Charleston Real Estate Blog

It goes without saying that if you want to buy a home, you need a good job. And there is good news on the unemployment front in both the Charleston metropolitan area and the state of South Carolina. The Post and Courier reports that unemployment fell to single digits in the state for the first time in a while. But like real estate is local, so ...

The administration is to announce a turbo-charged HARP (Home Affordable Refinance Program) today in Nevada, the foreclosure capital of the United States designed to allow underwater homeowners who are current on their mortgage to refinance at lower rates if their loans are owned by either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in a streamlined ...

Helicopter Ben just resurrected a 60's program to twist the yield curve by swapping short term debt with long term securities. I suppose Chubby Checker will once again be popular as a result. Anyway, interest rates on long term treasuries plummeted yesterday as a result with the 10 Year US Treasury (a proxy for mortgage interest rates) ...

I'll skip commenting on whether S&P downgraded US debt as payback for being hauled before Congress after giving AAA ratings to the toxic waste otherwise known as CDO's of mortgage backed securities or whether they may or may not have $2 Trillion dollar mathematical error or whether those rascals in Washington will ever get serious ...

Mortgage rates declined by a quarter point from Friday not so much do to the agreement on raising the debt ceiling but due to slowing economic growth. Today's "surprise" report that consumer spending declined in June won't do much to raise rates either because basically, bad economic news is good news for mortgage rates. So ...

With just a few days before the debt ceiling "crisis" deadline, Charleston mortgage rates are basically unchanged from previous quotes. But the stock market is down due to both the lack of progress on the debt ceiling and 2Q GDP growth reported to be sluggish. 10 Year US Treasuries are higher which means that interest rates ...

We know that jobs are good for the housing market, you need not look further than the Charleston real estate market which has done very nicely in part due to the many Boeing employees relocating to Charleston to work at the new Boeing 787 assembly facility. From the Houston Chronicle:“The campus is expected to boost demand for housing, ...

Did you ever wonder what happened to all those characters who played such a big role in the mortgage business that took the economy to the brink of collapse, the lenders, the ratings agencies (Moody's and S&P), the Wall Street firms who securitized all the toxic waste and others. Well, it seems that despite "financial reform" by ...

Let's face it. You really can't buy a house if you don't have a job. And if you aren't secure in your current job, you probably shouldn't be buying a house anyway, after all, lenders sort of demand it as a condition of making a loan. The good news from today's March job report is that not only were 222,000 private sector ...

To nobody's surprise (OK, I guess some economists were surprised but that's their job after all), Case-Shiller reported that home prices declined in October and are forecasting a double dip. “The double-dip is almost here,” David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s, said in a statement. ...