"Most of my buyers are averaging four offers before they have one accepted," my new real estate agent in the Bay Area said yesterday. "It can be an emotional and stressful time."

Probably! And especially if you're moving from a still-depressed housing market, which is roughly the area between the Eastern Seaboard and San Francisco. But, as NPR is reporting as I type these words, the American housing market (in the coastal elite cities) is "fast changing." From causing the collapse of the Earth's economy just five years ago to a breezy NPR feature about an insane couple putting in offers at 2 a.m. after driving by a new [...]

Armed with a thermal map produced by a flyover in March, Christine Lyons, chief planning enforcer of the London borough of Newham, is searching for unlawful “sheds with beds,” as the borough council calls them. There are as many as 10,000 outbuildings where people may live illegally in the 14-square- mile East End district, she says. Raids have found as many as four people sleeping in a single backyard shed and sharing a filthy shower and toilet that aren’t always properly connected to the sewage system.

—Nothing like a ten-billion-dollar sporting event next door to make you feel bad about your poors.

I'm not quite sure what the Times means by "personal liability mortgages" in their fascinating story today on the insanity of foreclosures in Spain, because that phrase doesn't really exist in English. But, yow, I did have no idea that repossession wasn't the end of owing money on loans and mortgages, and that mortgage debt was excluded from bankruptcies in Spain. Maybe there are actually ways in which the U.S. looks out for individuals that is better for people than they way it is done in Europe! Huh. Still, it is hilarious to look back at this BusinessWeek article from 2007, which declares Europe's mortgage and housing and [...]

Recently I went to visit an acquaintance who was trashing out his own condo. There were hinges to be pried out of doorways and appliances to take for eBay. The house had become inert, a non-house: trapped somewhere between the building's association who wanted the fees owed to pay for the building's roof and walls and the like, the people who wanted the property taxes to pay for things like schools and street lights and roads and the people who were in charge of collecting (or more likely not collecting) the mortgage for whomever actually owned the mortgage debt (at the end of that chain, quite possibly you [...]

It's hard to get a sense of what's going on in America with foreclosure filings, the number of homes being foreclosed on and the actual number of houses being taken back by banks. The newspapers are confusing! Are they "down"? Are they "up"? So we dug up the actual numbers for each year since 2005, up to the projected numbers for 2010. A "foreclosure filing" can be a number of things, including notice of default, auction or seizure-which is why the actual number of houses receiving these notices is a useful number to know.

I wanted a little bit more reasoning and example on this "THE WAY WE LIVE NOW" piece from this upcoming New York Times mag, which says that people should abandon their underwater mortgages (true!). He writes: "Mortgage holders do sign a promissory note, which is a promise to pay. But the contract explicitly details the penalty for nonpayment – surrender of the property. The borrower isn't escaping the consequences; he is suffering them." Sure! There is of course often the complication that then, you know, people have to find somewhere else to live.

The recession has come to this already: shared rooms, with bunkbeds, available in New York City's lovely Greenpoint. They are called "guesthouses." They cost $225 a week for "nonstudents." They are essentially illegal hostels in failed condo buildings. This is neat. It is sort of like being on one of those be-a-model reality shows: bad housing, scabies, awful roommates.

"The cheapest unit is a 1,128-square-foot two bedroom listed for $1,105,000." The "Sackett Union" condos, with a view down Court St. into the world's most awful "German" restaurant, are currently 47% sold.

Oh yes: this is the story that has it all, baby: Four Loko, insurance scams, foreclosures, a retired ladies detective club, RICO complaints, fake absentee ballots, the FBI, Las Vegas, offshore bank accounts and actual broken kneecaps. Stick with it, it gets crazier and crazier.

Your datapoint of the day: 51% of Americans would live with a ghost as long as rent were free, while 27% would share space with a spectre for a 50% reduction in rent. No word on how many people are willing to split the bill with werewolves and vampires, but I'm sure USA Today will get to that soon enough. [Via]

In looking at the recent wild estimate that there are 667,200 "millionaires" in New York City-supposedly up nearly 20% from 2008-it's important to pull back and look at what makes someone a millionaire on paper. The number one marker in New York City of this semi-mythical, marvelous status is home ownership.

When Matt Bai, a Times reporter and Yankees fan in his early 40s with two children, wanted to buy a new house, the mortgage brokers laughed at him! But he had perfect credit, and had only bought his last home six years ago! (It was a "center-hall colonial on a corner lot three blocks from the subway and American University.") Then he found out that his nanny had a very bad mortgage on her house, the payments of which were 75% of her income. And so he bought a new house, a "spacious, if deteriorated split-level," even though the counter tops were ugly, with a nice, 30-year, [...]

So, the recession is over because people are "snapping up" homes, as well all know. (I mean, I SNAPPED UP two myself! Didn't you?) According to mutual-fund-haver and sometime financial columnist Whitney Tilson, graphing the national Case-Shiller Home Price Index has recent trends that show "the start of the seasonal downturn that will take house prices down another 10%-15% by the middle of next year." (The Case-Shiller, which is basically a measure of the price that the same house is sold for over time, showed a long and then fast upturn from the late 90s to 2006, followed by a slight and then dramatic drop-off. Unsurprising!) But that [...]

Some people like to go on about how New York City is "anti-development," due to zoning and slow change, and that that's what's making the housing market bonkers this year. That's not really true, though I appreciate the frustrations of trying to develop in the City, which are endless. What made New York real estate crazy in the last year, and along the way shoved the rental vacancy rate well below 1%, was a combination of basically negligible interest rates for residential buyers (who then bought up literally everything in Brooklyn) and a bunch of development plans that went bust or at least stalled during the recession, because buildings are [...]

Bank of America is paying just $20 million for having foreclosed improperly on 160 active-duty military service personnel. (This, of course, was frequent predatory lender suit-settler Countrywide in action; Bank of America purchased Countrywide in January, 2008, for $4.1 billion in stock, and has paid for it more and more ever since, including the former CEO's SEC settlements.) But $20 million! That's nothing, in the grand scheme of the forthcoming housing disaster. For one thing, there are about half as many foreclosed houses being sold now as there were two years go: at this new pace, "it would take exactly three years to clear the [...]

1. Probably not, seeing as the people who own the houses are retaining titles left and right because apparently few financial institutions can actually follow the foreclosure guidelines. Bad news for Nevada, Arizona and California, where about half of home sales are of foreclosed houses.

2. Also you probably should not buy a foreclosed house if you already have one that you're living in and the marshals are banging at the door. (You should, however, get a lawyer!)

As the data has suggested for some time, we're doing well with our plan to put a million people out of their homes this year. "One of every 78 U.S. housing units, or 1.28% of the total, was subject to at least one foreclosure filing in the first six months of the year. That's a total of 1.65 million properties." By the way, how correlated are unemployment and foreclosure rates? Math explains: quite.

Jay-Z has been dipping his toes in the political waters of late. First, he and Beyonce showed up at the White House (which was stellar). Then, he surfaced as entrenched in an imbroglio (not so stellar) with the New York Guv, a potential Queens "racino," and Rev. Floyd Flake, the borough's behemoth ex-Congressman-cum-powerbroker. Then the governor, even while busy swimming in a flood of scandal, killed the deal. And yesterday, Jay-Z appeared standing shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of New York politicos and dignitaries to take a big step towards building his dream: a stadium for the Brooklyn Nets. And lots of people are peeved about it. [...]