If you’re trying to sell a home in Boston, Revere or Chelsea, you’re more likely to be competing with foreclosed or other types of distressed properties.

 Suffolk County ranks #1 In terms of density of distressed residential properties – meaning homes that have been foreclosed or where a petition to foreclose has been filed or an auction scheduled.

 Almost 3 percent of the properties in Suffolk County are distressed, according to data from The Warren Group. Plymouth County comes in second with 2.5 percent of its properties in distress. Two to three residential properties out of every 100 in those counties are in the foreclosure process.

 Home sellers in Nantucket, Berkshire and Hampshire counties, on the other hand, don’t have to worry so much about foreclosed properties. In those counties, there is less than one distressed property for every 100 properties.

 Here’s a closer look at The Warren Group numbers:

When the National Association of Realtors reported last week that home sales rose in June — the third consecutive month that sales increased — the media gobbled the news up. Some news reports even attributed the Dow Jones gains to the rosy Realtor report.

But here’s what a lot of the stories missed: sales typically rise month-to-month from April to June. As the weather warms up, more sales transactions occur. The closer it gets to summer, the more closings you see. The NAR report mentioned that June sales were up 0.2 percent higher than last June – which means that sales were essentially flat. Even in Massachusetts, month-to-month sales have climbed from April to June every year since at least 2002, according to The Warren Group.  Tomorrow, The Warren Group will release its June housing report for Massachusetts, and yes, single-family home sales were up from May but they’re still below year-ago levels.  And the number of sales for the month were way below what the state experienced in the late 1990s when over 7,000 home sales were recorded in June.

It seems like just yesterday homeowners were eagerly lining up to secure home equity loans to transform their tiny drab 1970s kitchens into gleaming chef’s paradises or their yellow-tiled baths into spa-like retreats.
Not so anymore. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that spending on home improvement projects will continue to decline through 2009 and the beginning of next year.
Property owners spent $118.2 billion on remodeling and improvement projects in the first quarter, down from $133 billion in the first quarter of 2008.
“Weak home prices and decreased cost recovery for most types of remodeling projects … discourage owners from pursuing typical upper-end improvements,” Kermit Baker, director of the center’s Remodeling Futures Program, said in a statement.
Has America’s love affair with home makeovers ended? If so, you wouldn’t be able to tell from watching all of those HGTV shows.
Harvard’s researchers say low financing costs for remodeling projects and improving home sales in some markets are positive developments for the remodeling industry.
But I’m betting that people with little or no job security aren’t going to have much of an appetite for spending big bucks on state-of-the-art media rooms and fancy outdoor kitchens for fun entertaining.

Gov. Deval Patrick’s hometown has made Money Magazine’s top 10 “Best Places to Live”.

Milton came in fifth on the list, right after Middleton, Wis. The magazine noted Milton’s historic homes, tree-lined streets, parks, playgrounds and well-tended gardens. It also mentioned the town’s low crime, good schools and short commutes to Boston and other cities.

Milton also made the mag’s list of “Best Places for the Rich and Single”, coming in at 18. (Easton and Belmont were also featured on that particular list.)

One other thing that makes Milton pretty attractive: home values have increased over the last two years unlike most other communities in Massachusetts.

The median price for homes sold in Milton from January through May reached $468,500 – 6.2 percent higher than the same months in 2008 and 4.1 percent higher than 2007, according to The Warren Group.

So let me get this right. Congressman Barney Frank is now proposing to give loans to unemployed homeowners who are having trouble keeping up with mortgage payments.

 Really? The solution to helping people who can’t afford their home loans because they don’t have jobs is to give them another loan, pushing them further into debt? Maybe I’m missing something here but how is that a solution?

 And why didn’t Frank and his colleagues think up that idea BEFORE they decided to dole out billions of dollars in federal aid to banks and other companies?

 Frank wants to pay for his plan by using dividends that the government is supposed to be getting from companies that received the $700 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Hmmm. Weren’t those dividends supposed to offset some of the losses from that bailout?

Here’s one study that is likely to get a lot of attention: The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reports in a new paper that lenders aren’t modifying many loans for homeowners at risk of foreclosure because it’s not profitable for them.

 Surprising? It is if you believe many of the experts and homeowner advocates who have been saying that foreclosing on a property is much more costly and time-consuming for a lender than renegotiating a loan.

 But what I find more startling is this tidbit tucked in the paper’s conclusion: 30 to 45 percent of borrowers who had loans modified end up falling behind on their loans again within six months.

 “For this group, the lender has simply postponed foreclosure, and, if the housing market continues to decline, the lender will recover even less in foreclosure in the future,” the Fed researchers write.

 That’s a risk that most lenders aren’t going to be eager to take.