Given current market conditions, for most first-time buyers the prospect of buying a home may still seem a distant dream. But despite the credit crunch, aspiring homeowners are still managing to get on the property ladder.
In the past, the government’s shared ownership schemes have been fairly strict with their eligibility criteria, mainly offering affordable homes [...]
Given the unprecedented rise in the cost of fuel, home care agencies are struggling to provide services to Medicaid and Medicare home care patients in rural hard-to-serve areas. Home care agencies are finding it difficult to pay workers for the increased cost of fuel needed to visit rural patients, and some workers are leaving for [...]
Last Monday The Wall Street Journal kicked off a debate on how best to allocate scarce resources to solve the world’s problems. Bjorn Lomborg offered a summary of the latest findings from his Copenhagen Consensus project, where he has enlisted some of the world’s top economists to address the issue. Over the next few Mondays [...]
United States stocks dropped last week, resuming a two-month slump, after home sales fell more than economists forecast and bond investor Bill Gross predicted 1 trillion U.S. dollars of losses for banks and brokerages.
All of the 23 developed nations in the MSCI World Index except for Canada have experienced bear-market plunges of 20 percent or [...]
Queensland has recorded the largest fall in new home sales across the country in June, according to the latest Housing Industry Association report.
The New Homes Sales Report showed sales across that nation increased moderately in June but were effectively flat over the first half of 2008.
“Australia is seeing strong demand for housing fuelled by record [...]
A man, beaten bloody in his home while robbers took his computer and cell phone; a gun held to a small child’s head during another robbery; a woman tied up with T-shirts in her own apartment before being robbed.
The descriptions sound like scenes from a TV crime drama, but they are from police reports documenting [...]
On Friday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over IndyMac, the Pasadena, Calif., company that ran out of funding to sustain its large mortgage business. Of its $31 billion of liabilities, about a third were loans from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and $19 billion were deposits an unusually low percentage of [...]
Governors from across New England, warning that some families may have to choose between food or warmth this winter, called for a sharp boost in federal home heating aid.
The governors, meeting in Boston on Wednesday, said they are sending letters to President Bush, the presidential candidates, U.S. House and Senate leaders and their congressional delegations [...]
An economist might deem the opportunity cost of building versus buying a house right now to be unacceptably high. And judging from emails I have received, so do some of my readers.
With the U.S. in a housing slump there’s an ever growing array of homes for sale at lower prices. Meanwhile, prices for supplies like [...]
FEDERAL Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek has given the thumbs down to tax breaks on loans for first home-buyers.
Aussie Home Loans boss John Symond has said the measure would help ease the housing affordability crisis.
But Ms Plibersek said it wasn’t the fairest way of helping first home buyers.
What needed to be done was to make sure [...]