Sales of Seattle office building suggests market pickup

Wall Street Journal - Maura Webber Sandovi - Investors priced out of trophy office properties in New York and Washington, D.C. are now often looking for top-tier buildings in cities like Seattle and Houston. One recent deal that drove home that point: the sale of the Russell Investments Center in Se...

House of the Day: Stone on Stone in California

Wall Street Journal - Stefanos Chen - Stone on Stone in California - Situated on 8.75 acres of craggy mountain terrain, this roughly 4,000-square-foot home in Ramona, Calif., was built on -- and built with -- solid rock.

CoreLogic: 69,000 completed foreclosures in March 2012

Calcualted Risk - From CoreLogic: CoreLogic® Reports 69,000 Completed Foreclosures Nationally in March CoreLogic ... today released its National Foreclosure Report for March, which provides monthly data on completed foreclosures, foreclosure inventory and 90+ day delinquency rates. There were...

Federal Reserve: Banks to increase real estate loan exposure

HousingWire - Justin T. Hilley - Borrower demand for prime residential mortgages is strengthening, causing some banks to anticipate increasing their exposure to such loans over the next year.The Federal Reserve Board’s April survey of senior loan officers showed standards on prime residential mort...

Foreclosure activity returns in majority of US markets

CNBC - Diana Olick - Big jumps in foreclosure activity in cities like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, New York and Raleigh pushed the national numbers higher in the first three months of this year, according to a new report from RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure sales and data company. A majority of U.S. ...

Manufacturing Employment in the US

The Big Picture - Global Macro Monitor - Here’s an interesting data series we thought you might enlightening.Note the peak in manufacturing jobs in June 1977, which represented 22 percent of all nonfarm payrolls, to less than 9 percent of total employment today. It’s too earlier to claim vict...

Denver rent hits 10-year high

HousingWire - Kerri Panchuk - Apartment rental rates in the greater Denver area shot up to a 10-year high in the first quarter as the region faced growing demand for a limited supply of rentals. Monthly rents in the area soared 4.5% between the first quarter of 2011 and the most recent 1Q period, a...

The first time mortgage-backed securities failed

Bloomberg - Louis Hyman - During World War I, as cities pulled every young man who wasn't a doughboy into their factories, the U.S. became an urban nation.After the war, there was a sharp and short depression in 1920 from which the cities quickly recovered, but rural America did not. That year, the ...

ISM Manufacturing index indicates faster expansion in April

Calculated Risk - PMI was at 54.8% in April, up from 53.4% in March. The employment index was at 57.3%, up from 56.1%, and new orders index was at 58.2%, up from 54.5%.

Fed officials: No more easing

Reuters - Ann Saphir - Two top Federal Reserve officials - one with a dovish, employment-focused bent, and the other a self-avowed inflation hawk - on Monday both said they see no need for the central bank to ease monetary policy any further. But the comments, from San Francisco Fed President J...