Category: Economy

Consider Minneapolis, Minn.  You could’ve bought, out of foreclosure, a three-bedroom, two-bath house of 1,356 square feet on a quarter acre lot for about $29,000. It needed a lot of work, but houses in the neighborhood recently sold for $75,000. …Read more  »

Investors are buying homes at a more rapid pace than ever before, and this time their investments actually make sense.  Most are buying homes below replacement cost, or at prices that allow for a reasonable rental return. Across the 167 …Read more  »

Why has this economic recovery been so sluggish? In a normal recovery, job growth would be accelerating at this point, rather than dragging along at the same modest level month after month. One culprit, off course, is the housing boom …Read more  »

One crisp fall Sunday afternoon under bright blue skies, my wife and I visited five homes up for sale. We remembered them by their street names: Big Acre, Blue Silo, Pontiac, Prairie Rose and Lamont. The lineup has a poetic …Read more  »

The Federal Reserve was supposed to protect the value of the U.S. dollar – at least that’s how it was originally sold to the public. We still don’t know why the dollar needed “protection”. It was solid for the longest …Read more  »

Real estate prices, as with most financial markets, tend to follow a pattern. For the purpose of this article, we'll call this pattern "The Real Estate Cycle." There are many theories out there about The Real Estate Cycle, but the …Read more  »

The Wall Street Journal this week said, Grim Job Report Sinks Markets. The bold headline suggests an economy in retreat. After all, it's an election year. But the May job numbers look like more of the same moderate growth we've been …Read more  »

In Why are Billionaires Buffett and Trump Bullish on Real Estate Right Now? part 1, we stated that the Federal Reserve is committed to stable, steady long-term inflation. But what about all this talk of hyper-inflation? There are some doom-and-gloomers …Read more  »

When we interviewed Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago, he told us that NOW is a great time to get into real estate - and he specifically pointed to houses. Fellow billionaire, Warren Buffett, appeared on CNBC a couple …Read more  »