By Aglaia Pikounis

Real estate professionals have frequently pushed the idea that owning a home is a good long-term investment. But with housing values plummeting, many people are starting to question whether relying on their homes as investments is really such a good idea.

The Center for Economic Policy Research released a report this week that shows that the housing market downturn, and tanking stock market, have left baby boomers nearing retirement with little or no accumulated wealth.

The co-author of the report said the collapsing housing bubble has destroyed almost $6 trillion dollars in housing wealth for homeowners — Pretty depressing.

But here in Massachusetts, a significant number of homeowners may be better off.

Just about 28 percent of single-family and condo owners in this state don’t even have a mortgage, according to data from The Warren Group. This means that more than 460,000 people who own single-family homes or condos in this state don’t really owe anything on their homes.

I’m guessing that a good portion of these folks are people who’ve owned their homes for a long time and paid off whatever debt was tied to the property. That leaves them in a pretty enviable position, especially in these times when all you hear about are foreclosures, short sales and underwater mortgages.

By Aglaia Pikounis

Optimists hoping 2009 would deliver some better news for the local housing market will have to wait some more.

 The Warren Group is releasing its January home sales and price report tomorrow and it looks like the year is off to a pretty weak start.

Single-family home sales and median prices in Massachusetts were off by double-digit percentages compared to the same month a year earlier.  

And condo prices are also starting to dive after remaining fairly flat for most of 2008 despite huge drops in sales transactions. In the last two months of 2008, the median condo price dropped about 12 to 13 percent compared to a year earlier. In January, the median selling price for condos fell even more sharply.

The million-dollar question: will the housing stimulus plan unveiled last week improve conditions?

By Aglaia Pikounis

The Warren Group released its January foreclosure numbers today and unfortunately, the picture hasn’t changed much.

 The number of foreclosure deeds recorded throughout Massachusetts was up in January compared to a year ago and the previous month. Since October, there has been an average of about 950 foreclosures a month.

 Today’s report comes just a day after President Obama unveiled his multi-billion dollar housing plan to rescue millions of struggling homeowners. Homeowners in places like Worcester, Springfield, Brockton and Lowell – Bay State cities that have had the most foreclosures – are hopefully going to be getting help. Those cities have consistently had the largest numbers of homes lost to foreclosure. In January, that trend continued. Here’s a list of 10 communities with the most foreclosure activity in January:

 Worcester (60), Dorchester (49), Brockton (43), Springfield (43), Lynn (32), Lowell (29), Lawrence (28), Revere (22), New Bedford (20), Randolph (19).

 But there are other communities that have had huge increases in foreclosures, including Malden, Weymouth and Saugus. 

 Malden had 17 foreclosures last month, more than double the number in January 2008. Two years ago during the same month, Malden didn’t have any foreclosures. Saugus had 10 foreclosures, which was more than triple the foreclosures a year earlier. Weymouth had only 1 foreclosure last January but that number jumped to 5 last month.

  It’s only a month’s worth of data, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.

By Aglaia Pikounis

I wouldn’t want to be a seller trying to unload a condo in Worcester right now. Worcester, one of the most recent cities to announce it will have to cut workers and services, was an area that saw a flood of condo proposals and building from optimistic developers in recent years.

 But Worcester’s condo market has suffered some deep losses during this housing downturn. Sales of condos last year totaled only 386 – down about 46 percent from two years ago when condo sales peaked at 711 transactions.

 Condo prices also spiraled downward. The median condo price in Worcester fell 33 percent to $120,000 from $178,900 in 2007.

The city’s price drop was much worse than the statewide price decline, which was a modest 1.8 percent. In contrast, Boston’s condo values actually climbed. The median condo price citywide rose 4 percent to $370,000 in 2008 from $355,750 the year before.  (Condo sales throughout the Hub dropped 19.5 percent in 2008 from a year earlier).

By Aglaia Pikounis

Here’s a surprising real estate factoid that hasn’t been widely reported: While sales of single-family homes and condos in Massachusetts tumbled in 2008, sales of two- and three-family homes jumped 21.5 percent. 

 A total of 6,830 two- and three-unit properties were sold in 2008, up from 5,622 in 2007, according to The Warren Group. That may sound like an impressive gain, but the numbers pale in comparison to the multifamily sales recorded two to three years earlier. In 2006, nearly 9,000 two- and three-family homes were sold.  And in 2005 there were about 73 percent more such transactions (11,866, to be exact).

 One of the factors pushing multifamily home sales up last year was probably foreclosures. About a quarter of last year’s foreclosures were of two- and three-family homes. Another thing that helped move two- and three-family homes off the market: lower prices. The median price for a three-family home in Massachusetts sunk to $200,000 in 2008, or 44 percent lower than 2007.  Meanwhile the median price for a two-family home was $228,000, down 33 percent from a year earlier. By comparison, the median selling price for a Bay State single-family home fell 11.6 percent in 2008.

By Aglaia Pikounis

I caught a report on NBC Nightly News last night highlighting a burgeoning new business: cleaning up vacant foreclosed homes. Apparently, these clean-up companies are springing up all over the country. The report showed crews clearing out books, couches, lamps, blankets and other personal belongings from abandoned homes in Big Bear, California – an area that is being referred to as foreclosure alley. 

All of this got me thinking to what’s happening here in the Bay State. Massachusetts hasn’t had the level of foreclosures that has plagued states like California or Nevada. And a lot of the foreclosures have been concentrated in urban areas like Dorchester, Brockton and Springfield. But it wasn’t Dorchester, Brockton and Springfield that saw the biggest percentage jumps in foreclosures last year.

 Some folks might be surprised to learn that foreclosure activity surged in some smaller communities – like Milford, Marlborough, Methuen and Framingham. In Milford, foreclosure activity more than tripled last year compared to 2007 – jumping to 92 from 28. Framingham, Methuen and Marlborough had more than double the foreclosures in 2008 as the previous year. And it seems in some of these towns, a significant number of condo owners are the ones being evicted. In Framingham, 85 of 189 foreclosures (or 45 percent) were of condo properties. And of the 157 foreclosures in Marlborough, 60 were of condo units.

 Some experts are saying that the worst is over, but sadly, others are predicting that there’s another wave of foreclosures coming.

By Aglaia Pikounis

Maybe it’s just envy, but I always find it kind of interesting to see what’s happening in Massachusetts communities that most average working people, including me, can’t afford to live in – like Weston and Wellesley.

 At a time when most towns and cities were suffering through the housing slump, Wellesley was joining the exclusive million-dollar club: The median home price in the toney town topped $1 million in 2008.  

Wellesley joins Weston, Lincoln, Brookline, Nantucket and three other communities where the median home price was higher than $1 million last year. Some homes were fetching millions of dollars. A 7,789-square-foot Colonial in Wellesley sold for $5.7 million last October. Talk to any real estate agent and they’ll tell you that such desirable communities always fare better during a downturn. I’ll say … In Weston, the median home price jumped 7.5 percent from $1.22 million in 2007 to over $1.3 million in 2008. A mansion on nearly three acres in Weston went for a head-turning $10 million last summer.

Interestingly, one community had to say good-bye to the million-dollar club in 2008. Dover, which reached the $1 million threshold in 2007, saw its price retreat to $998,500 in 2008.