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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Giordano Bruno who wrote (124436)	5/21/2008 2:37:25 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Where Home Prices Are Holding Up finance.yahoo.com Downtown: It's been among the safest places to hide from the housing downturn. Much has been made of the way the nation's real-estate bust is affecting some American cities far more than others. But even within a single metro area, changes in housing prices can show wild variations. And in big cities, prices in the central cores often fare the best. Far-flung suburbs -- where home building exploded in recent years -- have more typically gotten hammered. In between is a patchwork of established suburbs and city neighborhoods peripheral to downtown that can be all over the map in terms of price declines -- or even increases. Consider the San Francisco Bay area. Overall, prices there slid 17% in the 12 months through February, the most-recent data available, and were down 8% over the first two months of 2008 alone, making it one of the worst-performing metro areas in the country, according to the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices. Yet prices within the city of San Francisco are up 0.3% over the first quarter of 2008, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a San Diego-based real-estate-data firm.

To: Giordano Bruno who wrote (124436)	5/21/2008 2:39:42 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Nothing like an inside probe to find no wrong doing... --- Moody's Begins Probe on Report Bug Caused Aaa Grades (Update2) bloomberg.com May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Moody's Investors Service said it's conducting ``a thorough review'' of whether a computer error was responsible for assigning Aaa ratings to debt securities that later fell in value. Some senior staff at Moody's were aware in early 2007 that constant proportion debt obligations, funds that used borrowed money to bet on credit-default swaps, should have been ranked four levels lower, the Financial Times said, citing internal Moody's documents. Moody's altered some assumptions to avoid having to assign lower grades after it corrected the error, the paper said.