Once again, the historical home on the edge of Zephyr Park couldn’t find a new owner. Now its fate is unclear.

When the online bidding on the 1,665-square-foot wooden-frame home ended Friday afternoon, not a single bid had been made — even though the starting bid was only $500.

Full story is available on Tampa Bay Times

It’s that time of year — when blooming perennials make room for the springtime burst of “home for sale” signs.

Or is it?

Statistics from the Omaha Area Board of Realtors show that yard signs aren’t popping up like they used to. The number of area homes on the market is down compared with years past. March’s inventory was 17 percent below what it was a year earlier, and lower than it has been in any March since 2005.

Full story is available on Omaha.com

They are the backbone of a cottage industry thriving in the collapse of the housing market: independent contractors who can supply their own lawn mower, truck, weed whacker, tools, laptop, high-speed Internet access, cellphone, digital camera, generator and tape measure.

People willing to cut knee-high grass, haul trash from yards, change locks, hammer plywood over windows and pools — and, at times, clean foul-smelling refrigerators and toilets — are being sought by so-called “property preservation” companies hired by banks or real estate agents to tend to vacant foreclosed homes.

Full story is available on Sun-Sentinel

According to RealtyTrac, national short sale volume increased by 33% in January 2012 as compared to January 2011. Like it or not, short sales are a driving force in the real estate and housing finance industries, but the slower-than-mud time it takes for getting required approvals for closing a short sale causes buyers and sellers to walk away from homes burdened by loan amounts exceeding their value.

Full story is available on The Mortgage Reports

Fake Craigslist online classified ads that aim to scam prospective renters are nothing new. Craigslist’s website even warns prospective renters against scams by recommending they always work with local landlords and never submit a rental deposit without looking inside a rental, for example.

But a recent crop of scams that advertise inexpensive rentals pose a new danger to anyone looking for housing in Corvallis’ tight rental market.

Housing and jobs: these are the two keys to the economic recovery really taking off, and while we’ve gotten some positive news on the jobs front recently, real estate prices have more or less continued to decline steadily since their peak in 2007. Housing represents a huge portion of yearly GDP, but more than that it is most consumers main source of wealth. If home prices are rising, so are American’s net worth, and increased wealth will usually lead to increased confidence and spending.

No wonder, then, that the media and economy watchers have been so concerned with tumbling home values. Many have been eager for house prices nationally to reach a point at which they stabilize and start to creep back up. The information superhighway is littered with the corpses of pundits who have erroneously called the “bottom” of the real estate market, but hope springs eternal. This week produced two reports which have analysts optimistic that we’ve reached that point.

Full story is available on TIME

Today the Journal writes about a surprising phenomenon happening in a growing number of neighborhoods across the country: the return of competitive bids for houses.

As we wrote last week, inventory has fallen sharply in many markets—and in that way, they reflect more a sign of the trauma that has been inflicted on housing markets coast to coast.

Full story is available on The Wall Street Journal

THE boom in housing in the middle of the last decade created a huge oversupply of homes in the United States. But now that oversupply appears to be close to vanishing, at least in most parts of the country.

That reduction of supply does not in itself guarantee a revival for the depressed homebuilding industry, but it does remove one obstacle.

Full story is available on The New York Times

For four straight years, there has essentially been one question on the minds of everyone remotely connected to the real estate industry.

Have we reached the bottom?

Full story is available on Rockford Register Star

For sale, for rent, price reduced, by owner. You probably see signs like this every day as the housing market continues to struggle.

First Thomasville Realty owner Mills Herndon says the foreclosure problem is getting worse in our area. “Probably last year if you would go back and ask me, I would say that it was not driving our market but it was impacting our market. It’s impacting our market more and more every month because we’re having more and more foreclosures.”

Full story is available on walb.com