News

April 2013 marks the 45th anniversary of the 1968 landmark Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Act prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or handicap. Every April, REALTORS® celebrate Fair Housing Month to reaffirm their continuing commitment to fair and equitable treatment and a professional level of service for all in their search for real property.

Add to the never-ending List of Things That Caused the Housing Market Collapse: zoning. Specifically, zoning for too many large, expensive, single-family homes.

That kind of policy, according to a paper in the journal Housing Policy Debate, left people who wanted to live in an area with a choice of either living elsewhere or being lured by the promise of low/no payments and the idea that they could refinance when their ARMs reset.

Naturally, they chose the latter, and the data show the result: Communities zoned for those larger homes were much more likely to see foreclosures. (And that, of course, drove down property values, making it harder for people there to refinance..)

Since November 2012, an arsonist has been plaguing the Eastern Shore, setting more than 70 fires in abandoned and unoccupied buildings.

He (or they) have eluded police and are driving the local volunteer firefighters nuts — these are folks with day jobs and are often out all night fighting fires.

An Onancock Realtor is saying thank you — and while raising some awareness (and money) by selling T-shirts.

A new CoreLogic report says that “shadow inventory” (homes in the foreclosure process that will presumably enter the market soon) is down — in January it was 18 percent lower than a year ago. And it’s continuing to drop.

For a while, there was much being made about shadow inventory and how it was going to flood the market, lower prices, and stall the recovery. (We argued against that a-plenty, but there were still a good number of pundits who spread the fear.)