Everybody's got to live somewhere. And – as the world now acutely knows – its usually better to do business in person as well.
In this section, you'll find our real estate posts, research, and calculators. And remember: location, location, location.
We found historical homeownership rates buried in a digitized Census Bureau report from the 1970s indexed and searchable at the University of Minnesota. We've reproduced the additional data points in the chart and table. You can find the quarter to quarter homeownership data from the Census Bureau at the St. Louis Fed's FRED economic indicator […]
In this article, we present a Real Estate Return Calculator, for quickly estimating the return on a house in many areas in the United States. We guess the median values and actual returns for any of 356 American Metropolitan Statistical Areas in an attempt to tell all of our American readers how well their homes […]
Below, I provide and graph historical monthly median single-family home values in the United States. Importantly, this data is non-seasonally adjusted and based on sales of existing homes. The data includes home prices from January 1953 until June 2020. There is a historical home price series using nominal prices and one adjusted for inflation. Historical Median Home Value I needed […]
Previously, we talked about the historical homeownership rate in the United States, with data back to the 1890s. Today, we'll discuss the 30 year mortgage's history and other innovations leading to the United States housing market's current status. Even though we don't have the resolution to discuss every mortgage innovation, we can still point to […]
How much does noise affect real estate prices? Ever wonder how much better a house would be if it wasn't near a highway or main street? One web site linked a study measuring how loud noise affects real estate values. They looked at how an increase or decrease in average 24 hour day night sound […]
Fundrise offers a low-cost way for you – or anyone – to achieve diversification in real estate in an easy, decently priced, and intuitive way Opening a Fundrise account means low-minimums, easy-to-achieve real estate diversification and a great customer service experience. Unlike other platforms it has no requirements that you are an accredited investor - […]
So, you've heard a lot about the booming real estate markets in many American cities. However, have you ever calculated if you can afford a house in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. on your current income and with your current debts? Have no fear […]
Editor: This article was first written in 2013. The dollar amounts have changed but the relative location discussion holds. When our friend SSS from Save. Spend. Splurge. asked us if we were interested in shining a spotlight on value-for-your-housing-buck in the Bay Area of California and explore where a newcomer to the Bay Area should […]
We've got a treat for you today - a spiffy graph we created with Google Drive (née Documents). Thanks to comments from fellow Burbed commenter SEA on this article, we decided to take another look at the relationship between mortgage rates and home prices. Thought we did it once before? Not quite - we had […]
About a month ago, my colleague Cameron penned an article about the Mortgage Interest Deduction - namely, whether it is a good idea or not. For an itemizing taxpayer in the 25% bracket, he pointed out, "The bank receives 4.0% interest, the homeowner pays 3.0% and the taxpayer is left footing the 1.0% difference." Right - and the bank ends up pocketing the subsidy.
