Rob Viglione

    Rob Viglione's Articles

    • Wealth Is Temporary

      The Wall Street Journal published an article called “The Truth About Money” that struck me as extremely relevant for affluent homeowners, and real estate investors.The total income of the top 1%—or those earning more than $343,000 in 2009—fell by more than 30% from 2007, according to the most recent Internal Revenue Service data. By contrast, the average income of the bottom 90% fell less than 3% during the same period.Citing a study by Jonathan A. Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen of Northwestern University they that found that “the beta of the top 1% nearly quadrupled between 1982 and 2007 to 2.39.…

    • If Mortgage Rates Go Up, What Happens To Housing?

      Conventional wisdom maintains that home prices and mortgage rates go hand-in-hand—rates go lower means mortgages are cheaper and there’s higher demand for housing. At first glance this makes perfect sense, but how have real estate prices behaved in the past with respect to mortgage rates?History tells a comforting story: The world doesn’t end when rates go higher:For those of you with bad memories of stats class, please forgive me, but eye-balling a chart doesn’t give the full story. I’ll spare you the regression tables, but suffice it to say that there is a long term positive relationship between interest rates…

    • Will Obamacare Really Effect Real Estate

      The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly known as “Obamacare,” was signed into law last year amidst a good deal of controversy. The Left sees it as the turning point in decades of health care prices skyrocketing, while the Right sees Big Brother taking over all of medicine. What’s not quite as obvious is that “Obamacare” touches real estate. Namely, the bill introduces a new 3.8% tax on “unearned income,” which in the real estate industry means “capital gains.”The new Obamacare tax will add 3.8% to capital gains over $500,000 for married couples, and $250,000 for singles. The good…

    • How The Stock Market Effects Home Prices

      Conventional wisdom holds that stocks and home prices are independent. Tuning into CNBC in the morning to watch the S&P 500 chart wiggle around should have nothing to do with the price of the home in which you’re sitting in pajamas doing the watching. It turns out that if you’re the kind of person who really cares about stocks, your home’s price is probably much more closely linked to those stocks than you think.A common saying is that all real estate is local. That’s how Wall Street was able to package trillions of dollars of Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and sell…

    • Financial Factors In Renting vs. Buying

      Rent vs. Buy. The fundamental housing decision is whether to rent, or to buy. Buying is a big deal; it comes with high upfront and recurring costs, and can lock you down to a specific property for years. Renting, on the other hand, only ties you to a location for as little as one month, or, in most cases, for up to a year with a standard lease, and you are not the one stuck with maintenance bills.Everyone should run through their own specific calculations when choosing between buying one home, or renting another, and here are the major cost…

    • Buy And Hold Makes Sense When Rents Rise

      Markets have a funny way of evening out over time, wiggling up and down to eventually find some sort of equilibrium. One way this happens in real estate is when the tradeoff between renting and buying hits a sweet spot, e.g. when rental rates increase and property values decrease—at some point the scales get tipped one way or another.Most people are familiar with the crazy real estate boom that started in the early 2000’s and crashed late 2007. But the new story that is playing out is the reverse, where home prices are falling and rental rates rising. This is…

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