Real Estate Tax | Real Estate Investing Blog

Posted on: November 26, 2016 Posted by: Real Estate We Blog Comments: 0

Real Estate Tax | Real Estate Investing Blog

Are you religious (or not) and looking for a new way to speed up the process of selling your home? If so, you may want to try what one person did to help sell her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. during this difficult real estate market. She has turned to an unlikely source for help: St. Joseph.

St. Joseph is a Catholic saint who has long been believed to help with home-related matters. And according to lore now spreading on the Internet and among desperate home-sellers, burying St. Joseph in the yard of a home for sale promises a prompt bid. After she and her husband held five open houses, even baking cookies for one of them, she ordered a St. Joseph “real estate kit” online and buried the three-inch white statue in her yard.

These statues are flying off the shelves as an increasing number of skeptics and non-Catholics look for some saintly intervention to help them sell their houses. Talk about desperate measures. You might as well put your house up on eBay and/or Craigslist and see if anyone makes a bid. Regardless, I guess at this point I would try anything and everything to help sell my home.

You can read the entire article on the RealEstateJournal website.

Update: I received an email from the seller and her house has sold! Congrats to her and apparently burying St. Joseph in her yard helped.

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The housing market is just getting worse. Home resales tumbled 8% in September to the lowest levels in this decade, prompting the obvious question: When will it all end?

The honest answer is no one knows. Optimists have been saying for more than a year that the worst is behind us, while the pessimists have been saying recovery is still a year, or years, away.

So far, the pessimists have been right about the weakness in the housing market, but their forecast that the collapse in housing would lead to a general economic malaise has, at least so far, failed to pan out. The economy has slowed, but has not fallen into recession, as consumers and investors adjust to a world in which home prices don’t automatically rise 5% or 10% a year. Read more

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This article posted on the Real Estate Journal today talked about how the real estate slump could continue for a while.

The Mortgage Bankers Association predicts the housing recession will last until the end of the third quarter next year. And if confidence isn’t restored in the credit markets, the wait could extend until 2009, the group’s chief economist said.

In the meantime, the slowdown in housing has become a primary cause in the slowing of the national economy, said Doug Duncan, chief economist of the group.

“Tough times,” he said, after sharing the group’s loan production estimates during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. Tough times indeed.

On Wednesday morning, Duncan is scheduled to deliver the MBA’s economic forecast to its members at the group’s annual convention. The forecast calls for home sales to bottom out in the third quarter of next year and for housing starts to hit their bottom slightly earlier, in the second quarter.

Existing-home sales for 2007 will total 5.72 million units, a 12% decline over 2006 sales, he said. Sales will decline another 10% in 2008, before picking up by 5% in 2009. Read more

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I used to own a house in Santa Teresa which is a neighborhood in San Jose, CA. Ever since I sold my house in 2005 I’ve been watching the market to see if I made the right choice. When I did sell it, I received twelve offers all of which were over asking price. Now looking at some of the current economic real estate data, I’m very glad I sold when I did.

Sales of single-family, re-sale homes fell 10% from July and were off 39% year-over-year. Year-to-date, home sales are off 23.6% in San Jose,CA and are at their lowest level for the past ten years. The median price for homes fell 0.5% from the month before, but is up 6.1% compared to last August. The average price fell 3.2%, up 2.8% year-over-year. Read more

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For the past many years, real estate has provided a hefty return for those who got involved early enough. Real estate has appreciated 12.4% annually between 2001 and 2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. Home Price index. That beats out stock prices, which gained only 4.3% a year as measured by the S&P 500. Read more

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Some of you may have already heard about this but Donald Trump has done it again. He broke ground on a luxury condo hotel resort in North Baja, Mexico and his buildings will be the tallest on the entire Baja.

In fact, the first building, called the Lobby Tower, set a record for the highest single-day residential sales in Mexico at $120 million. While those of you who acted quickly were able to secure units, some of you were shut out, and the least expensive units were, of course, the first to go. Read more

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