I was at lunch the other day with an executive from one of Saint Louis’s largest publicly held corporations who recently relocated to Saint Louis.  We were talking about the economy and how much the landscape has changed in so many different industries.  I knew he was eventually going to get around to real estate because that [...]

The treasury will be borrowing about $102 billion worth of 2 yr, 5 yr and 7 yr notes or roughly $2 billion less than it borrowed last month.  July existing home sales are due out and are expected to be down roughly 13% while new homes sales are actually expected to have increased 3%.  Existing [...]

Recently I began helping a first time homebuyer find a condo in St. Charles. He was ready to move out of the downtown area and make the switch to the suburbs. While the house hunt started out normal, it took a complete 180 when I got a phone call from him that would change the [...]

The first rule of real estate used to be the 3 L’s….Location, Location, and Location.  In a declining market such as this we might think about dumping this old phrase and adopting a new first rule comprised of 3 new L’s.  In my opinion these would be Listen, Learn, and Let Go.
Listen to the economic [...]

At the Federal Open Market Committee Meeting last week, the Fed came about as close as it could to assessing the near future of the nation’s economy as declining by stating “The pace of recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.”  During the meeting, the Fed indicated [...]

More bad news came for the economy last week.  131K jobs were lost in the month of July even as private jobs showed an increase of 71K.  If that pace holds, it could take as long as seven years just to get back the 8.5 mil jobs that have already been lost.  Weekly jobless claims [...]

A lot of people in St. Louis have become real estate investors…a lot of them not by choice.  Don’t mistake this as a bad thing.
With the current conditions of the real estate market people have been able to purchase high end properties that they may not have been able to afford in a steady market. [...]

The markets have quite a bit of data to digest this week, headlined by the July employment report that is due to be released on Friday.  Early numbers indicate that we can expect a decrease of 87,000 jobs mainly census related and the annual auto manufacturing layoffs caused by the changing of model years.  The [...]

Uncertainty about the pace of the economic recovery pushed mortgage rates down to another record low this week. The economic outlook is for slower than normal economic growth with low inflation, which is favorable for mortgage rates. The risks of a “double dip” recession and deflation also increase demand for relatively safer investments such as [...]