home values

The year-end housing news is sobering: U.S. homes are expected to lose more than $681 billion in value in 2011. But there's an upside: That's 35% less than the $1.1 trillion lost in 2010, according to research from Zillow.

It's one thing to use Photoshop to make your waistline look slimmer in your snapshots. Many people also take a distorted view of their finances, fooling themselves about the health of their balance sheets. Here are some common self-deceptions.

If you're looking to score a great deal on a house, you may want to wait a bit longer: U.S. home prices dropped 3% in the first quarter, their sharpest quarter-over-quarter decline since late 2008, according to real estate tracking service Zillow, which now says prices won't begin to rebound until at least 2012.

U.S. homes will lose a total of $1.7 trillion in value in 2010, according to real estate site Zillow.com. The value lost this year will be 63% more than in 2009, and will take the total value lost since June 2006 to more than $9 trillion, Zillow said on its blog. "Since the peak of home values...

Despite falling real estate prices, houses still cost almost twice as much as they did in 1975 when you adjust for inflation. Relative to average income, they're 40% higher. By many measures, houses are still unaffordable, which helps explain the current 15% vacancy rate.

How much is the White House worth? Online real estate database Zillow came up with $292,386,000 as of Jan. 18, that is down $15 million since the Obama family took up residence a year ago, and down another $24 million since George W. Bush's final year in office.

No question. We are in the age of the app. One newspaper columnist a few months ago even decided that smartphones such as the iPhone ought to really be called App Phones.

Zillow, the real estate home-price research company, says the value of residential real estate ended its sickening drop in 2009. The firm's chief economist writes: "Total home values in the United States fell $489 billion in the first 11 months of 2009. A large drop, to be sure, but it marks a...

The percentage of Americans owning homes that are under water is falling, according to Zillow's third-quarter Real Estate Market Reports, which focus on 156 metropolitan areas. The other good news is that home values were relatively flat between the second and third quarters, so the price declines...

A September survey by insurance company Sun Life showed that two-thirds of American workers expect to labor a year longer than originally planned. The figure is up 11 percent from the same survey conducted in January. "There is a huge drop in confidence that has taken place," because of the fall of...