Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate

The guidelines for this carnival. Please note that they have been amended to give future hosts the explicit right to reject overtly commercial entries and obvious link fishing, spam or otherwise

As always, I arranged the entries that met guidelines into three levels, based upon originality, usefulness to the consumer, and how much thought and effort and research went into an entry. This is the first time in quite a while I've had three entries in the "Highly Recommended" level, and we did get one at the end that was good for a little bit of humor.

It was a close call between the two eligible entries, but I have to give the Host's Choice for Most Useful Information award to Stewart Hsu, who gives us an excellent article directed at investors on the cap rate. Consumers invest also!

Silicon Valley Blogger over at Digerati Life gives us an excellent article on Split Real Estate Markets: Which Homes Are Holding Up In Value?. Property values have nothing to do with what the "average person" can afford. How many people make enough to afford a given property is far more important, and the wealthy didn't go for Negative Amortization Loans and risky subprime.

Your host submits The Doctrine of Delaying The Moment Of Truth, discussing the dichotomy between how consumers should want to treat proper disclosure, and how they do, and how it hurts them.

There were no second category ("Above Average") articles this time, but Tradeline Solutions with 3 Reasons Why I Can't Cry For Countrywide would have made it if they hadn't started directly pitching their services towards the end.

The rest of the "met guidelines" entries:

Green Rising says the St Louis MLS is starting to incorporate information on the environmental sensitivity of a project.

From the UK, Mortgage Blog has a basic article on How To Sell Your House for a Higher Price

The Truth About Mortgage sends us a basic handwaving article about What Causes Mortgage Interest Rates to Move?

Finally, to top it all off, a bit of humor:

One of the pastimes of the real estate community is kind of like something fishermen do: tell stories. But instead of the one that got away, we tell stories about the horrible things we've encountered and the "What were they thinking?" moments. These are always good for a little bit of humor, at least in retrospect. Bigger Pockets has one of the better ones of this genre.

Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate will return in two weeks, here at Searchlight Crusade, unless someone else wants to host. Deadline for submissions will be December 17th.