, largely due to high-paying technology jobs.

This paragraph goes a long way to explain a phenomenon that often stumps both newcomers to the Boston area's high-priced housing market and veterans as well. Given declining population, an epic real estate downturn and national economic troubles, how did housing prices get so high here and why have they been so stubborn coming down?

It's the classic fantasy, returning to the neighborhood you grew up in to buy back your childhood home.

Back in the "olden days," as my five-year-old daughter calls them - though of course to her that's anything that happened before she was born, but no matter - it was more common for two or three generations of a family to live under the same roof.

But with the birth of the self sufficient, nuclear family after World War II, those days are long gone. The house and town we grow up in often has no bearing on where we eventually land. By the time we are out of college, mom and dad have already downsized to a condo or moved to a warmer climate.

That certainly was my experience. I grew up in a nice, 1970s subdivision in Norfolk, a commuter town with lots of woods and farms about 30 miles south of Boston. By a fluke, really, my sister Sandra still lives in town, so occasionally I drive by four bedroom colonial I grew up in at 8 Noon Hill Ave.

It always looks smaller than it did when I was living there - the current owners, I'm told, have taken out all that dark, 1970s wood paneling and have painted the walls. Probably stripped out the powder blue and rose red carpet as well.

A pair of  Columbia Business School profs have come up with a rather unique way to fix the nation's woes - they want to throw a great, big mortgage refi party for homeowners across the country.

R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School, and Chris Mayer, a professor of finance and economics and the school's senior vice dean, would like to refinance 30 million mortgages across the country down to a once unimaginable 4 percent.
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The duo contend this would both stabilize the reeling housing market while providing a $60 billion a year boost to an increasingly troubled economy as well. The average homeowner would wind up with hundreds of additional dollars to spend - money that is now being sucked into mortgage payments.

Mayer appeared on Tom Ashbrook's On Point radio program yesterday morning to tout the proposal.

Not exactly a pair of Ivory Tower lefties, Hubbard chaired the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush.

There's both much to be said for this idea - and some reasons to be concerned as well.

If so, you are not alone.

Just over half of all agents surveyed by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors said sales in their offices have taken a hit as a result of appraisals that came in under listing prices.

A significant number of those who answered yes had seen as many as three to four sales hit by low appraisals, which, if they don't kill a sale, can lead to some frantic last minute restructuring.

In fact, the Bay State numbers are significantly worse than the national numbers, which have been rising as well. The National Association of Realtors reported that 16 percent of all sales fell through in June, up from 9 percent in June of 2010. Low-ball appraisals were the main culprit, the trade group contends.

For a growing number of would-be home sellers and buyers, the numbers appraisers are throwing out are increasingly disconnected with reality.

It is now cheaper to buy a house than rent an apartment in 74 percent of the nation's largest metro markets, Trulia's latest Rent vs. Buy Index finds.

That is just about everywhere else except for Greater Boston, which is one of the few holdouts in this trend towards dramatically cheaper homes.

OK, it's hardly a surprise that Las Vegas, the original foreclosure basket case, tops the list of markets where it's far cheaper to buy than rent.

The same goes for Detroit, where you could probably pick up a home for practically nothing if you are willing to take your chances on the sputtering Motor City.

But there are also a lot of fairly attractive metro markets where buying a home now makes more sense than renting.

It's a group that includes Baltimore and Charlotte, Atlanta and Minneapolis, Chicago and Sacramento.

Yet while home prices have plunged around the country, the decline in the Boston area has been far more tentative.

Today, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team addresses a reader's questions about building permits in his weekly Monday blog post.

Last Monday, we discussed Living Area calculations for single family properties. I focused on how appraisers calculate single-family lower level finished space for mortgage purposes. (Condo and multifamily calculations often vary from the way that single-family living area is calculated.)

Readers asked lots of good questions about how living area would be calculated in different situations. For those interested in learning more about how various areas of single family homes are calculated, I suggest an excellent article written by my client and friend, Maria Lando, a/k/a “The Math Mom”.

Now, on to the business at hand:
Last week, Lisa53 wrote:

“We hired a licensed contractor, electrician and HVAC person but did not go the permit route because we plan on staying a while (esp in this market) and weren't looking to increase our property taxes. Our contractor gave us the choice. Everything is code and we even ripped down a bunch of the work done by the previous homeowners, who did it themselves, and badly. I was a little hesitant about skipping the permits, but time will tell.”

That's the Obama Administration's latest brainstorm on how to fix our ever more messed up housing market.

The Home Affordable Modification Program - now that's a mouthful - is seeking proposals from investors on what to do with hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes sitting empty and helping drag the housing market down.

And the feds appear to be reaching out to hedge funds and other deep-pocketed investors who can scoop up large tracts of homes and convert them into rentals, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Anything is probably better than Washington's current policy of muddling/sleep walking through one of the worst housing downturns in modern history - the Journal lauds the Obama folks for looking at a private market solution.

But if the game plan is to turn all these foreclosure specials over to the big boys and girls, what happens to the small investors out there looking for a shot at fixing up a few homes and renting them out?

The last thing that a buyer does before closing is take a walk through the house or condo. Usually, the buyer and buyer’s agent are there. Sometimes the seller or seller’s agent is there, too. The purpose is to check that property has been prepared for closing. Things to check are whether the heat and hot water are working, and that the property is vacant and clean. Everything should be working that was working at inspection. Nothing should be damaged by the sellers or their movers on the way out. Things that should be gone are gone; things that should stay are there and work.
That seems simple enough. But it isn’t always.

Sam wrote about mishaps in the garden found on walk-through. He mentioned that the Purchase and Sales Agreement needs to be specific about real estate (realty) and chattel (personalty) so that what should stay will stay and what should go will go. I create a list of grey-area items that are staying and going. I give it to the seller’s side after home inspection. This gets the discussion done and also creates a neat list for the attorneys to incorporate into the Purchase and Sales Agreement.

Some definitions:
Real estate is the land, what grows out of it, and everything built on it. The house or garage and anything affixed to the house or garage is real estate. All the appliances that are hard-wired in are real estate (light fixtures, built-in dishwashers, in-the-wall air conditioners.) The stove stays, too. Built-in bookshelves are real estate. Furniture built for a specific space is also real estate.

Chattel is anything that can be unplugged and moved, or is not attached to the house. This includes refrigerators, washers, and dryers. Even though gas dryers are connected via the gas line, they are typically considered chattel.

Grey-area items should be listed and discussed. Buyer and seller should agree about what is staying and what is going.

My rental focus this week turns to larger condo associations. Landlords who rent their condos in larger condo associations are often plagued by special assessments (additional fees for maintenance and repair.) These costs get added to rental fees as time goes on. It is in the interests of would-be tenants to pay attention to whether the building is being taken care of before big-ticket repairs are needed. It is also in the interest of non-occupant owners to encourage their management to be pro-active about building exterior issues.

Mediate Management published a blog titled The 3 Biggest Deferred Maintenance Mistakes That Condominiums Make

Here is my take on their list:

I have written about deferred maintenance. It costs more, a lot more, in the long run. Mediate gets specific:

You need a maintenance plan that the association must stay devoted to…here are the 3 biggest maintenance mistakes you should try to avoid:

1) Neglecting your roof until it leaks or endlessly patching to avoid a replacement
2) Neglecting your masonry and not making regular annual inspections
3) Neglecting paint and exterior wood repairs

Exterior leaks cause more damage than most people realize. A little drip can be the source of wood rot, termite or carpenter ant infestation, plaster damage and mold. Because water works its way down through whoever’s unit is below it, a condo association can waste a lot of time and money chasing down leaks, patching them, repairing the interiors, and doing it all again when the next little leak begins to show itself.

Mediate management recommends

... A proactive tip is to schedule annual inspections by your roofing vendor. They will survey the structure, clean out gutters, clear drains, and patch or repair vulnerable areas. They will also inspect and repair copper downspouts and detailing, roof flashing, and other metal finishes that may deteriorate or leak over time. Regular visits from the same vendor will become an excellent resource for planning out the expected life span of your roofing materials.

OK, here's my take: Sell your house first, move to a rental, and then focus on buying.

Why put yourself through the stress of trying to buy a new home while you sell your old one?

A high-wire act even during the best of times, selling while buying has become even more difficult as the pool of credit worthy buyers willing to take on a chance on falling market dwindles.

Instead, by selling first, you have the flexibility of a first time buyer coupled - hopefully - with a little cash in your pocket.

That's my take, though I suspect I am in the minority here. What's yours?

Mike wrote to me with a question that is on the mind of anyone who owns a condo in a building where there is a short sale or foreclosure.
He asked:

To give you some history, back in 2006 during the boom I was thinking of jumping into the real estate market out of fear of being out priced. I settled upon a condo in the newly built ….[condo complex in a north shore town]. I made an offer on hand’s down the nicest 1 bedroom in the building… The original owner bought it preconstruction and got every conceivable perk added. Huge granite island, granite in the bathroom, California closets. The unit was phenomenal…My offer at the time was $340,000, which got accepted, but I got cold feet and backed out of the deal. I still follow the buildings sales out of curiosity and I recently saw this same unit go on the market in a short sale for $240,000 and was eventually sold for $220, 000. Before this even the worst 1 bedrooms in the building were selling for $300,000+. It seems to me that this sale will be used as a starting point for all future sales in the building, immediately putting every other one bedroom owner at least 100k under water.
Did the bank just literally cripple this building and its tenants?

In general, a single distressed sale in a condo complex is not going to drag down the value of every unit like it in that building. It takes three to tango, for appraisers. Appraisers are aware that a comparable property is distressed, and takes that into consideration. Unless there is an epidemic of distressed sales in a building, a new, low price-point has not just been established by this one, low sale.

Looking a little deeper, Mike really dodged the bullet by having cold feet. There are two sales in that building in the past year and a half that indicate declining prices that could put other owners underwater. Only one of these was lender-involved; the other owner did not owe much on his unit.

Really, this is a foolish game, trying to predict what quarter home prices will start to turn around.

Yet every housing tracker out there does it, dutifully rolling out their latest home price predictions every quarter or so, trying to pinpoint at what time in the future prices will being their long-awaited turnaround.

The latest entry in the predictions game is Fiserv, which has pushed back by another three months the date at which it believes the market will shift into recovery mode.

Why are agents reluctant to talk about crime, safety, and schools? That’s easy. Safety and good schools are hard to measure objectively. They are matters of personal choice. One person’s “safe enough” is somebody else’s idea of scary. Weston public schools are considered the best on many lists, but many parents in Weston send their children to private school.

What is an agent’s job in regard to subjective information? Many agents provide objective information about schools and crime. Some provide contacts to former clients who can speak about their experiences in a neighborhood or at a school. But the decision to buy depends on the comfort level of the buyer. Unfortunately, comfort levels can run along race and ethnic lines.

Agents are legally required not to steer their clients. Steering is the practice of coaxing consumers into segregated neighborhoods by choosing to talk up an area to one type of person and insult it to another. The practice was commonplace until fair housing rules came into place and enough agents behaved for fear of being caught...OK, that was blunt. Not all agents behave because they think they will be caught. In fact, if I ran the world, enforcement would be better than it is; most agents don’t much fear being caught because there’s not much testing. But even the most liberal, non-racist agent has had it drummed in that subjective opinion is risky. My insurance company sent me this example of someone in trouble last year.

Bynxers thinks he's found a solution to Greater Boston's home price conundrum. He's even dubbed it the "Third Way."

I'll give him A for creativity, but I think it boils down to another variation on a now well worn path - moving to a cheaper home well beyond the 495 ring and settling for an epic commute.

Here's how Bynxers, who has managed to wrangle three days of telecommuting a week from his boss, pitched his idea in a recent comment.

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team has a few things to say about how living area is calculated and advertised.

The secondary mortgage market has clear guidelines about how appraisers are required to calculate and report the "gross living area" of single families. The rules are clear; any finished areas that are "below grade" are not supposed to be included in the gross living area of the house. That means that if the floor of a finished basement or lower level is not level with or above the land outside of it, its "living area" should not be included with the rest of the home's above grade living area.

Below grade living area is still considered when appraising single families, however, it is included and valued as a separate category of living space in the appraisal report. Presumably, that is because below grade living area is valued differently than above grade living area.

Like a lot of people, I thought once a debt default had been averted, things would go back to normal.

Normal as in sluggish economy and messed up housing market - all familiar terrain right now.

I even suggested in my post last Monday that avoiding a debt default had averted Armageddon in the housing market.

Now it looks like I wrote too soon.

OK, so Congress, despite the block headed posturing of the last few weeks, wasn't so completely senseless as to force the United States to default on its debts, effectively pushing the economy off the cliff. But it came pretty darn close - earning an unprecedented 82 percent disapproval rating.

In fact, the long and debilitating debt default debate, coupled with Standard & Poor's decision to jump on the bandwagon and downgrade the federal government's long-held AAA debt rating, has taken its toll.

And anyone who suggests all this won't have a profound impact on the housing market is beyond clueless.

Surprise, surprise! The MBTA extension of the Green line in Somerville and Medford has been delayed, again. This time, they are projecting 2018 as a finish date, with the Medford stop possibly being delayed until 2020.

I am on record here at BREN for being skeptical about the on-time arrival of the Green Line. I wrote about it in 2007, and 2008 that I do not think that buying in anticipation of the Green Line is a good idea.

In 2009, I drew on lessons learned during the Red Line extension in the 1980s for an understanding of just how long it takes to see profit from that kind of community change. Here’s what I said then. I still stand by it, except now I am pushing my projections back four years.

C., a client of mine, asked me this question:

… I was also wondering if you had any opinions on the proposed Green Line extension. Personally I think I'll be dead by the time it's done, but was wondering if you'd heard anything to the contrary. I do know about that lawsuit that said it was supposed to be completed by the end of 2014. But I'm not holding my breath.

Home prices bounced back somewhat during the spring selling season.

But it wasn't enough to reverse the double dip, with prices still down nationally nearly 8 percent for the year, Clear Capital finds in a newly released report.

The Northeast, and in particular the Greater Boston market, fared considerably better than the rest of the country. The Northeast saw prices rise 5.2 percent this spring over the abysmal winter months. That said, home prices are still down nearly 3 percent from July 2010.

Greater Boston, which the survey defines as a broad stretch encompassing the pricey western suburbs, posted a 7.6 percent gain in home prices, spring over winter. Prices, however, are still down 1.4 percent from July 2010.

The New York metro area fared even better. Home prices rose 6.7 percent in the spring, for a net gain, year over year, of 1.5 percent.

Still, as far as home prices go, this may be as good as it gets this year. We are now in the doldrums of the summer market, and if you couldn't find a buyer this spring, you are either looking at price reduction or pulling your home off the market.

Today, I am writing about unsafe conditions I have seen in attics (and basements.) Paying attention to this counts as both a rental issue and a buying issue.If you have any additional questions this rental season, write me.

I am not so naïve as to think that all workers do house renovations to code. Many renovations are done by homeowners or their paid help that are way-way-way out of code. The attic is a place where I’ve seen some whoppers.

Absolutely the worst:
Early in my career, I saw this: The seller had put paneling (the 70s kind) along the walls and the sloping roof line all the way to the peak. What was he thinking? Well, he was thinking he wanted more ceiling height and the wood going across the attic at about 5 feet up was in the way. He (or she, but this was probably a he) didn’t do any checking to find out why the roof framing was built that way to begin with. He removed the wood that was in his way.

When I showed this house, the ceiling paneling was bowing in. When we went outside, the exterior walls were bowing out. What was going on? The owner had removed the collar ties http://www.carpentry-pro-framer.com/images/anatomy-of-a-common-rafter.png that support the roof. Years later, that roof was collapsing.

More common mistakes:
In our old housing stock there are lots and lots of “finished” attics that have bedrooms in them. Even if they have been bedrooms since the 20s, it doesn’t make them safe bedrooms. I frequently see personal belongings that show that people have been living in these rooms for many years. They were lucky that no one was hurt in the time they used those rooms. Neither owners nor renters should have been sleeping there.

The more things change, the more they stay the same in our perpetually inflated Greater Boston housing market.

Prices may be coming down again, but it has been a long, slow and grudging decline here in the Boston area. And if you look at towns within the 128 belt, well it's hard to see all that much of a drop in prices from the peak years of 2004/2005.

Frankly, if you have a half decent house and don't have to sell, why would you right now?

That brings me to jhwilly's lament yesterday in the comments section on my post about the endangered species of the housing market, the move-up buyer.

“The REALTORS® are coming! The REALTORS® are coming!” Well, actually, the REALTORS® are going. They are going to some bigger commercial property because they have outgrown the Waltham location. Where they will land is still undisclosed.

Massachusetts Association of REALTORS® President Laurie Cadigan, broker-owner of Barrett & Company in Concord, took the opportunity to say, “Effectively, we are taking our own advice: Now is a great time to sell and buy.” Time will tell whether the commercial trade-up was a good idea.
I always liked the MAR (Massachusetts Association of REALTORS®) office. Over the years, I have been there for classes. The meeting room was useful. There was plenty of parking. The downside was that there was not enough room, so I can see why they would want to trade up.

The office backs up on a visible part of I-95/ Route 128. There are trees there, so inside it wasn’t all that noisy. The MAR sign was quite visible to southbound traffic. We’ll see what the new owners do with that opportunity.

Here's an interesting take from Calculated Risk on the endangered species of the housing market - the move-up buyer.
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First time buyers have increasingly become the sole source of demand in the sputtering housing market. After all, all they have to do is give notice to their landlord.

By contrast, homeowners looking to trade up can't move up until they can find a buyer for their home.

And, of course, the family selling the home you want to buy may be faced with the same dilemma, and so on.

It's a chain of transactions that during good times we all take for granted, but during bad times, can become highly problematic.

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team discusses the pricing strategy known as “testing the market.”

Assuming that a property is properly marketed, when it first comes on the market all agents and buyers have their eyes on that property. Today, that means that the brain that is processing the information on the screen quickly decides whether or not the property is of interest and worthwhile to look at, based on the property’s features and price.

Since the average attention span in the Internet age seems to be the length of time that an image is displayed on a screen, an overpriced property is likely to fade from memory as quickly as the next home appears on the screen.

Sellers that try to “test the water” with a high price often find that they need to adjust their asking price later in order to attract interest in their property or sell within their desired time frame.

Maybe, if Congress can get its act together and pass a compromise bill today to keep Uncle Sam from becoming the biggest deadbeat in history.

If the federal government were to start default on its debts, it could have catastrophic consequences for the economy and, by extension, the housing market.

A still stubbornly high unemployment remains one of the biggest obstacles to a housing recovery, argues Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

A prolonged debt default could very well trigger another severe downturn, throwing another 2 million people out of work while sending interest rates soaring.

That's obviously just what the housing market needs right now as it flounders amid another round of falling prices and sales.

"The downside of a default is massive," McBride said. "It is the reason we teach our kids to look both ways before they cross the street."

The doomsday-like debt default countdown looms over the housing market like the sword of Damocles.

After all, along with an economy that seems perilously close to shifting into reverse, the debt debate fiasco down in Washington is not exactly a confidence builder for potential home buyers.

But has it begun to truly hit home with individual buyers, prompting them to put decisions on hold or even bail after putting homes under agreement?

The Case-Shiller housing indices are the gold standard of the real estate industry, tracking resales of existing homes across the country.

But my head is aching after reading the press release on the numbers by the S&P Indices, which puts out the crucial market gauge devised by Karl Case, professor emeritus at Wellesley College, and Yale University economist Robert Shiller.

The numbers clearly show continued year-over-year declines in housing prices - Greater Boston prices were down 3.2 percent in May.

Yet the press release starts off touting seasonal increases seen in several cities in May over this April, the heart of the spring sales season.

Home sales plunged more than 23 percent in June, the fifth straight month of double-digit declines, reports The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

In fact, the 4,313 homes sold last month marked the worst June since 1991, when there were 4,243 sales.

Of course, that low point was set during another brutal recession that hit Greater Boston and New England particularly hard compared to the rest of the country.

The early 1990s were a tough time for the Massachusetts economy and real estate market here in particular. The 1990s may have ended amid the happier times of the tech boom, but the decade started with an epic bust that featured a collapse in home sales and prices after a big run up during the Reagan years.

Sounds familiar, but with national bankruptcy looming, it's not clear whether we get the happy ending this time around.

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team brings you a must-read for anyone planning to buy and renovate.

It's not uncommon to buy a home and do some renovations before moving in. Many buyers do cosmetic updating like paint and/or floor sanding, but when improvements are more extensive and delay occupying the house, buyers need to make sure that the house is properly insured and that their loan allows them to delay occupancy.

Recently, I helped buyer-clients purchase a home that they intended to renovate extensively before moving in. Planning and renovating would take between two and four months before they could occupy.

They purchased with a typical mortgage for owner-occupants. Knowing that the home was going to be unoccupied for a few months, their insurance agent obtained a construction policy to cover the vacant renovation period.

Unfortunately, there are problems with that strategy.

Now how's that for a double whammy?

Despite the housing downturn, the Boston area still has some of the highest home prices in the country.

Now, with the exodus of homeowners into the rental market, we have some of highest apartment rents as well.

Greater Boston is No. 5 in the country, behind only New York and its suburbs and San Francisco, the Globe reports, citing a new survey by Somerville-based RentalBeast.com.

Maybe, suggests a new report by Radar Logic, which argues the weak spring market may be a precursor to even deeper price declines this fall.

Home prices nationally fell nearly 6 percent in May - the most rapid decline since September, 2009. Overall, year-over year price declines have been accelerating since June 2010 in the wake of the expiration of the home buyer tax credit, according to Radar Logic.

Come fall, prices will hit a new "post-bust lows," Radar Logic predicts

On that cheery note, have a great weekend.

Ah, all those poor buyers who bought during the bubble years. It's hard to find a more maligned group out there. Basically, if you paid some sky-high price for your home back in 2004 or 2005, everyone assumes you are a fool who jumped on the bubble band wagon.

But it turns out that maybe those bubble years' buyers aren't so foolish after all, at least when it comes to figuring out what their homes are worth now. In fact, they may have a better grasp of current market reality than those who bought later during the bust, or for that matter homeowners like me who bought just before the big run up in prices began, according to a new report by Zillow.com.

Today, our Monday guy Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team discusses what every borrower should know about how lenders verify income these days

Not long ago, a signed copy of a borrower’s tax return, copies of W-2 forms, 1099 forms and maybe a letter from the borrower’s CPA would have been sufficient to prove income for most loans.

In today’s lending environment, lenders are more prudent. They are required by Fannie Mae to verify that the information on the tax returns submitted to the lender matches the information on file with the IRS. The lender does that by submitting form 4506t to the IRS to obtain a transcript of the tax returns on file with the IRS. That transcript is not a copy of the tax return; it consists of a line by line printout of the income and deductions from the tax returns filed with the IRS for the particular years in question.

For those who are current with their tax returns, that should not pose a problem.

Just back from two weeks of vacation with my wife and three little ones down in the D.C. area.

Karen strung together a pair of house exchanges in Virginia that put us close enough to Washington to make some day trips into the city.

And it also gave me a chance to see what life is like in a gated community.

Frankly, it's a concept I have never been too wild on, but after a late night scare that drove home the vulnerability of rural living, I am rethinking my reservations.

We spent the first week at a development called Lake Holiday in the verdant Shenandoah Valley.

The reality of what it means to live in a gated community was driven home at the start of our vacation when we drove up to the guard shack at the entrance to the development.

Check out this Forbes piece. It breaks down the various real estate indexes - Case-Shiller, Clear Capital - and looks at how they stack up with each other.

Given the profusion of real estate numbers and websites and firms tracking them, it's a helpful peek inside the sausage factory.

Still, I take issue with the main theme - the fluctuations of Case-Shiller or whatever your index of choice is don't really have much meaning for the average homeowner.

It's a safe, conventional argument, but it no longer holds the water it once did.

There's no point scrimping and saving to buy a house only to get sunk after you move in and the roof starts leaking.

In fact, the biggest challenge of homeownership may come after you sign your life away on the mortgage - it's the job of keeping your house in livable shape without getting into a financial jam.

It's a theme that should resonate here in Greater Boston, where first-time home buyers too often stretch to get buy some older, overpriced home in need of work. Little do they know what they are getting into.

I recently took a look at this for Bankrate - here are some tips I came across.

Today, our Monday guy Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team, writes about problems that could have been avoided by paying attention to the Purchase and Sales agreement, or by keeping your hands off the peonies.

Something that is not a big deal to a seller can be a very big deal to a buyer or vice-versa. That is why good Purchase and Sale (P+S) agreements spell out the details of the agreement in minute detail.

But who reads them, aside from the attorneys?

Many agents and brokers don’t get involved in P+S details because they may have been told that once they do, they expose themselves to extra liability. I think that while an agent or broker is not an attorney, one needs to realize that a buyer or seller doesn’t usually know what to look for in a P+S or what areas cause the most common problems if they are not scrutinized before signing the P+S. Those areas should be understood by all of the parties involved in the transaction before signing the P+S. I prefer a conference call with the attorney and client to review the P+S prior to sending it to the other side.

In my experience, the area that causes the most trouble is the paragraph that spells out exactly what is being left with the property (i.e. which appliances, air conditioners, light fixtures, etc.). If it is not scrutinized by both the buyer and seller, it’s likely that someone may be surprised later.
Anything attached to a building is referred to as a fixture and is supposed to remain with the property unless specifically excluded from the sale.

Exclusions should be in offers and later carried forward to a P+S.

Here are a couple of issues that I have seen:

No, and for a very simple reason: The Boston area has a lot of things, but starter homes are not one of them.

We simply don't have the vast subdivisions of new homes, ready and waiting for first-time buyers that you can find in many Sunbelt cities.

That's not to say builders aren't putting up any new homes in Greater Boston - even in the worst of times, such as right now, a builder or two can be found adding a home or two to a subdivision somewhere out in Acton or Southborough.

But here's the rub: If that new home is built within the 128 belt, given that prices still remain near their bubble years' peak in upscale suburbs like Wellesley or Newton, you are likely looking at an overpriced McMansion.

So who's to blame for the housing mess?

Last Friday, I somewhat facetiously suggested that all those greedy boomers were responsible for the worst housing crisis since at least the Great Depression.

Now, to be fair, I want to give boomers a chance to defend their generation's honor - and better yet, blame all those irksome Gen Xers and Gen Yers for all our current housing market woes.

To get things rolling, I will start off with a comment by ISchmidlapp. He contends the younger couples in his town have been the ones leveraging to buy the McMansions, all under the guise of doing right by their children. By contrast, the boomers in his neighborhood were all happy to buy and fix up 1950s capes and ranches.

Well that's what economist Gary Shilling is predicting.

A true doom and gloomer, he's also forecasting a return to recession in 2012.

That said, Shilling's bearish pronouncements have been right at key moments, including 2008.

No says a provocative new study out of George Washington University.

The Federal Housing Administration was formed to help first-time and low-to-moderate income buyers get mortgages.

But it now finds itself backing mortgages up to nearly $730,000 in some of the nation's costliest housing markets, the report notes.

It is a change that came about in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis - as recently as 2006 the FHA wouldn't back any mortgages above $362,790, the GWU study finds.

But with housing prices having been in free fall for the past few years, those higher limits now appear to be helping the comfortably well off move into their dream homes, or at least one could argue that after looking at the study.

Goodbye July 4th and hello dog days of the real estate market.

If you haven’t sold your house by now, it’s time to either take a meat cleaver to the price or pull it off the market.

Look for lots of price reductions in the weeks ahead.

It's an odd looking house hard by the railroad tracks on Marion Street in Natick. Built in 1930 with no particular style in mind, it sits precariously perched on the downside of a steep hill, with no front yard and a parking-space/driveway the only buffer between the house and a busy cut-through road.

But it's a sad commentary on the Greater Boston real estate market that this clearly dysfunctional house, crammed onto a tiny lot by some Depression-era builder, looked slightly tempting to my wife Karen and me when we were house hunting back in 2002.

How things have changed. Today I thank my lucky stars I never bought it, the plywood over the front window at 17 Marion St. the telltale sign the never-ending foreclosure epidemic has claimed another home.

Just call it the dead cat bounce.

That about sums up yesterday's report by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors that prices rose by half a percent, even as sales plunged 20 percent.

Thanks to beermeister, who called the dead cat bounce first.

And even that may be a statistical aberration - the latest report by the Case-Shiller index, the gold standard of home price tracking, has Boston area prices falling .2 percent.

The Case-Shiller index was up overall by .7 percent in April over May, but, significantly, Boston was one of seven cities that saw prices fall.

And even that overall, national bump, as modest as it is, appears questionable. The increase reported by Case-Shiller was the not-seasonally adjusted number. Seasonally adjusted, prices actually fell .1 percent.

Arlington, Franklin, and to some extent Needham are all classic examples of blue collar towns that have gone uptown.

And let's not forget urban neighborhoods like Davis Square, the South End and now Jamaica Plain as well.

Time to get out our crystal balls and peer into the future here. If you are buyer looking to get in early on a town on the rise here in Greater Boston, where should you be house hunting right now?

Should you be hitting open houses in Watertown, which is basking in the heat of the Cambridge market, or Medford, which someday might get a green line stop or two?

My brother Ben and I grew up in the suburbs here in the 1970s, long before Greater Boston became an international magnet for the upwardly mobile.

While I returned to the area after graduate school to work in newspapers, Ben left for college and never looked back, pursuing a medical career that took him to Nashville, Baltimore and Chicago.

So when we all gathered at my house in Natick earlier this week for a rare family get-together, I was particularly intrigued at Ben's shock at some of the dramatic changes he noticed in towns he last knew as a teenager.

Ben barely recognized Franklin, which, back in the 1970s was as blue collar a town as they come, with a respectable but hardly hip downtown.

That's all changed, of course. Real estate values have soared over the past few decades in Franklin as the homes have gotten bigger and its once dull downtown has filled up with restaurants and other amenities.

And Franklin is hardly alone, with a number of other towns within the 495 and 128 beltways having undergone equally dramatic demographic changes.

The spring market was nothing short of a debacle for sellers.

As always, it began with some economists and housing market watchers holding out hope we might see glimmers of a rebound on the horizon.

And it is ending with those hopes thoroughly upended as the double dip in home prices unfolds.

That's not to say there continue to be some hot pockets here and there where home prices remain buoyant - we happen to have more than our share of those here in Greater Boston.

But the mood of the market clearly is heading down as prices continue to fall, the latest HomeGain survey finds, with a disappointing spring having led to a big increase in pessimism.

It's a favorite game of economists and housing market watchers. When your prediction of a housing rebound falls flat, just push off that rosy estimate until the next year.

Just take a look at Fannie Mae's revised forecast for home sales across the country.

Faced with a sluggish economy and a housing market headed south, Fannie Mae has revised downward its prediction of a 6 percent jump in overall home sales this year.

It's now down to 4.3 percent, with Fannie also predicting a decline this year in new home construction, compared to an increase it had been predicting.

But don't worry, just wait until next year, Fannie Mae's economists tell us.

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team is our Monday guy. Today he discusses online the accuracy of online reviews.

If you read this blog, chances are that you also use online reviews to help you decide what products to buy and who to do business with. I do, but since I started receiving emails like the one below every 3-4 weeks, I approach those reviews a bit more skeptically.

Below is an actual email (complete with missing words and misspellings) that I have received at least 3 times over the past few weeks. I have taken out the link to the company to comply with editorial guidelines:

“Google is now using business reviews to determine business ranking. People are trashing companies with reviews, Complaint sites and Blogs. We can help you defend your company by posting positive Reviews, Blogs and creating Websites to take over Search Results and control what people see about your company. How does posting positive reviews help in your businesses Google ranking? 1. Positive reviews increase your business rank by linking important and relevant websites to your website. 2. A constant stream of positive reviews improves your online reputation. 3. Positive reviews drive traffic to your business. 4. Positive reviews restore a tarnished reputation by pushing down negative reviews and links. 5. Helps protect against competitors or anyone else from attempting to run your ranking.” Tired of review sites? Hire us to knock them off the front page of Google under your search term. Our company has been in the business of taking over the first page of google for our clients for 8 years and knocking off complaint sites. We can do the same for your company and review sites. We will create special websites and blogs and link them to the 15 thousand websites we already have. These websites will knock the review sites away and replace them with content you control.”

Is Cambridge truly immune?

After all, as the rest of the real estate market heads south, things don't appear to have changed all that much in Cambridge since the days of the housing bubble.

It is enough to make Cambridge an object of envy nationally - The Wall Street Journal cites the country's academic capital as one of a handful of markets that are still near their bubble year peaks.

Cambridge prices are about what they were in 2004, hardly a down year, and 8.6 percent off their peak, the Journal notes. The median single family sale price in Cambridge was up to $730,000 year-to-date through April, compared to $600,000 during the same period last year, according to The Warren Group.

Zillow's home index, which includes assessed values of properties not on the market, pegs the average home value in Cambridge at $423,900, down .6 percent year-over-year.

The piece cites the obvious - Cambridge is home to MIT and Harvard and a relatively thriving jobs market. Yet the impact of Cambridge's booming economy on home values can't be overstated, with the city benefiting from breakneck growth in a trio of key sectors - life sciences, technology and higher education.

I take questions. Email to Rona Fischman. But sometimes a slightly off-topic comment repeats a question I’ve seen before.

JJ34 asked:

Rona -- are there laws in MA about what agents *can't* tell their clients? When we bought I first house in the Midwest, back when information was nowhere near as readily available online as it is today, one of the things that I really liked about our agent was that she was a very straight shooter. When my husband and I inquired about looking at houses in a certain section of town she nipped that in the bud and told us we wouldn't want to be over there (and she was right). However, when we bought our house in CT our agent seemed to be very "by the book" and I vaguely recalled her saying something to the effect of not being "allowed" to share her opinions about certain schools, etc. Since we were moving across the country and didn't know much about the area, and she lived here her whole life and was an expert on the area, it actually would have been helpful to have some advice and not simply a reiteration of the facts (i.e. "the school is having a lot of budget problems and has been in the news, let me pull some articles for you" as opposed to "yes, there is a school there." )

In general, the reason agents don’t talk about schools or safety is because their managers or brokers tell them they are not allowed to. No law, just policy. What are they afraid of? First, being accused of steering. Second, being held to a subjective opinion on something.

In quality offices, there is information about schools and crime. That information is factual, not subjective. In some offices, like mine, we provide factual data links and also rely on parents in the districts and owners in neighborhoods who can speak to their experiences.

Today, is an encore of a previous entry.

Q: Why would agents not tell you about the great schools?

Answer number one: Unless the agent says the same thing to every customer or client, that agent may be seen as practicing “steering.” Steering violates fair housing laws. It is the attempt to encourage people to buy in areas with people “just like” the buyer. In the past, this practice maintained segregated communities.

Where have all the housing bulls gone?

Fresh off the business pages at the Boston Herald, I jumped headfirst into full-time freelancing and writing for this blog in the fall of 2008.

Back then, even as the world appeared headed into another Great Depression, there was still a housing bull or two around to bait all the bears on this blog.

But one by one, Sunshine & Lollipops and the rest of the housing bulls have fallen off the comment boards, digging in for what looks like will be a very, very long wait for the second coming of the Great Housing Bubble.

Even economists, who just can't seem to resist the temptation to predict housing prices will fall now but will then rise at some other point that is always just around the corner, appear to be wising up as well.

I was asked by a friend of mine whether I would take a listing on a house with a level-three sex offender* next door. Since I don’t take listings, I got to dodge the question. Since then, I’ve been asking listing agents. Some say that the person next door has done nothing wrong. That owner should be allowed to hire help to sell his or her house. Some say, they couldn’t sell a house with an offender next door.

When a level-three sex offender is released from prison, neighbors in the immediate area are informed. However, there is no requirement for the police to inform people who subsequently move into the area.

What brought my friend to call me and ask such a question? There is a sex offender living around the corner from this friend. The house next to the offender is under agreement to a family with little girls. My friend was driving past when she saw the new buyers were at the house with their buyer’s agent, and the listing agent. The little girls were dancing around (apparently invited) on the lawn of the level-three sex offender.

Anybody who has ever gaped at the astronomical price tag for some modest starter home in an upscale Boston suburb has surely had this thought at some point.

The schools in Sudbury, Winchester or Weston, or you fill in the town, are surely great, but if I took the same cramped Cape and moved it 20 miles west, I'd shave off half the price or more.

A case in point is Coldwell Banker's survey of the most and least affordable towns in the Bay State, as measured by average selling price.

Steve, our brave seller from Lowell who shared his frustrations with the current market, must be having some second thoughts right now.

Apparently he made the fatal mistake of having bought his now eight-year-old colonial in Lowell during the home price bubble. And, according to some folks who comment on this blog, that was an unforgivable error in judgment.

I'll leave names - or to be more accurate pseudonyms - out of this.

Still, it's worth taking a look at this barb thrown out by one of the regulars on the comment boards of this blog.

Steve bought a new home in Lowell back during the bubble years and has spent the last eight years spiffing it up.

He and his wife decided to buy the newly-built colonial after losing bidding wars for homes across the Merrimack Valley and Southern New Hampshire. At $309,900, it seemed a lot more reasonable than the other homes he had bid on, which were closer to $400,000.

Times change and Steve and his wife, who now have two young children, would like to take advantage of falling home prices to move up to a bigger house.

Under no illusions about the state of the market, Steve is ready to sell low in order to buy low.

With new hardwood floors, a professional paint job and some nice landscaping and a fence, his 1,700-square-foot colonial sparkles. And, at $289,000, it is priced right for Lowell's Belvidere neighborhood, while offering a nearly $20,000 discount from what Steve originally bought it for.

There's only one small problem - Steve can't find a buyer. In fact, he's having a hard time getting anybody to come and check it out.

So when he read my post suggesting that buyers face a dearth of decent homes at reasonable prices to choose from, Steve fired off this email to me.

Our Monday guy Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team answers some common questions about offers.

What are the rules about making offers in Massachusetts?
- There are no official “rules”, although a final deal should contain certain elements that were discussed in my blog post (“What Every Good Offer Needs”) on March 21.

Is there a standard offer form?
- The “standard form” can vary from area to area and from agency to agency. The most common forms used in Greater Boston are from the Greater Boston Real Estate Board or Massachusetts Association of Realtors, however, there are various contingency addenda that are added to basic offers. Those may be on their forms or an agency’s own forms. The degree to which the forms protect buyers or sellers may vary depending on the type of agency that the agent filling out the form works for and/or the agent’s relationship with the buyer (i.e. seller agency, single party agency, exclusive buyer agency, facilitators, dual or designated agent).

How much of a deposit should be included with the offer?
- The offer deposit is typically a formality. It can be as low as $500 or as high as the buyer or buyer’s agent thinks that it should be to get the seller’s attention. The most common amount is $1,000. I have advised buyer-clients to go as high as $10,000 on high end property, custom construction and/or in multiple offer situations. Larger deposits get the seller’s attention and convey that buyers are more serious than smaller deposits might.

There's a cruel twist to how the real estate downturn is playing out here in Greater Boston.

While home prices are on the retreat again, it may be actually becoming harder to find a decent home.

Rona, in this insightful post, argues the quality of homes on the market has dropped markedly over the past year or two. She's seeing too many homes in need of work or near major highways.

In fact, I'd argue that what we are seeing is a long-term problem that is actually growing more acute.

Buyers negotiate against a seller. But the seller is not the enemy. Other buyers -- real and imagined by the seller – is who will drive the price up. In some markets around Boston, there is strong demand; in others, there is not. Know where you are shopping. If there is lowered demand, there is more room for negotiation, since real competition is less likely, so phantoms are hard to conjure.

A house is a house and it costs what someone will pay for it. Whether the seller owes 120 percent of its current value or 10 percent of its current value, the price is more or less the same. Buyers are not helping themselves by counting the seller’s profit. I frequently see buyers who have the seller’s purchase price in hand before seeing the house. I hear things like, “he’s paid only $175,000 for it, so he’ll be free to go down.” Most of the time, the buyers are looking at the sale price and not the debt level (which could be much higher.) Also, the buyers are not subtracting for improvements. It is wishful thinking that a seller will take less profit, because he has equity. Even if he financially can take less, why would he share potential profit with you if there’s another buyer who will pay more?
Knowing the point where a seller will take a loss is helpful to negotiation. If the seller is close to the bone, know where the break-even point is. Break even is a powerful anchor for sellers in this marketplace. The problem here is that break-even is an emotionally-driven number that is not always logical.
One seller will be content only if he/she can close with the initial down payment intact. Another will rationalize that they are even if they close with their initial down payment intact, minus rental cost for the period that they owned the house. Some will see break even as leaving the closing table at zero or with a tiny payout.

When negotiating against a seller, you should get an estimate of the seller’s position. Much of the debt information is available in public records. Between MLS and public records for permits, there is pretty good information about improvements. Frequently, the listing agent can get accurate information about what work the seller did, whether the seller did his/her own work or hired out, and whether there are permits.
If you can find out the seller’s motivation for the sale, this can also inform how hard you can push. A seller who is buying something else, has bought something else, or is relocating will be more amenable than a seller who could move this year or next year or sometime thereafter. Listing agents are often a font of this kind of information.

These are the most general things I can think of – that are not about the buyer’s motivations -- that help buyer’s position themselves for negotiation. Is there anything else that I missed?

Have you been frustrated by attempts to negotiate that would have been helped by this advice? What happened?

Home prices continue to fall across the country, but the pace of decline is starting to slow, ClearCapital reports.

But apparently it is a different story here in Greater Boston.

Nationally, prices fell 2.3 percent, on a quarterly basis, in May, less than half of April's 4.9 percent drop.

By contrast, the Boston area home prices fell 4.1 percent in May, landing it on a list of laggards topped by the likes of Detroit, Hartford and Cleveland.

Now that's quite a turnaround.

The latest pending sales report is out, and the Massachusetts Association of Realtors is touting the "first year-over-year increase since December, 2010."

That's technically true, but it hardly tells us what's really going on with home sales, which have been lost in the shadow of ongoing drama over the double dip in prices.

A close look at the numbers hardly points to a revival, but rather how brittle the real estate market still is across the Bay State.

Given the tumult in the real estate market, it's an option that looks increasingly attractive.

The phenomenon of buyers sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the right time to jump into the market, is hardly new, though the numbers have grown as the housing downturn drags on.

But we are now also seeing sellers cash out and and renting, instead of buying again, until the market straightens itself out.

I know at least one real estate agent in the western suburbs who attributes at least some of the drop in sales this spring to sellers opting to rent instead of buying again.

Just take jj24, a potential buyer getting ready to move from Connecticut to the Boston area with her young family. Despite a juicy corporate relocation package with all sort of perks based on buying a home, the rental market looks safer to her.

Home prices have never been so affordable, beating even the 1990s on that score.

So don't get paralyzed by the short-term fluctuations of the economy - think long-term and go out and buy that house you have been pining for.

So goes this provocative piece in this weekend's Wall Street Journal. Given the play it is getting on various brokerage websites, it is fast becoming a rallying cry for Realtors across the country.

Sale prices or assessed values, which are more accurate? Today, I indulge

Lance, who asked:

On your list… I see your point about how sale prices do not line up with assessments. Nobody ever said they would. If you’re feeling charitable, I would be curious to see the same list run against initial (not latest) asking prices for those same properties…. Please post a comparison, along with the average margin of error for both groups (assessors vs. UHS). I assume the margin of error will occur in both directions (not just on the high side) for the UHS’s listing prices given all those bidding wars happening this spring.

(Data on the next page)

Owners want their assessments low, so their taxes are not inflated. Therefore assessments need to be pegged to the low-priced end of the selling season. So it didn’t surprise me that winter sales were in line with assessed values, and spring sales were off. It also didn’t surprise me that agents do better with sticking to their original asking prices in the spring, than they do in the winter. As a buyer’s agent, I prefer winter shopping, when the asking prices are more negotiable and prices, in general, are lower.

Lance predicted:

I think you will find the asking prices cooked up by the all-knowing UHS listing agents are even more out of line with reality than the assessments.

Actually, they are about the same amount off, depending on the season. However, at their worst, both the assessor’s offices and the agents are the same as Zillow, or better.

Home prices across the state and country are on the second leg of an epic slide down.

But in Greater Boston, home prices remain stubbornly high in many towns.

In fact, a number of suburbs have seen median home prices rise - not fall - this spring.

Our local housing market has the same problem it has always had: Too few well maintained, desirable homes at reasonable prices.

So when a home in a good location, good town and in good condition comes on the market at a reasonable price, it gets snapped up.

Here are towns where prices are rising, according to records section of Banker & Tradesman, published by The Warren Group. All numbers are median home sale prices, year to date, through April, compared to the first four months of 2010.

I've broken the list into two parts - relative surprises and the usual suspects.

When I wrote about overpricing, I made these general statements, based on what I am seeing around Boston:

…demand has not dried up and the shadow supply has not swamped the inventory, leading to rapid price drops. So there is a market full of buyers who are spending what the market is still bearing, in order to get a house that suits them.

Ehwhy questioned:

If demand has not dried up why are sales down?

Sales are down because inventory is down. Anecdotally, I would say that demand is as high this year as last, but good inventory is low in my area right around Boston. If you want a house with a view of I-95, there are some nice houses to be had, at a relatively low price. But, if you want a house to stay in long enough to make it worth your effort, the pickings are slim. The inventory is clogged with houses that are either overpriced, in need of huge upgrades, tiny, or poorly located. The ones that are well priced and worthy of living in are being sold quickly. Kihon1 bears witness to this:

kihon1 wrote:

I've been looking for a house for the past five months… I've seen gems of houses going for very little money, but in bad locations. I've seen other, similar houses, with water, mold, vermin, and HOLES in the walls, going for 100K over the nicer house…

… I also understand that if I buy a house that I settled for, I won't be happy in it. This is a big investment to be unhappy with in the long run. So I'll keep looking for the right house at the right price in the right area. And sellers should understand, there's plenty of potential buyers out there who are just like me.

The housing market woes just keep on coming.

Jumbo loan ceilings, which the federal government raised during the recession in hopes of boosting the ailing housing sector, are set to come tumbling down again Oct. 1.

That could have big implications for a high-cost housing market like Greater Boston, which has benefited over the past few years from the decision to boost the starting point for more expensive jumbo loans to $523,750.

That's hardly luxury real estate territory - in many upscale suburbs that would barely get you in the door.

But starting in October, we will be looking at a new, and significantly lower limit of $465,750, warns Greg McBride, a senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

"It doesn't help, that's for sure," McBride said of the impact on the housing market. "There are likely to be fewer qualified borrowers once those (lower) limits kick in."

Skeptical yet about all the media hype on how apartment living is the wave of the future?

If you're not, then you should be. This is a classic case of a short-term shift being trumpeted as a long-term cultural trend.

There's no debate the number of renters across the country has risen sharply at a time when foreclosures and falling home prices has tarnished the idea of homeownership.

In fact, the number of renters has grown by 692,000 each year since 2006, when home prices started falling, USA Today reports.

Yet there are some big problems with the now fashionable notion that renting is destined to become the new owning.

Reasons to be wary of the Renter Nation hype include:

One more time! The only way to know what something is worth is to use accurate recent sale data accurately. You need a Comparative Market Analysis. Anything else is folly.

Lance wrote:

Many buyers lack the skills and experience needed to meaningfully evaluate comps. But anybody with a web browser (or iPhone app) can look up a home's value on Zillow or check the assessed value online. These are the anchors that most buyers care about, far more important than asking price. So when a buyer asks why the asking price is 20 percent above both Zillow and the tax assessor, there better be a very good answer. "The tax assessor is wrong" simply doesn't cut it anymore.

The tax assessor is wrong. OK, it doesn’t cut it. It just happens to be true. I don’t have a bone to pick with tax assessors. They have a huge job to do and, at least, they set foot in houses unlike Zillow. Lance is entirely wrong that buyers care about assessed values or Zillow values. They may say they do, in surveys, but they don’t out on the streets.

Just for fun, I matched assessed values with sale price on properties that closed May 25 and May 26:

Assessed/Sale/Town corrected 3:30 5/31
$292,800/$300,000/Melrose
$396,400/$318,000/Needham
$326,800/$366,000/Medford
376,700/$360,000/Arlington
$317,700/$375,000/Waltham
$310,600/$373,000/Medford
374,000/$435,534/Melrose
$464,300/$472,000/Melrose
$424,900/$479,000/Newton
$512,900/$502,000/Sudbury
$521,000/$515,000/Lexington
$554,700/$570,000/Acton
$556,700/$562,000/Wayland
$515,200/$615,000/Wayland
$408,700/$640,000/Melrose
$533,000/$659,000/Belmont
$607,000/$670,000/Belmont
$579,000/$750,000/Lexington
$820,000/$685,000/Concord
787,000/$850,000/Lexington
$784,500/$845,000/Sudbury
$795,600/$860,000/Winchester
$1,013,200/$889,000/Wayland
$739,000/$939,900/Waltham
$848,000/$1,020,000/Brookline

Do you see a pattern to rely on here? I sure don’t.

The downturn in home prices has now blown past the previous lows set during the Great Recession, according to the latest Case-Shiller numbers.

Home prices in 18 of the nation's top 20 metro markets, including Boston, saw prices fall again in March. It marks the eighth straight month of declining home prices since the end of the home buyer tax credit pushed the residential market off the cliff.

March saw a 3.6 percent, year-over-year drop in home prices, following on the heels of a 3.3 percent drop in February.

Nationally, home prices have now slipped below April 2009 levels, the last low point of the current, and now years-long, housing downturn, according to Case-Shiller.

Ouch!

There are many here that will argue that all houses are overpriced. Economically speaking -- when you look at greater Boston -- they are right. The bubble has not finished deflating here. However, demand has not dried up and the shadow supply has not swamped the inventory, leading to rapid price drops. So there is a market full of buyers who are spending what the market is still bearing, in order to get a house that suits them.

Buyers, realize that lots of sellers think his/her home is worth more than it is worth. I have seen this over and over and wrote about it before.There is wishful thinking. “My house is the nicest one on the block.” “I’m in the very best neighborhood.” “Garages aren’t worth that much, so my house is worth as much as that one (with the two-car garage.)” It is part of the reason that open houses draw nosey neighbors. The neighbors can then play the wishful thinking game of “That house sold for $400,000; mine is worth $30,000 more.”

Add to that what I mentioned yesterday:

This has been a miserable spring for sellers.

Not only are sales down, but prices are down as well.

Sipping my morning coffee, I came across these numbers in the records section of Banker & Tradesman, which is published by The Warren Group, the Boston-based real estate publisher and data firm.

Market psychology is a funny thing. Just recall the foolhardy stampede last spring by buyers scrambling to close on homes in time to collect the $8,000 federal home buyer tax credit. A year later, you can get reap multiples of that as sellers slash prices, but buyers are waiting on the sidelines again. Go figure.

Here are some year-to-date numbers, which match up median prices for the first four months of 2011 with spring 2010. I note sales where the declines are significant.

Towns where sellers are feeling the most pain include:

The most successful sellers price their house near market value and draw buyers who know the market and are ready to buy. Sellers who overprice see their property stuck on the market longer and frequently sell for less than they may have.

Here’s what happens:
Suppose there are five Cape Cod houses for sale in roughly the same size, location, and condition. They are priced $349,000, $354,000, $359,000, $369,000 and $385,000. The market value of these hypothetical houses are all close to $350,000-$355,000.

People who are shopping in the $300,000-$350,000 range will see two or three of them.

Shoppers in the $350,000-$400,000 range may see most of them. Those buyers will think they are overpriced or just hate them because they aren’t as nice as properties that are really worth $360-400,000. The most likely thing these buyers will remember is why the Cape wasn’t as nice as the other houses they saw that day. Many will rule the Cape out, even though it is a nice house in the $350,000-$355,000 range.

If you really want to check out the neighbors before you buy, well Trulia is betting it has the search tool for you.

Trulia next Thursday will roll out CrimeMaps, which it bills as a service that will enable "people to view, explore and compare crime in neighborhoods across the U.S."

The initial stats will not include Boston, but data on the Hub will be coming soon, I am told.

Trulia contends its new mapping technology will let you determine which neighborhoods have the least and most crime reports, when crime tends to happen, and even the most dangerous intersections.

Of course, whether this proves to be useful or just a silly gimmick will boil down to not only what kind of information is available but how it is displayed.

I've had buyer-clients who considered houses that abut wetlands. For one of them, their closing almost got held up while the seller moved a shed (with no foundation) two feet forward to satisfy the local conservation office. If you are considering buying in a town with wetland, pay attention to what Attorney Richard D. Vetstein offers us today.

Massachusetts has one of the most restrictive wetlands and environmental codes in the U.S. Simply put you cannot do anything – not clear, cut, fill, dump (not even leaves, grass clippings or dirt), alter, grade, landscape or build upon — any wetland resource areas without a permit from your local town Conservation Commission.

The state Wetlands Protection Act and Rivers Protection Act imposes stringent restrictions and oversight of real estate development in and near coastal wetlands areas such as salt marshes, dunes, beaches, and banks, and inland wetlands areas such as swamps, marshes, rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes. Many homeowners are often surprised to learn their property contains or is near protected wetlands or is within a restricted buffer zone which will impact their ability to construct an addition, deck, pool, driveway, or cut trees.

Check with the local conservation agent first
A buyer and their Realtor should always research whether there are wetlands on or near the property. First, check the state Geographic Information (Mass GIS) maps online. Next, call over to the local Conservation Agent and pull out the local wetlands maps. The conservation agent should be able to answer most questions and will know whether there are conservation restrictions on the property.

Wetlands areas and buffer zones
The state Wetlands Protection Act and local Wetlands Bylaws include a number of different types of wetlands, and wetland-related areas called “Resource Areas.” These include rivers and streams (“perennial” if they run year round, and “intermittent” if they dry up seasonally); lakes and ponds; the vegetated wet areas bordering rivers, streams, lakes or ponds (“bordering vegetated wetlands”); the 100-year floodplain along rivers and streams; and isolated areas that flood seasonally, such as vernal pools. The determination of wetlands is a science and very complicated.

If you answered no, well you are still in the minority.

A majority of Americans - 57 percent - not only believe buying a home still has potential as an investment, but that it's a better bet than the stock market or putting money into a retirement plan, according to a recent Fannie Mae survey on home buyer and consumer attitudes.

In a presidential election, they call that a landslide.

As home prices across fall again, that's the big question for buyers.

The median price of a single-family home in Massachusetts posted a 4 percent, year-over-year decline in April, down to $274,000, The Warren Group reports this morning. Sales plunged 28 percent.

Still, prices have a long way to go before they hit 2000 levels. That year saw the median price of a home statewide hit $185,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The same is true, even more so, of home prices in Greater Boston.

While prices across the state have been on the decline, home prices in Boston and its far-flung suburbs actually jumped roughly 4 percent in the first quarter to $417,000, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

That's a far cry where sale prices stood for our metro market back in 2000, when the median price was $250,000.

And given sluggish paycheck growth over the past decade, that is a real problem.

CatB may be wondering if she should wait for lower prices and risk being in a higher loan rate environment, What do you think?

There is a fallacy that “you can always lower your payments by refinancing.” First, you may not be able to refinance if your income or your equity is shaky. Second, the savings may not be real savings.

It’s a dirty little secret that most of the homeowners who are under water got there through refinancing, not by borrowing for their initial purchase. It was tempting to buy new kitchens, cars, vacations, college educations and just junk by using cash-out refinancing products. These products were given out like candy.

While housing prices were going up, the value in equity was burning a hole in a lot of people’s pockets. Homeowners felt rich. If you paid $250,000 for a house that’s worth $500,000 five years later, you are $250,000 ahead, right? Wrong. It seemed perfectly reasonable to borrow only $50,000 or $100,000 of the profits. Right? Even more wrong. Even though the house may be worth $425,000, in 2011, it was not a good idea to borrow against the equity.

Cost of the refinancing service: even if you get a “no points, not closing cost” loan, you are paying for it somehow. Sometimes the rate is higher than a mortgage with more fees. Sometimes the fees are added into your principal.

That's right, let's blame the bad market on all those stingy banks.

With the real estate market in a deep funk, one of the nation's top real estate franchises is taking a swing at the nation's bankers.

Century 21 polled more than 1,500 of its agents, asking what kinds of problems buyers are running into when it comes to getting a mortgage.

In one of the most pertinent findings, three quarters of the agents surveyed reported they had lost at least one deal in the past six months when a buyer was unable to close on a mortgage.

Other findings include:

Whether it is a house or a condo, owning a structure is going to cost CatB money to maintain over the years. I am not going to throw figures around today, except in the most general way. That is because it is way too easy to be wrong, when getting specific about repair costs. When a problem begins, it is much cheaper to repair than the same problem left for years to get worse. Deferred maintenance costs roughly five times more to repair than if a problem is solved when it begins.

The general rules:
The most expensive things to repair are on house features which must stand up to the elements. The exterior of the house -- from the roof to the foundation -- have the hardest job and need to be tended most. Expect that replacing a roof, re-siding, replacing windows, rebuilding foundations and waterproofing basements are your biggest ticket items. Expect that most of your 5-figure repairs will be to exterior features of a house.

After that, any repair or change in design which takes more than one type of worker will cost more, per labor hour, than something a single type of worker can do. For example, kitchens and bathrooms need electricians, plumbers and carpenters. They need to coordinate their schedules and share space and responsibility. Because of this, the cost goes up astronomically. Whereas, one or more carpenters can come in to change every interior door for less than the cost of a new bathroom.

Even the most shameless real estate market hucksters will have a hard time spinning this one.

Pending home sales actually fell .08 percent in April from March, the National Association of Realtors reported today. That's a more than 12 percent drop from April, 2010.

The news bucked widespread expectations of a modest increase in pending sales over March, with economists having predicted a 2 percent bump.

Those predictions, in turn, had spurred some market observers to even postulate that the pending sales numbers might show evidence of a market turnaround, or at least forward momentum.

But the real estate momentum right now appears stuck in reverse - both in prices and sales.

The National Association of Realtors will release pending home sales stats for the spring market later this morning.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg are already predicting a 2 percent increase in April over March in homes across the country that have been put under contract.

No one is disputing the fact that even with this modest bump, home sales are still far below those of last spring, when the pending expiration of the home buyer tax credit stoked frenzied buying.

But some market observers are looking to the pending sales numbers as a sign of the market's momentum - according to this theory just about any increase can be construed as a positive development, maybe even a turning point.

Gas prices are spiking again. And higher costs at the pump already have potential home buyers rethinking long commutes, a new survey finds.

Three quarters of Coldwell Banker agents surveyed said gas prices are already having an impact on buyers' decisions.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what this might do to sales and prices out on 495 and beyond, already struggling by comparison with towns closer to Boston within the 128 beltway.

Among the highlights:

CatB may be looking at a condo. Anyone buying into a condo association needs to look at fees before making an offer.

Like taxes, condo fees don’t go away. When evaluating condo association fees, know what the fees are paying for. Some condo fees act as a monthly savings plan for things you are going to spend money on anyway. Most homeowner association fees cover water and sewer bills and homeowner’s insurance. If you are looking at a listing sheet with a $150 a month fee, chances are, the fee is covering the basics.

Looking at basic fees:
Up to $120,000: low $125 high $281

$120,000-$240,000: low $40 high $150

$240,000-$360,000 low $50 high $200

When I see fees below $150 a month, I question whether they cover the basics. It may be that the water or insurance bill is additional. As a buyer, you need to check whether you are expected to pay insurance or water in addition to this fee.

The home buyer tax credit expired just over a year ago. But we will be living with the fallout from this disastrous government gimmick for years to come.

Buyers who rushed to close a home last spring and collect their $8,000 check have already lost that money and then some, Smart Money notes.

The median home price across the country has dipped over the past year to $170,000 from $180,000 last spring. That means a loss of $15,000 for the average tax credit buyer – almost double what they earned through the $8,000 credit.

And those who rushed to buy homes last spring here in the Bay State aren’t looking that much better.

Today, our Monday guy Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team wonders out loud about the expectations of today's sellers and buyers.

Despite inflation, virtually everything that most of us buy and use frequently goes down in value. No one is surprised when their cars, books, records, furniture, clothes, computers, electronics, exercise equipment, etc. lose value.

On the other hand, many people are surprised and disappointed when the value of their home goes down.

Since past performance is often a reliable indicator of future performance, it should be no surprise to anyone that the value of a home can increase or decrease in value over time because home values are directly affected by supply and demand. Since supply and demand are affected by economic conditions beyond our control such as interest rates, employment and the availability of mortgage financing, I think that it is outstanding that home values increase at all over the long term. (I know that there are other factors to consider, however, that is not the point of today’s post.)

CatB wants to know how to calculate the costs of renting and owning. Today, I go over typical taxes that are added to the mortgage principal and interest.

Taxes.
I took a look at Middlesex County, Massachusetts. The typical taxes on single family house recently sold are below. To figure out your expected monthly payment, simply divide by 12.

Up to $120,000: low $1659 high $3901

$120,000-$240,000: low $2095 high $4565

$240,000-$360,000 low $2593 high $6112

Your residential tax is never going way. It is likely to go up over the time of your ownership. This payment will be due even after your mortgage is paid. So, those buying their retirement house need to keep an eye on this figure.
As an aside, I am not of the opinion that property taxes are a bad thing. I think municipal taxes that are spent prudently are a huge advantage to the residents of the town or city. Before you buy into a town -- and its tax base -- you need to do your homework about how your residential tax will be spent.

Get this - the median price of a home here in the Bay State could fall to a somewhat more affordable sounding $250,000 by year end, if the forecasters have it right.

Home prices could fall another 3-to-6.5 percent across the Bay State over 2011, finds a new Fiserv Case-Shiller report. The report doesn't get into specific sale prices, but I took the high end of the range and did a little math.

A 6.5 percent decline would push the current statewide median price, now at $276,250, down to $250,000, if not a bit below.

Greater Boston could see prices drop another 4.5 to 4.8 percent, with the western suburbs - Cambridge, Newton, and beyond - falling on the higher end of the scale, the report finds. The Warren Group, on the Banker & Tradesman site, offers a good local breakdown of the Fiserv Case-Shiller numbers.

So what could that mean in terms of the median home price in Greater Boston?

Well it could knock another $20,000 off the median price, pushing it from $417,000, as of the end of March, below the $400,000 mark. (Regional numbers come from the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.)

This entry comes to you in response to an email from CatB. Real estate questions are always welcome. Send to Rona Fischman.

Cat B asked:

I’d like to see a post about what it means to "have to buy now." What are the factors that (should) go into this calculation? Is there a better way people can find adequate rental housing that will alleviate the “need” to buy now?

I hear regularly from wanna-be homeowners that the only way to get decent housing for their family is to buy a house. They tell me that anyone trying to rent with children will face a wave of discrimination and rejection after rejection. They tell me that trying to find an apartment for one person that can be supported by one income, near the T, is like trying to win the lottery. They tell me that they are sick of living like students.

The other thing I hear is that friends and family are telling you that any renting is second-rate when you are happy renting? Tell us! Has your Aunt Margaret said something ignorant like, “Well, darling, you graduated from BU five years ago, we expected you’d buy a house by now. When are you going to grow up?”

Renters, how hard is it? Really? Tell your story. Is it true that all rental property for families and singles is either second-rate or costs an arm and a leg? What does it really cost to live in a nice place? Renters, what are you paying? Tell us how many bedrooms, house or apartment, what town, what shape.

So, do you need to buy? Is it because rental housing is the pits? Or is there more to it?

OK, I'll take a shot at this: Later this year in Greater Boston and 2012 for the rest of the state.

That, anyway, was the consensus that emerged yesterday during a chat about the local real estate market I took part in on WBUR's daily local news show, Radio Boston.

Chip Case, the retired Wellesley College professor, offered a pretty detailed analysis of the national trends and statewide - I did my best to offer a more micro-local perspective.

I am drawing upon Fiserv for my prediction - which I am already beginning to regret as I write this. Fiserv and Moody's Analytics are predicting a bottoming out nationally in prices during the third quarter.

My last licks on How We Decide address the single page that is dedicated directly to real estate.It starts near the end of page 144. I think Mr. Lehrer and the psychologist he quotes got it wrong.

On page 144, Mr. Lehrer has just explained that emotion-based decisions are the best for things like choosing a poster or strawberry jam. Subjects who are asked to mentally evaluate their decision over-think it and choose one that is less satisfying. Lehrer writes:

The more people thought about which posters they wanted, the more misleading their thoughts become. Self-analysis resulted in less self-awareness. [Emphasis by Lehrer]… This isn’t just a problem for insignificant decisions like choosing jam for a sandwich or selecting a cheap poster. People can also think too much about more important choices, like buying a home.

Lehrer then quotes our friend, Dr. Dijksterhuis, who calls the act of concentrating on the wrong thing a “weighting mistake.” Lehrer writes:

"Consider two housing options: a three bedroom apartment that is located in the middle of a city, with a ten minute commute time, or a five bedroom McMansion on the urban outskirts, with a forty-five minute commute.”People will think about this trade-off for a long time," Dijksterhuis says. "And most them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad." What's interesting is that the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes.

Condo and home prices have been remarkably stable over the past few years in such perennial hot spots like Cambridge and Davis Square, even as real estate market has gone haywire elsewhere.

There have been minor blips up and down, but no big comedown from the market's peak back in 2005, when the real estate bubble was just about to burst. Just a steady march upward over the years.

Judging from the $1 million-plus condo for sale in Davis Square I just spotted online, some sellers still believe they are back in the time of easy money and silly prices. OK, so it's new and in the heart of Davis Square, but it's a condo.

So is this just another mini-bubble waiting to burst, with the double dip in real estate prices that is sweeping the country finally bringing a well-deserved comeuppance to all those cocky sellers who so far have escaped unscathed?

More from How We Decide.
In 1978, a plane ran out of fuel. The captain was too busy trying to figure out why the landing gear light didn’t go on. He ignored the fuel gauge and his staff who mentioned that fuel was running low. Ten people were killed. There was nothing wrong with the landing gear except the indicator light.

By the 1980s, flight simulators got more realistic and training got better for pilots. But the bigger jump in airline safety came with CRM, Cockpit Resource Management. This system was developed by NASA. Pilots (and later surgeons) were shown to make mistakes based on their “God-like certainty” and would fail to listen to the opinions of those around them. This led to airplane crashes and surgeons operating on the wrong side of the patient. Certainty, it seems, is not as certain as it seems.

In 1984, Philip Tetlock of University of California at Berkeley studied 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to predict future events like elections and government affairs. The experts were right less than 33 percent of the time, which is less than random. The most famous pundits tended to be the least accurate. Why? Tetlock blames it on certainty. These pundits recognized patterns, but ignored the emotional signals that said there was something wrong.

This is the second blog in my series, Gubernatorial Real Estate Follies.

OK, just kidding. Still, last week I took a look at Gov. Deval Patrick's on again, off again hunt for a buyer for his $1.9 million Milton manse.

It seems only fair then to note that he is not the only New England governor who can't seem to come to grips with the reality of a down real estate market and find a buyer.

In fact, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee will likely take a big hit on his Providence home - that is if he can find someone to buy it.

Chafee, then a U.S. senator, shelled out $939,000 back in August, 2006 for a quaint, seven-bedroom Victorian in Providence's upscale College Hill neighborhood. Built in 1886, it includes nice touches like the original stained glass and woodworking.

But the house has proven to be an albatross for Chafee, who bought it just months before the former Republican was booted from the U.S. Senate in the fall of 2006 by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.

Today, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team discusses the dilemma regarding lead paint laws, disclosure, and what is happening in the real world of home ownership, buying and selling.

The following language is included in the Property Transfer Notification Certification, most commonly know as "The Lead Paint Form":

"Every purchaser of any interest in residential property for which a residential dwelling was built prior to 1978 is notified that such property may present exposure to lead from lead-based paint that may place young children at risk of developing lead poisoning . ……….. The seller of any interest in residential real property is required to provide the buyer with any information on lead-based paint hazards. A risk assessment or inspection for possible lead-based paint hazards is recommended prior to purchase."

When the law came into effect years ago, many people felt that over time a significant number of homes would be tested for lead paint and hopefully deleaded. Despite the fact that the lead paint laws have been around for years, the majority of sellers claim to have no knowledge about the presence or absence of lead paint. To make matters worse, when researching whether to test for lead paint, they learn that they will be required to disclose the results of lead paint testing to potential buyers of their home when they sell. As a result many buyers or owners decide that they would rather not test for lead paint.

The number of homeowners stuck with negative equity is on the rise again across Greater Boston.

Nearly 17 percent of homeowners across the Boston area are now underwater, meaning they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, according to Zillow's first quarter market report.

That's up from 11.7 percent a year ago.

In How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, hidden in the chapter titled “The Poker Hand” is a study about the most common pitfall of house buying: overwhelm. Halfway through the chapter, we meet Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who realized that buying a car overwhelmed his rational mind.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you are a research psychologist, everything looks like an experimental paradigm. Dr. Dijksterhuis’s experiment went as follows:

Shoppers were given four pieces of information on four used cars. The information included things like poor leg room and shoddy transmission. One of the cars was objectively better. Subjects had a few minutes of conscious thought, then Dijksterhuis asked the shoppers to pick the best car. In the sixteen information-bits exercise, 50 percent chose the objectively best car. A second group was told about the sixteen bits of information, then distracted by word games and puzzles to keep them from thinking it through. It is no surprise that they did worse at picking the best car.

So, the rational brain works better than guesswork and feel. If you want to pick the best car, pay attention to the facts, right? Wrong.

Dijksterhuis’s next set-up had twelve bits of information about each car, making for forty-eight data-points to juggle. The additional information included things like trunk size and the number of cup holders. The subjects who had time to think chose the best car only 25 percent of the time. The distracted group, who were thinking on the emotional level, found the best car 60 percent of the time.

Then Dijksterhuis took the study out of the lab.
He studied people who bought cooking accessories, like vegetable peelers and those who bought complicated consumer items, like furniture. The peeler buyers who studied the few variables were happiest with their purchase. (Peelers have only a couple of factors.) Dijksterhuis then looked at furniture buyers. Furniture considerations include use, size, color, fabric, and so on. The longer they took rationally weighing options the less happy they were with their choice. They were happier if they relied on their emotional minds.. Lehrer writes:

The problem is that the pre-frontal cortex can’t handle this much information by itself. As a result, it tends to fix on one variable that may or may not be relevant, such as the color of the leather. The rational brain is forced to oversimplify the situation.

Nationally, home prices have sunk below their previous low, set back during the recession in 2009, Clear Capital reports.

April home prices were .7 percent below levels last reached in March, 2009, the latest milestone in a now months-long slide in real estate values, the research firm notes.

Of course, the last time prices were headed south, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in the fall of 2008, we saw a panicked Congress and real estate industry rush through the home buyer tax credit, which artificially buoyed sales and prices.

This time around, there's no home buyer tax credit to bail things out and lots of downward momentum to keep prices falling in the coming months.

Greater Boston weighs in at No. 15 on Clear Capital's list of  "lowest performing" markets, with a 6.8 percent, quarter-over-quarter decline in prices and a 2.2 percent year-over-year drop.

That's compared to 4.9 percent, quarter-over-quarter price drop nationally.

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer relates how the wording of a question can draw opposite answers from a large sample of medical doctors.

One group was asked:

The US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease. It is expected to kill 600 people. Two different programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.
Which of the two programs would you favor?

Of a large sample of physicians, 72 percent chose program A, the safe and sure option.

However when the same question was asked like this:

If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If Program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that no one will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
Which of the two programs would you favor?

Of a large sample of physicians, 78 percent chose program D, the risky strategy.

By changing of the wording - whether focusing on the possible saving of patients versus focusing on the death of patients - doctors can be manipulated into choosing a riskier strategy to avoid death (loss.) Doctors are good at science and math…

Doctors aren’t the only ones who are good at math but have loss aversion. Harry Markowitz, the Nobel Prize-winning investment portfolio theorist, splits his personal portfolio into stocks and bonds. His own mathematically brilliant advice favors stocks over bonds. Higher rewards have higher risk, more volatility, and intermittent loss. His little neurons didn’t like it and neither do most people’s.

So, what’s this got to do with real estate? Everything!

Gov. Deval Patrick and his wife Diane put their $1.9 million Milton manse on the market back in June, 2009.

With their children out of the house, the governor noted he and Diane were looking to trade in their long-time Milton home for a downtown Boston condo.

The move, not surprisingly, drew a fair amount of media attention. In a market where sellers battle for any scrap of attention, it was the kind of publicity most can only dream of.

But nearly two years later, the Patricks still own their five bedroom, nine fireplace Milton mansion on Hinkley Road. Built in 1900, the stately home boats nine fireplaces and three and half baths.

In fact, the Patricks temporarily pulled their home - which they first bought for $562,885 in 1989 - off the market last December. And they've yet to put it back on.

So what's the story here?

How can this be? Years after the subprime mortgage meltdown almost derailed the world economy, many Americans appear to be as clueless now about mortgages as they were in the bubble years.

Back then, untold hundreds of thousands fell victim to all sorts of lending scams. And when it comes to woeful ignorance about basic mortgage facts, little appears to have changed, a new Zillow.com survey shows.

Some lowlights include:

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer explains, in depth, how the mind learns complex tasks. Dopamine is one of the neurotransmitters in the brain. It is the chemical that’s involved in our learning of patterns that lead to reward. Our minds crave patterns; we enjoy looking for them.

At a simple level, think Pavlov’s experiment with the dogs: ring the bell; give the dog meat. Do that a few times; the dog will anticipate the meat as soon as the bell is rung, as shown by the dog salivating. At a more advanced level, chess masters have learned patterns of chess moves, not one at a time, to become masters. Gamblers looks for patterns that are frequently not there, but their minds are excited by the hunt and the intermittent reward.

This ability to learn patterns is what separates us from a mathematically-bound program like Deep Blue, the chess-wizard of Artificial Intelligence. Deep Blue needs to go through two hundred million chess moves a second to keep up with the human brain of Garry Kasparov. Garry's mind goes at about five per second, in patterns that his dopamine receptors enabled him to learn. Chess is a game of patterns. Deep Blue eventually won, by brute data-volume alone.

So, what's this got to do with open houses?

Pending home sales plunged again in April as we enter the heart of the spring sales season.

The number of homes put under agreement this April was off by more than 24 percent compared with April 2010, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

Yes, last year saw a mini-bubble as buyers rushed to take advantage of the home buyer tax credit, so that's a partial excuse, I guess.

But 24 percent is a big drop, anyway you look at it. It seems to suggest that base demand is still hovering around recession levels, even as the economy finally begins to pick up.

Next week, I'll be discussing How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. I hope you have picked it up and read it. From my very first blog entry here, I have kept an eye out for ideas that help people buy and sell better. Like the study on EBay buying behavior, many of those resources for consumers are not aimed at real estate consumers. Lehrer’s book is case in point; it has two pages that are indexed as “real estate shopping.” I see the book as being all about how to buy and sell anything better. Please join the discussion.

Besides the announcement of the upcoming book discussion, today, the topic is children’s books.

Last week, one of my clients had the experience of seeing a house go under agreement on MLS before she could see it in real life. She panicked. Then she apologized to me for acting like “Chicken Little.” There is great power in the cultural stories that we read to our children. Chicken Little is a modern myth about jumping to conclusions that the worst is happening. I immediately understood her emotional state when she called herself “Chicken Little.”

I countered her Chicken Little with, The Little House. I was introduced to this book by the late Hilda Silverman, who was an agent I worked with. She was a native of Gloucester; so was the author. It’s a wonderful book about a house that gets encroached upon, over and over, until it finally gets moved to a place where is can regain its former happiness. It is a book about the expansion of cities and towns and its effect on housing.

I refrained from using The Little Engine that Could. It is not my style to be that rah-rah.

My personal favorite children's real estate book is Creaky Old House. It’s a book about how one house repair leads to another, and another.

Do you have a favorite children's book that embodies the market, your buying experience, or your selling experience?

Renters here in Greater Boston and across the country can expect to get socked by rising rents and a tightening market over the next few years, a new Harvard report finds.

In fact, after a dip in rents and a rise in vacancies during the Great Recession, both key indicators are turning sharply upward again, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Larger, professionally managed apartment complexes saw rents dive 4.1 percent in 2009, only to rebound 2.3 percent toward the end of 2010. That likely to set the stage for an even bigger spike this year.

The market is about to get a lot tighter as well, with apartment complex vacancies having plunged to 6.5 percent in 2010 from 8.2 percent the year before. The overall U.S. vacancy rate - which includes all rentals, not just in the bigger buildings - fell to 9.4 percent in 2010 from 10.7 percent in 2009.

When I wrote about blind references, we got advice from Boston Charles.

Boston Charles can zing me at times, but he is worth it. Actually some of you appreciate him best when he zings me, right? I don’t agree with all his advice about choosing an agent. However some of it was spot on.

Charles wrote:

I've never got references from an agent from someone I don't know. I have done so within the real estate community. Yes, this is less useful for the average buyer. 2 easy tests are - how much did you sell last year (or buy, depending) - the good real agents do almost all the deals, as sam mentioned. 2d, ask a buyers agent "whats wrong with this house". Its a great weed out - you'll find many agents simply can't say anything negative and "real". Avoid them - they are poisoned by BS.
For selling, simply put, the agents who sell the most sell the most. Find out who they are and list with them.

What I agree with:
1. The best references are from people you know.
Yes! Where I differ from Charles is to stand by my interview questions. Get names from people you know. Trust but verify. Your friends may be nice, but they may not know what to expect from an agent. Good outcomes are not always the result of good agents.

2. To find a good buyer’s agent, ask the agent to find problems in the house.
Yes, again. A good buyer’s agent will find problems and will also show you how the property doesn’t match what you said you wanted. The ones that are cheerleaders are not good buyer's agents.

The double dip we are seeing in home prices is being treated as some sort of stunning new development. As is everything in no today's no context, memory-of-a-gnat news media.

Home prices and sales fell again in March, according to both the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

The Bay State's median home sale price dipped to $267,250 in March, down 2.8 percent from March, 2010, according to the Warren Group. Home sales were down 14 percent year-over-year.

Yet it was only a matter of time before prices headed down again.

In fact, I would argue it's even good news, as in an alcoholic finally coming to grips with his drinking problem or a couple facing up to huge problems they had denied for years.

I say no, but I'm not an economist.

But then again, neither is CNBC's John Carney, who is predicting trouble ahead for the economy as the slide in home prices picks up speed.

He cites recent research by Karl Case the Wellesley College professor emeritus, that tracks the connection between fluctuations in home prices and consumer spending.

To summarize, when home prices go down, consumer spending takes a hit.

Just in news terms, this is the obvious follow to yesterday's story on falling home prices.

But I am skeptical that one double dip, in housing, will trigger a second double dip, in the economy - a double double-dip if you will.

I’m a little late for Earth day, which was last Thursday, but the beautiful weather on Sunday inspired me to mention these spring energy tips for home buyers.

The energy costs of a house can’t be determined by size alone. The two factors that affect it the most are personal usage and the efficiency of the house itself. Usage depends on you. Efficiency can be modified once you own it.

I frequently have buyers who get stuck in the details of energy costs and miss the big picture. A low annual energy bill (given by the happy sellers) may reflect a winter when they were in Florida and the thermostat was set at 45 degrees. If a buyer depends on that figure, the buyer must also know the typical usage of the current residents.

Buyers, these are the things to watch for when house hunting in the spring and summer:

The latest Case-Shiller numbers don't look pretty.

Home prices fell or were flat year over year in all 20 major metro markets with the sole exception of Washington, with its overheated government-driven economy, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Composite.

And in ten cities, home values hit their lowest point since prices began falling in earnest four years ago.

Boston area home prices fell 1.5 percent in February - which places Greater Boston in the top five markets with the biggest winter price declines.

Accelerated marketing has worked pretty well for large condo towers with hundreds of units that can be sold in an auction-style format.

Buyers have been able to pick up some real steals, while enabling high-rise developers to quickly jettison troublesome investments.

But we will soon get a chance to see how this tactic works with mansions, with an 11,800- square-foot Wellesley estate set to to be sold by May 25th to the highest bidder.

The seven bedroom, seven full and two half-bath, five fireplace home was built in 2008 and was last listed at $5.2 million. (That said, it also appears to have been under agreement at the end of last month for $4.5 million, though clearly this deal is now dead.)

Last Monday, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team discussed how he felt that some sellers over prepare their homes. Today he continues the discussion:

Last week I wrote:

"The most common mistake that sellers make is that they do work to their homes that might be better left to negotiate over after a home inspection."

Jima responded:

Sam - I think that this statement needs some explanation as it doesn't make sense.
Today's Home Inspectors are like wolves on a deer. If there is some blood, they tend to rip a house apart. A buyer's estimate might be double or more of the actual cost to fix an issue.

Jima makes some good points. Here is what I think:

Good listing agents know that there is the actual cost of a repair as well as the perceived cost of a repair or upgrade. Good listing agents also work with reliable, reputable, cost effective contractors that can provide quotes on issues that arise or could arise from home inspections. A good listing agent will obtain estimates for the obvious repairs or upgrades that he anticipates that a buyer might notice or request after an inspection. At least I know that I do.

Sales of new homes are picking up this spring, with new numbers due out this morning.

Economists are estimating a 12 percent jump when the Commerce Department releases its March housing report at 10 a.m., Bloomberg reports.

But any progress is likely to be tenuous until more people who lost their jobs during the Great Recession are able to get back on their feet again.

I did my own informal survey at a family Easter gathering this weekend.

Of 12 adults, four are now unemployed, or soon to be.

As a buyer’s agent, I am responsible for respecting and securing a property that I show through the MLS. I am given access to a key, which I am to use and replace in a secure container. I am given instructions like “don’t let the cat out” or “leave the lights on” or “please remove shoes.” I follow those. Then there are the obvious rules that go without saying: “don’t steal… don’t snoop…don’t break anything.”

Lately, I have seen instructions that read, “Don’t give lock box combination to the buyer.” Are they serious? What agent would give out a combination to a buyer? It must happen or there would be no need to mention it.

The worst security breach situation that I know of happened in Cambridge. By the time I showed the house, the sellers were only allowing showings when they were home. They were not speaking to their agent. Why? Because their house was burglarized over what must have taken hours. These sellers went away for a three-day weekend and come back to find odd things missing. Weird things. Like empty boxes in the basement that had contained wedding presents that they hadn’t used yet. A few pieces of missing jewelry. Some liquor gone. Some video tapes gone. They were creeped out. They blamed the combination lock box on their door. What bothered them the most was that they told the agent that they would be away for a long weekend and whoever stole their things knew that.

Everyone knows one, especially here in Greater Boston, where, in the eyes of their loving owners, all homes are above average.

It's the guy on the block who thinks his Colonial is worth $800,000 even as his neighbors are lucky to break the $500,000 mark.

OK, it's a little harsh, but I have taken to calling them delusional sellers. (I'm open to suggestions here.)

Of course, what makes this blog so fun is that everyone calls out everyone else on just about everything.

Jima contends I'm off the mark - all those sellers who start with a pie-in-the-sky price and then are forced to come down, one small price reduction after another, are doing what home sellers have always done. There's nothing new here, he contends.

I have some new clients who have been shopping on their own through open houses. Once we got going, they noticed an MLS listing with no open house. We made an appointment to see it. There was a page on the table with “offers being presented 3 PM on Monday” written on it. They were new enough at the hunt to be confused that there can be a bidding war called without an open house. Yet, I’d seen it before. Open houses are a common way to market a property, but it is not a foregone conclusion that it is the best way.

They couldn’t let it go, “why would a seller not want an open house?” they asked. I told them why.

First and foremost is security. Open houses invite anyone and everyone into the house. This welcomes nosy neighbors, klutzes and -- once in a while -- people of bad intent. Things get broken, things get dirty, and sometimes things go missing. At an open house, there will be one agent to watch people in five or more rooms. Even an agent who is paying attention can’t keep an eye on everything in that situation. Therefore, some sellers demand appointments only. In that case, there will be one agent there with one party of buyers; a much better ratio for keeping house-hunters from intentionally or unintentionally damaging the property.

Check out this mock apology from one avowedly "stingy" seller.

While my post on Boston leading the country in stingy sellers drew lots of "amens" from frustrated buyers, greblok was having none of it.

"I hereby apologize to Scott and all the countless unnamed people I've deeply offended by being a shrewd, nay stingy, seller, which is the only way I afforded a down payment on my current home. I don't know how I sleep at night because a couple from California wanted to pay about $75,000 more for my 1790 colonial than anyone else did. Or because I rejected an offer on a condo during the great recession until one came in at $54,000 more. Oh the unbearable agony of having offended so many finely tuned sensibilities."

I further apologize for being a shrewd, stingy, low-balling buyer, which was also the only way I could afford my next home. I will try to be dumber next time."

Wow, that's a great retort.

Yet equally fascinating were some of the responses it drew from the fed-up buyer camp.

It may go down as one of the more memorable real estate blunders in New England history.

Nicolas Cage shelled out a whopping $15.7 million to buy a Roaring Twenties mansion on Newport's waterfront back in 2007, when the real estate market was clearly past its prime.

Cage, whose personal travails seem to be growing by the day - witness his arrest in New Orleans - recently unloaded the 26 acre Gray Craig Manor estate for a relatively measly $6.2 million.

So are all those rich celebs finally getting their comeuppance? Is the bottom is finally falling out from the mansion market?

Well not so fast. While that would make a fascinating story line, Cage's Newport mansion mess is arguably the latest sad chapter in a personal meltdown being played out on a global stage.

No wonder there is a glut of unsold homes on the market.

OK, I am being facetious here, but the latest survey from HomeGain illustrates a glaring intelligence gap in today's market.

On one hand, we have sellers all too eager to choose agents based on style rather than substance.

And on the other, we have buyers looking for substance over style, and, in particular, easy to visualize, basic information on homes.

Today, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Greater Boston Home Team discusses how following the wrong advice can cost some sellers time or money.

Some owners will try to sell on heir own; the majority turn to real estate agents to manage their sales.Today’s post is inspired by owners that I've met that prepared their homes for sale before bringing in agents to interview.

Most sellers will do at least some research online. Others will take the advice of a friends or relatives that haven’t seen the property. Unfortunately, online information, including this blog and other blind advice can't take the place of human judgment based on an evaluation of a property's condition and the seller’s circumstances. With the exception of de-cluttering their homes, most sellers would be better off selecting their agent before they "prepared" their homes for sale. Then they should follow that agent’s specific advice to prepare their home for sale.

The most common mistake that sellers make is that they do work to their homes that might be better left to negotiate over after a home inspection. That work often includes updating electrical systems, replacing a roof, gutters, doors or windows, doing excessive landscaping or interior upgrades. On the other hand, I’ve also seen sellers that refuse to do inexpensive repair work that would make their home much more appealing and valuable to buyers.

Some sellers call in several agents and ask them for suggestions about preparing their home for the market. Then they combine all of the agent’s suggestions and do the work. The result is often too much money spent on items that will not bring a return on the money spent.

The 26.2 mile Boston Marathon dashes past some of the priciest real estate on the planet.

The race kicks off in middle class territory - Hopkinton, Ashland, Framingham and Natick.
But as the runners cross the Natick line into Wellesley, the median home price immediately doubles. And as they hit their stride, the Marathon runners will find themselves gliding past some of the most expensive suburban and urban enclaves on earth before crossing the finish line at Copley Square, in the heart of downtown Boston's luxury home and condo market.

In towns like Ashland, Hopkinton and Natick, prices are settling back into solidly middle class territory after having flirted with the lower rungs of the high end market during the boom years.

But in Wellesley, Newton, Brookline and downtown Boston, prices are still stratospherically high and, if anything, taking a breather before the next sprint up.

Without further ado, here's my town-by-town real estate tour of the Marathon route. (All numbers are from The Warren Group, with the exception of Hopkinton, which I used Trulia for.)

Today, I challenge you to find the best place for the “average” wage-earners in Massachusetts. You all have your favorite MLS interface, so get searching.

Within Ten Miles:
The single-earner household can borrow $100,000. He or she needs a 20 percent down payment. That makes a purchase price of $125,000. Within ten miles of Boston, $125,000 could have purchased houses in Boston, Chelsea, Dedham, Everett, Lynn, Malden, Quincy, Revere, and Saugus. Condos (at least a couple) could be had in Melrose, Winthrop and Winchester. (Data from the last six months.)

The two-income household can borrow $250,000. With their 20 percent down payment, their purchase power is about $313,000. I put some limits on the size of this two-person or more living space. It must have two bedrooms, five rooms and be 1000 square feet or more inside. In the past six months, there were houses in Arlington, Boston, Braintree, Chelsea, Dedham, Everett, Hull, Lynn, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Milton, Needham, Newton, Quincy, Revere, Saugus, Somerville, Stoneham, Wakefield, Waltham, Watertown, Weymouth, Winchester, Winthrop and Woburn. When I throw condos in, I get a lone Brookline condo to add to the town mix.

Where do properties in these towns fall, generally, on that size + location + condition (+ some for style in some cases) = price equation?

Who knew? OK, I mean we all know home sellers around here are a particularly stubborn bunch. But the stingiest in the country?

So says Trulia, which just launched a new "home offer" report, which takes a mountain of real estate data and slices and dices it into a range of entertaining categories.

Boston is the top market in the country when it comes to stingy buyers, with an average price reduction of just 5 percent. By contrast, Atlanta home buyers lop an average 9 percent off their listing price and in Baltimore, 10 percent, according to Trulia.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about being surprised that 74.7 percent of American-born people who live in Massachusetts were born in Massachusetts. The comments that followed really called me on my naivety. It seemed obvious to some that Massachusetts-born made for a lot of Massachusetts-stayed. “Grow where you are planted” is alive and well here. (The entry predates the “great comment wipe-out.” So, so you can’t see the conversation anymore.)

I was reminded of that conversation by comments on Marcel’s thoughts about leaving Massachusetts. Artie and RedheadedJen both mentioned family ties as a reason to stay here.

What in the world are they thinking?

Some sellers are shooting for the stars again when setting the price of their homes.

And frankly it both irks and baffles me at the same time.

Take a look around - you won't have to do much digging to find a good example.

I have a few in my hometown of Natick, where a colonial owner or two suddenly decided they are really living in Wellesley, where the median price is $835,088.

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Great Boston Home Team is our Monday guy. Today he continues the discussion about restrictions that he began last week.

In addition to the restrictions that we discussed last week, there are other restrictions that can affect how an owner can use his or her own property.

Condominium or co-op documents:
Condominium documents, including rules and regulations, if any, often include restrictions regarding pets, ability to rent, parking, storage, use of condo units, voting rights, insurance, use of common areas, and financial matters including the condo association's ability to borrow money for the association on behalf of all owners. Condo docs also address who is a trustee (A/K/A Member of the Board of Directors) and what powers and responsibilities trustees have.

Easements:
Easements are used when one party has the ability to use someone else’s property. Typically, easements are used for shared driveways or utility access. It is not uncommon to see utility easements when underground pipes are beneath or planned on someone’s property. A utility easement grants the utility company the right to access a particular area of someone’s property to install or maintain their utilities. Easements should be noted on property deeds.

Community covenants:
When some neighborhoods were developed, the developer created a set of community covenants to regulate the appearance of the neighborhood. Any aspect of a neighborhood can be regulated through community covenants provided the restrictions are legal. In many cases, community covenants restrict the style or size home, garage or other building that can be built within the neighborhood, the type number of vehicles that can be kept by owners (no campers, boats, etc.), types of antennas possible on homes, pets, landscaping, or the colors that homes can be painted. Community covenants should be noted on property deeds.

The return of the 20 percent down payment was the first shoe to drop amid the mortgage market overhaul taking place in Washington.

But the real game changer for Greater Boston, with its perpetually inflated home prices, can be found in some of the less examined pieces of this monster federal proposal.

Some of the new rules, notes Kenneth Harney, would bar home buyers from tapping the best mortgage rates if they exceed strict debt-to-income ratios.

Basically,no more than 28 percent of your monthly, pre-tax earnings can go towards housing, while total housing debt can't be more than 36 percent of what you make, he notes.

Darn, I guess that means no more million-dollar fixer-uppers.

For anyone who bought an overpriced home during the bubble, this spring has got to be particularly painful.

Home prices are hardly a steal within 128, but some buyers with a little more spending power than first-timers can make out all right. As you head out towards 495 and beyond, the deals become more numerous - though gas prices have gone haywire again so commuting is a concern. (I filled my tank the other day and it cost me more than $40 - haven't seen that since 2008.)

Basically, a home that you could not afford during the bubble years is suddenly within your league, yet you are stuck with your overpriced little Cape or condo.

But are you?  Here's one option that I am starting to hear more about - selling at a loss so you can move on and up.

I am working through the questions leftover from the chat yesterday.

[ShadowCat]
We're looking to move to a bigger space next spring. Our priority is a good school system, but we also would love a town with a commuter rail or T stop and an active town center. And we'd like more than a postage-stamp of a yard. Our budget is under $400k and I'm having trouble finding towns that fit the bill. What resources would you recommend?

There is an equation that is always true:
size + location + condition (+ some for style in some cases) = price.

If you shop carefully, you may find a B location which is big enough and in B condition. You may find an A location that is not big enough in B condition. You may find a B location that is a little too small in A condition. You may find… you get the picture. $400,000 is not going to buy an A location that is big and in good condition.

Size: When I look at my towns, I get 112 properties that have 3 bedrooms and 1400+ square feet inside and 6000+ square feet outside that sold in the past 6 months for under $400,000.

But then you have to define the limits on location and condition.

Location:
Commuter rail towns: Acton, Concord, Medford, Melrose, Natick, Waltham, Wellesley and Winchester. Which of these do you consider good school systems? What is your take on busy streets? (you have to rule those out.)

Condition: The better the location, the worse the condition. Guarranteed!

So, what choices would you make in ShadowCat’s shoes?

A happy resident of the Sunbelt, where the skies are always blue and new homes come cheap, Nancy is getting ready to move to the Boston area with her husband and children.

She says she's ready for sticker shock - and a doubling of her current mortgage - but Nancy has yet to get on the ground here and start looking.

I ran into Nancy, so to speak, during Monday's Spring House Hunt market chat, where I tapped away on my keyboard doing my best to keep up with questions thrown out by potential buyers.

Today, I came, I saw, I chatted. The busy beavers on the editing end will post the link, in full, sometime soon.

Marcel asked a question that is on the minds of many, many people. I repost his question here, with some ideas about how to sort an answer for yourself.

Do you have advice for Marcel? Did you leave Massachusetts for cheaper housing? Are you happy? Or did you stay despite our over-inflated market. Are you happy?

[Comment From Marcel] Hello. My wife and me is thinking of chunking the deuce on Mass because home prices is so high. We are thinking of moving to an area where housing is less expensive, so we can buying. If we could buying a house in another state now (closer to families), would it make more financial sense for us to buy or keep renting until we can afford a home in Massachusetts.? Thx.

If you are thinking of “chunking the deuce on Mass” (I never heard that before, but we all know what he means) these are the things that I think you should consider.

You need to compare a number of factors to make a decision that you won’t regret five or ten or twenty years from now.

Employment and income:
What is the future of your job prospects, career opportunities, and educational opportunities in Massachusetts and in the other state?
Will you find yourself making a lower income elsewhere? Will that balance the lower housing cost, or are you just stepping away from inflation without getting more economic freedom? Will your career be dead-ended elsewhere, lowering your lifetime income?

Lifestyle:
Will you be happier living near family?
What are features of both places and which suit you better? Think about weather, recreational and social activity, cultural activity (theater, sports, music, parks, museums.)
Is there housing stock at a reasonable commute to work in either place, or will you get a much better place in the same commuting zone (or even a shorter one) outside of Massachusetts?

With winter - cross your fingers - mostly behind us, home and condo sales are starting to finally pick up with the start of the spring market.

Pending sales jumped 40 percent from February to March, the largest month-over-month increase since the Massachusetts Association of Realtors began tracking pending sales in 2008. Condo sales were up 45 percent from February.

Blaming the weather for poor sales is typically pretty lame, but this winter provides an exception to the rule.

But don't be fooled by the big month-over-month increase into thinking the market has turned the corner - it hasn't.

The increase in pending sales in March over February is mostly a story about this winter's bad weather - the more telling figure is how this March stacks up with the start of the spring market a year ago.

Pending home sales in March fell more than 16 percent when compared with March 2010, MAR reports. Condo sales plunged 22 percent compared to March 2010.

Today, Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Great Boston Home Team discusses how private property rights can be legally restricted.

One of the most important considerations that a buyer should factor into the purchase of their next home is what they want to do with the property during the time that they will own it. That is important because, contrary to what most people think, property ownership does not give owners the right to do anything that they please to their property. There are various ways that the use of private property might be restricted.

If a buyer has a buyer’s agent, the agent should be made aware of the buyers plans for the property before the offer is written. As a buyers broker, I’ve written offers allowing additional time to research potential restrictions. I’ve also advised buyers to walk away from properties that they could not legally modify to meet their future needs or expectations.
He are some ways that individual property rights might be restricted on individually owned property. Due to space limitations, next week I’ll discuss restrictions for situations where more than one party shares the use of the property:

Zoning:
Municipal zoning can affect an owner’s ability to modify or expand a home or other structures, add an “in-law apartment”, erect a wall or fence, build a patio or deck, or widen a driveway, among other things.

Thinking of buying a smaller home than you need and expanding later or tearing down and rebuilding a garage? Check with the building department and zoning code to be sure that you will be able to do what you want to do.
Before you even think about buying near a commercial property of any kind? Remember that today's office building or nursing home could become tomorrow's kennel or nightclub, if allowed by zoning in that area.

Let me know now want you'd like to talk about this afternoon.

There is certainly lots of territory to cover, from whether it makes sense to buy now to finding yourself caught in a bidding war in a down market. Not supposed to happen, but inside Route 128 it does.

Here's the link to the chat.

So fire away - we'll talk more at 1 p.m.

Today, let’s make fun of listing sheets. Easy, right? I hope this is fun for you.

First, I want to share my two personal (seen with my own eyes) favorites:

It is custom to tell an agent that there will be a pet in the house. Example: “Small dog named Fred will be in crate in the office.” “Two cats, don’t let them out.” Sometime in the 90s, I saw a listing sheet that read,

“Friendly dog, named Killer, will be in the house.”

The other was a Freudian typo.

“An imaginative buyer can burn this one into a beauty.”

The most common type of remarks that draw derision from my clients are the ones that are obvious exaggeration. My colleagues, Kathe Geist and Hilda Silverman and I prepared this list for our clients about ten years ago:

It may look the return of the Ice Age this morning, but don't be fooled. The spring real estate market is here - and with it innumerable pitfalls for unprepared and naive buyers.

While things may be slower in the hinterlands, it's the same old story in many of the hotter towns and neighborhoods along and inside the Route 128 corridor.

Once again there are too many buyers battling it out for a limited pool of decent inventory - either new homes or older ones not needing expensive overhauls.

And brokers who have been around the block know all the tricks to stampeding eager buyers and getting them to check their common sense at the door to the open house. (Rona has written extensively on this over the past few weeks. Read and learn.)

My favorite is the broker at the open house who told buyers, all eager to see a house - in Burlington, I think - that sorry, he was now only taking "back up offers."

But how do we know those offers are real? Could this just be another broker ginning up the process with a few "phantom buyers?"

Does it really have to be this way?

The noise issues in suburbia are nurture and nature. Nurture, taking care of things and people: transportation noises, lawn care, and child care.

The train blew its horn as it went over a bridge a little over a quarter mile from my childhood bedroom window. The horn blasted every two hours all night and hourly, or more, all day. I didn’t much notice it until I was a restless teenager, tossing and turning. When my parents bought that house, the train was a selling point. The train noise was never an issue. My friends a little closer to it, complained a little more.

Highway noise is a complaint I hear from buyers in many towns around here, where Route 2, I-95, 90 and 93 blast past residential neighborhoods. Around Logan and Hanscom and under their flight paths, jet noise is a significant disturbance.

The suburban noise I remember best is the lawnmower engine of my next door neighbor. He mowed around 7 on Saturday morning. My teenaged self was none too pleased. Since those days, yard care has gotten noisy year-round, with the advent of leaf and snow blowers.

Where I grew up, the houses were pretty close together. There is an illusion of privacy that was just not so. During the summer, we heard parents calling kids to dinner two doors down. Maybe, I was in a place of particularly noisy parents, but somehow, I doubt it. I could hear conversations next door, at night in the summer. Have you lived in a suburb like this?

Here's an idea tossed to me by a renter sitting on the sidelines.

Yearning for a meaningful decline in Greater Boston's perpetually inflated home prices, but apparently tired of waiting, he's looking into buying a vacation home while continuing to rent here.

Not necessarily here in Massachusetts, but in another state where prices are easier to get your arms around.

It's an intriguing idea, to say the least. Rent here and avoid breaking the bank to buy in Newton or Arlington and instead become a homeowner in pretty little East Nowheresville.

The fact is, armed with $150,000 - roughly the median price nationally of a home - and you can do well for yourself in many other states and metro markets.(Here that gets you a grim looking one bedroom, garden style apartment/condo along a busy highway.)

And really, unless you believe the world ends at 495, there are actually a lot of other nice places to live in this world.

After all, it's not hard to beat our crummy weather and terrible traffic.

Richard D. Vetstein describes the changes to the Homestead Law. Anyone who owns a house in Massachusetts should know about this home owner benefit.

On March 16th, the revamped Massachusetts Homestead Act went into effect. The new law can be found here. The old homestead act had not been revised in decades and had caused confusion in certain aspects.

For those who don’t know, a homestead is a creditor protection device which protects the equity in a person’s principal residence against certain types of creditor claims up to the homestead amount—either $125,000 or $500,000. Homesteads play an important role in protecting principal residences in personal bankruptcy proceedings.

Here’s a summary of highlights of the new act:
• All Massachusetts homeowners will receive an automatic homestead exemption of $125,000 for protection on their principal residence without having to do anything.
• All residents are eligible for a $500,000 “declared homestead exemption” by filing a declaration of homestead at the registry of deeds. There is a new homestead form which must be used. For married couples, both spouses will now have to sign the form–which is a change from prior practice. The recording fee is $35 in most registries.
• If you already have a homestead recorded at the registry of deeds, you do not have to re-file it. All previously recorded homestead declarations are grandfathered into the new law, and have the full $500,000 protection.

My wife and I spent months tire kicking and going to open houses before we got pre-approved for a mortgage.

It was valuable time, certainly - we came to a rough agreement on what we wanted and what we didn't want.

But we really didn't have a clue what we could afford - that came later when we got pre-approved for a mortgage.

According to David Crowley, a downtown Boston broker who I chat with from time to time, home buyers who look before getting pre-approved are putting the cart before the horse.

In fact, if you don't have your pre-approval in hand, David won't be driving out to that open house with you.

No pre-approval, no housing hunting with David.

Caramel wrote:

"I wish someone would come up with an offer verification process that somehow reveals the existence of an offer without compromising the privacy of the party offering."

Carmel, you can verify "offer in hand" claims, but only after the fact. I don’t think there is a way to verify in real time that would not compromise the seller’s confidential position. Can anyone think of a way to do this?
The presence or absence of a competing purchase contract is a material fact. But what is in the offer is confidential until it no longer matters to the seller. There may be a way to verify the fact of an offer, but some will be too weak to be competition.

After the fact, you could get an attorney to write a letter to the broker of the listing agent who said three offers were in on March 27 (and that house is still for sale on April 27th.) Send a copy of the letter, along with your complaint, to the Commonwealth. By involving the boss of the possible liar, you will either get three dead offers, with identifying information whited-out, or you will have uncovered a stinker. I hope some stinkers will get run out of the business. They give people like me a bad name. If every buyer did this, the bluffing behavior would go away.

In my experience, there are few “offer in hand” liars. I have gone through the effort to get offers verified when it was important to my buyers. In every case, the other offer(s) existed. They did, but some were bad offers.

Before offer-in-hand, it is impossible to really verify anything.

Single-family home sales posted a 12.5 percent year-over-year decline in February, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, points to an even steeper plunge - 15.7 percent - calling it the worst February since it began tracking local home sales in 1987.

Yet all real estate is local and often micro local. Even as home sales plunge across the state, in the more coveted towns near or within the 128 belt, half decent homes are sparking bidding wars.

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Great Boston Home Team is our Monday guy. Today he musing on who benefits from those yard signs springing up on our landscape.

What is the purpose of the real estate sign in front of a property for sale?
The answer probably depends on who you ask.

If you ask the listing agent, she might tell you that signs help sell the property sooner because everybody that passes by will know that it’s for sale. In reality, the national statistic is that only six percent of home buyers in 2009 bought a home because they happened to see the sign. I know agents that have been in business for many years that have never sold a home based on a buyer seeing the sign. Surveys show that around 90 percent of today’s buyers are already searching for their next home online.
Having a sign in front of a property for sale from the day it is listed until the day that it closes is great advertising for the agent and the agency. That sign presence often leads to inquiries from other neighbors that want to discuss selling their home with the agent. (In fact, I once lost a potential listing to an agent that had lots of signs all over a particular neighborhood. She hadn’t actually sold any of the homes in over 4 months, but that didn’t seem to be something that the seller factored into the decision making process.)

Buyers like signs until they get tired of calling the agent or agency only to get hustled for their names, numbers and whatever else before they can get any information at all about the property or they find out that they are talking to an agent that has never seen the property. Agents have treated some buyers rudely once they hear that the buyer has his own buyer’s agent.

The first week of May, I will be discussing How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. This is a book about the brain, how it works, and how we tap the brain when making decisions. I am finishing my second go-through and it has a lot of good topics about how our physical thinking apparatus works against us, and for us. We think too rationally and make mistakes. And, we think too emotionally and make mistakes.

There’s a specific section about real estate. But I don’t find it the most informative for our forum. There is no cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all way to buy a house. However, from what I have picked up from Mr. Lehrer, there are some guidelines and warning signs I’d like to discuss with you.

Are you game? Please pick up the book and finish it in April.

Here's a startling figure: New homes still carry a more than 23 percent premium over their competitors.

OK, it's all relative - both new homes and existing homes are locked in a race to the bottom right now when it comes to prices and sales.

Still, the disparity continues - the median price nationally for a new home is now $202,000, compared to the $157,000 for a home that is being resold.

If anything, the premium placed on new construction is even higher here given the dearth of meaningful home building across the Greater Boston area.

Frank, our frustrated first-time home buyer, may just have a point when he fumes about the new colonial that hit the market in Woburn for $480,000.

Now I come to the debate having long been a big fan of older homes. REMaven keeps trying to convince me I should torn down my early 1900s Natick fixer-upper and hired her to put a modular special.

Thanks but no thanks to that. Go ahead and call my Natick fixer-upper a tear down - to me it has stood the test of time and that means something.

When I wrote about the motorcycle-riding neighbor, it brought a few comments about other noise issues in urban (and suburban neighborhoods.) So, today I’d like to give those other noise complaints some air time.

I have had clients who have either complained about, or were complained-to about all of these common noises. Some stated that the noise issue was a big part of their reason for moving. Do these bother you? Do you think that anyone bothered by these is just a hot-house flower who should move to the middle of no-where?

People noise:
There are voluntary activities that people do in and around their houses and apartments that, if heard by the neighbors, can cause friction.
Riding a motorcycle, using a chirping car opener, using a car alarm, lawn mowers , leaf blowers, playing music, dancing (especially DDR), yelling – either in anger or shouting for children to come, cooking strong-smelling foods, doing laundry or vacuuming at odd hours.

I'm all for thinking outside the box. After all, it takes a little creative thinking to snag a half decent home in this market without breaking the bank.

But I wonder if our buddy "Frank" may be pushing the envelope here a bit.

The last time we checked in with Frank, our friendly IT guy was getting back into the hunt for an affordable home in Boston's perpetually overpriced suburbs, having rebounded from a layoff that sidelined him for a good part of 2010.

But Frank keeps striking out, mainly, at least in his view, because he bases his offers on what a home is truly worth, not the listing price.

Some may call it low balling; Frank and others on this blog would simply call it common sense.

His most recent foray - offering $400,000 for a newly built Woburn colonial originally listed at $480,000. It wound up selling for $450,000. (My apologies to Frank, It was last listed at $449,000 and has been put under agreement - the sale price may be even lower. That should cast his decision to offer $400,000 in a somewhat different light.)

So Frank has decided if you can't beat the real estate industrial sales complex, maybe it's time to join it.

"I'm going to become a Realtor," he told me over the phone yesterday.

I didn't fall out of my chair, but I certainly had some questions.

"What's your spring market verdict: Disaster or buying opportunity?"

That was the informal poll I took here last week on the outlook for the spring market.

I spent this morning tallying up the votes, following United Nations best practices.

Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. And with one predictable exception, no one argued that it is a great time to buy. Shocker!

Basically, the comments broke down into two camps. The are the embittered hopeful, who are looking, but remain frustrated by home prices that still seem too high, and the perpetually wary who are awaiting another 10 to 20 percent drop in prices.

I aim to please. So even though Lance damns me with UHS tirades, I make my best efforts to answer his requests. Lance, thank you for being part of this ongoing discussion. You add a lot.
Lance asked:

My specific question was how many of the deals where you (or your buyers) were the targets of an obvious hurry-up scam ended up closing over ask? Even better (because asking prices are often arbitrary), give us a rough BPO at time of sale and tell us how much the properties closed for in relation to that number.

How I collected these figures:
I went through my CMAs for 2010. (I do at least a preliminary CMA before any discussion about making an offer.) For simplicity’s sake, I used a single figure as Comparative Market Analysis price. I don’t actually quote a single figure to my clients; I create a range. This range is generally no more than $5000.
Note: The CMA does account for problems I noticed in the property, but doesn’t account for additional repair items identified by the inspector.

Then I looked at my notes about what my clients were reacting to (in terms of listing agent pressure.)

Then I correlated the pressured conversations about Offers with the sales data in the MLS.

So these are all properties where one of my clients considered jumping in. There are many more where they “Just said ‘no’” to the hype and I didn’t start crunching numbers.

Condos:
These were all rehabbed units in small associations. Arlington, Somerville or Cambridge
CMA//Asking price//Sale price
$315/$309/$297
$368/$389/$380
$802/$789/$801,5

Single family houses: Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Waltham or Watertown

Not rehabbed:
CMA//Asking price//Sale price
$315/$298,9/$298,9
$408,5/$399,9/$383
$454/$449/$435
$536/$559,9/$527,5

Significantly rehabbed:
CMA//Asking price//Sale price
$329/$355/$375
$461,5/$499/$505
$470,5/$494,5/$487,5
$575/$575/$576
$667/$649/$665
$947,5/$949/$1.001

So, to answer Lance’s question, sometimes the hurry-up does lead to closings over asking price. Sometimes by more than I think is reasonable, compared to CMA price. The tactic works best with rehabbed properties, where buyers seem to lose their heads most often.

New homeowners of 2010: did you pay “whatever was necessary” to get the house you wanted? What motivated you to buy the property you bought?

All homeowners: did you pay “whatever was necessary” to get the house you wanted? Do you regret it now? (Include your purchase year and town.)

Here's a fascinating tidbit on the real estate market.

Nearly 60 percent of men recently surveyed by Rasmussen Reports said they believed their home is still worth more than what they borrowed to buy it for. That's compared to 47 percent of women homeowners polled.

Given the state of the real estate market right now, I'd vote with the women right now, whose bearish instincts on this question appear closer to reality.

Despite that contingent of bullish men, most homeowners now appear to be finally grappling with real estate reality after years of hoping that a home price rebound is just around the corner.

Less than half of the 720 homeowners surveyed the week of March 15th said they still expect the value of homes to go up over the next five years.

Other interesting findings from the Rasmussen poll, which focused on the real estate market, include:

Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Great Boston Home Team is our Monday guy. Today he discusses how to make an offer a good offer.

Whether you’re buying or selling, you probably want an offer that binds the other party to the deal.

Massachusetts real estate contracts must be written and signed by both buyer(s) and seller(s) to be enforceable. Otherwise, buyers could back out for any reason or sellers could sell the property to someone else with a better offer.

Since the offer is used as the basis for the Purchase & Sale agreement, a good offer contains all of the ingredients needed to keep the transaction on track through closing without exposing either side to unnecessary risks.

The basics of a good offer are:
1. Property identification.
2. Price to be paid.
3. Time that the transaction will take place.
4. Place that the transaction will take place.
5. Consideration being paid to bind the agreement.

A basic offer or Purchase & Sale agreement could be as simple as:

I, Sam Schneiderman (include Sam’s address), hereby agree to sell 123 Main Street, Anytown, MA to Rona Fischman (include Rona’s address) for the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. The delivery of the deed will take place at 3pm on June 1, 2011 at the Moon County Registry of Deeds. A deposit of $100 is paid herewith to bind this offer.

I’ve been advised that if any of those items are missing, the offer would be unenforceable.

In a fall market, during the current recession, I had clients who were involved in a bidding war in one of the “usual suspect” towns. The offers where collected on Monday. I was told that there were 16 of them. My clients were within market value, and were roughly $20,000 over asking price. The property sold for $102,000 over asking price. (This property had an asking price between $700-900,000.)

Bidding wars are still happening through the recession. They are happening outside of “silly season” (as one of the commenters called the tax credit period.) Here is the asking price and sale price information for hurry-ups in the usual suspect towns, Arlington, Brookline, Belmont, Cambridge, Lexington, Needham, Newton and Wellesley for the past six months.

Asking price// Sale price
$329/$329
$339/$338
$349.9/$350
$379/$390
$379/$370
$385/$379
$398/$350
$399/$381
$399/$399
$400/$400
$419/$418,4
$439/$449
$439/$458
$440/$439
$449/$475
$459/$450
$460/$450,5
$464,5/$445
$465/$486
$495/$457,5
$499,9/$500
$510/$482,5
$519/$510
$525/$530
$525/$536
$529/$529
$529/$527
$530/$525
$550/$546
$557/$550
$572/581,9
$589/$589
$595/$595
$599/$620
$599/$654

I am already seeing the hurry-up at work this early spring. Are you?

Today and tomorrow, I am answering Lance’s request for data on what hurry-up houses are fetching, compared to their asking prices.

Today, I am posting some towns that are not known for their bidding wars: Natick, Medford, Watertown, Waltham and Somerville. These are all hurry-ups during the fall and winter seasons which stuck and closed. Data from MLS for the past 6 months for all single family homes with 5 or fewer days on the market.

Asking price // sale price
$99/$78
$139/$172
$199,9/$199,9
$230/$220
$298,9/$298,9
$299/$299
$300/$275
$324,9/$324,9
$339,9/$327
$355/$375
$359,9/$350
$359/$349
$359/$352
$369/$369
$375/$375
$378/$375
$379/$382
$384,9/$380
$389,9/$392
$398,750/$400
$399/$411
$399,9/$385