Calculated Risk has an interesting post in the wake of today’s Case Shiller numbers, comparing current housing prices with different baselines. It’s a pretty strong reality check: While today’s headline is that February prices were up almost 10 percent over 2012, we’re only worked our way back to 2003 (un-adjusted) or 1999 (inflation-adjusted) housing prices [...]

Everyone knows that good picutre can make or break a listing, and of course perhaps the essential ingredient of a good picture is proper lighting, both indoors and out. There’s nothing like a flickering flourescent bulb to make that lovely basement rec room look like a serial killer’s dungeon, and nothing like a iron-grey sky to make that spacious roof [...]

Martha Coakley may have been early to the party in announcing her disdain for the man last month, but it looks like she’s got company in wanting Federal housing chief Ed DeMarco to hit the tracks.
Several state attorneys general are pushing for DeMarco’s outster, and a coalition of housing advocates is on their side, saying [...]

Gahlord Dewald has a interesting column up at Inman today where he outlines a method whereby — gasp, shock, horror — one could actually put a dollar figure on the value of one’s social network.
The method is a little involved. You’d have to coallate metrics from a number of different services, as well as [...]

Redfin — as is quite often the case — has another interesting post on their corporate blog about real estate data.
Their numbers this month are about the continuing decline in inventory — down 18 percent compared to last year at this time. Everything I’m hearing from brokers and agents is that spring has come [...]

The saga of the benighted OCC foreclosure reviews drags on. Dealbook has a good post about the latest developments — now apparently the banks themselves will be undertaking some sort of review to identify borrowers deserving compensation? This a mere month after they blew up the consultants’ reveiw and inked a new deal promising flat [...]

Trying to figure out whether social media is capable of doing any good to agents’ bottom lines has been a perennial topic of interest for the past several years — maybe because even now, eight years after Facebook’s launch and six years after Twitter’s, the jury is still out. Some agents have successfully made connections [...]

The folks at Zillow are tired of using the giant brains, and even bigger data sets, to analyze asking prices. Now, just in time for Valentine’s day, they’re trying to plot the location of Cupid’s arrows. Or at least what cities are best for singles, if any fish out there is looking to move to a [...]

I’ve been mulling over this interesting article on Inman about the results of the Edina Realty experiment. The Minnesota brokerage caused quite a splash last year when it pulled its listings from Zillow and Trulia, a move that seemed to get a lot of approval from agents and brokers — but few imitators. Inman says  [...]

The Wall Street Journal’s Developments Blog has an interesting post about the major Wall Street investor interest in the residential housing market. Though investment vehicles like REITs are by now a well-established vehicle for investing in commercial real estate, analysts like former Morgan Stanley-r Oliver Chang have been proclaiming for years now that the housing [...]