Salt Lake City Real Estate Blog

Home foreclosures were up 4 basis points from the same time last year. While this is obviously not good news it does need to be put in perspective. Foreclosure rates actually fell in 24 states, and the overall foreclosure rate is still below the 10 year average.

All in all the increase in foreclosures is being driven by just a few states. Florida, Nevada, California and Arizona have seen large increases in foreclosures largely driven by speculators who are seeing home prices stagnate and their ARM rates increase and so they are walking away from the loan.

The other problem states are Ohio, Indiana and Michigan who combined account for nearly 20% of all loans in foreclosure. The problems in these states are due to job losses in the manufacturing sector.

OK so I recently purchased a new PC with Windows Vista. I loaded all my old software onto the PC and most things seemed to work OK except for Top Producer 7i. No panic, Top Producer was always a pain to get up and running so I followed the suggestions in the help docs just like I have done in the past for XP machines. Still did not work. Last resort, I phoned tech support. They took me through a completely different set to options to change from those needed for XP and guess what it now works.

So to sum up Top Producer does work in Vista but you will need to call tech support to get it up and running.

Oh and just one more thing, my Windows Sidebar seems to have now stopped working. Now I wonder if one of the options I had to change for Top Producer caused this to stop working. Guess I need to do a bit more digging.

Experts are predicting that the slow housing market will continue through the end of the year and well into next year. Fueled by the subprime problem the number of foreclosures are not expected to peak until next year which will put further pressure on the U.S. real estate market. 

The market in Salt Lake is still very healthy at the low end (under $200) but is slower than last year when you get above that level.

Everyone knows about the subprime issue with the market but I believe another problem will start and rear its ugly head. People living beyond their means. This is where people have been living on the equity within their home, every time they need more money they just cash out more of the equity. But what happens when prices don’t go up? All of a sudden that ready made cash is no longer available, but they still have the same level of expenditure.  They could sell their home and downsize in order to cut their bills, but wait their home is already mortgaged to the max and prices have now gone down so they owe more than it is worth. If they cannot cut their bills then the only option is to foreclose!