AOL Real Estate - Blog http://realestate.aol.com/blog AOL Real Estate - Blog http://realestate.aol.com/blog/media/feedlogo.gif AOL Real Estate - Blog http://realestate.aol.com/blog en-us Copyright 2013 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/The 10 Best Cities for Educated Workershttp://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/09/13/the-10-best-cities-for-educated-workers/http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/09/13/the-10-best-cities-for-educated-workers/http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/09/13/the-10-best-cities-for-educated-workers/#commentsFiled under:

Brigham Young UniversityThe job market has remained relatively stagnant since 2009. To make matters worse, the educational requirements of the average U.S. employer have increased consistently from 2005 to 2009, recently outpacing the growth of educated labor, a new report shows. This means that the average job now requires a higher level of education than the average worker possesses -- a bad sign for much of America's labor force.

However, there are a number of metropolitan areas in the country that have exceptionally small education gaps, or "shortages of educated workers relative to employer demand," according to the report "Education, Demand, and Unemployment in Metropolitan America" by the Brookings Institution. These areas tend to have a large number of highly educated workers available to meet rising demand.

As a result, these cities often have lower unemployment rates than the national average, which was 9.1 percent as of July 2011. "Highly educated metropolitan areas like Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Indianapolis and Knoxville have avoided very high unemployment rates despite having high concentrations of jobs in industries that were hit hard during the recession," Jonathan Rothwell, one of the report's authors, told 24/7 Wall St. "The reason, in large part, is that the average worker in those areas has enough education to meet the needs of the average job." In cities such as Boston and Madison, which are major educational hubs, a cycle is formed. They produce lots of educated people and provide lots of jobs for educated people.

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There are still some cities with small education gaps that do not have exceptionally low unemployment rates. This is the result of unavoidable economic forces. San Francisco, for instance, was badly damaged when the housing bubble burst -- the same crash that has hurt so much of California. San Jose's unemployment rate remains high because its manufacturing base was hit especially hard during the recession.

24/7 Wall St. has analyzed the 10 metropolitan areas in the Brookings report with the smallest education gaps. We looked at what causes these areas to have highly educated residents and how their education levels are affecting the areas' unemployment rates. We then looked at numbers for median household income from the Census Bureau, all of which were higher than the national average of $51,425.

Click through the gallery to view the cities where people are most qualified to work.

More from 24/7 Wall St.:
The Eight Beers Americans No Longer Drink
The Hippest Countries in the World
The Highest Paying Jobs With the Most Time Off

Also see:
Top 10 Cities for Recent College Grads
College Town Real Estate Investments Score High Marks
Forget Empty Nesters, We Now Have Full-Nest Syndrome
11 Most Active Real Estate Markets

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]]>10 best cities for educated workersand Unemployment in Metropolitan Americabest cities for educated workersBrookings Institution education reportDemandEducationhousing marketwhere the jobs are24/7 Wall St.2011-09-13T11:00:00 00:0010 Housing Markets That May Collapse This Yearhttp://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/08/15/10-housing-markets-that-may-collapse-this-year/http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/08/15/10-housing-markets-that-may-collapse-this-year/http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/08/15/10-housing-markets-that-may-collapse-this-year/#commentsFiled under:

wrecking ball247 Wall St The real estate market is already in the deepest depression in modern U.S. history. If you think it can't get any worse, think again. In several cities, the real estate market is about to drop even more. Home values in many of those cities, such as Las Vegas, have already collapsed as unemployment has shot higher. And with no hope of quick recovery, housing prices are expected to continue to fall. 24/7 Wall St. identified ten housing markets that are expected to drop by at least another 10% by 2012.

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Methodology: We used data from the Fiserv Case-Shiller Indexes, which track real estate activity in 380 cities. We selected those that are forecast to have the largest percent price drop between the first quarter of this year and the first quarter of next. We added several other pieces of information to our city-by-city information, including June unemployment levels, median household income, and when home prices are expected to reach their troughs in each market.

Median household income in these cities tended to be near the U.S. median, and in some cases well below. We expected to find high unemployment in these cities. This turned out to be the case. In all but one of the cities we examined, unemployment was well above the national average. The rate was over 18% in two of the cities. This link between unemployment and expected future drop in home prices shows again how insidious the housing price problem is.

Home prices fell from all-time highs in 2006. Home equity tapped by second mortgages had been a tremendous source of income then for families who used it for retirement saving, education, and simple consumer purchases. Three years later, many of those homes were worth less than their mortgages. A large population of homeowners still owed a second mortgage. The burden of those two home loans happened to come at a time when national unemployment rose from 4% in the mid-2000s to 10%. The mix of unemployment and high mortgage payments ripped the home market apart.

The ten markets on the 24/7 Wall St. list of "Housing Markets That Will Collapse This Year," and several other like them, may not see a full recovery in home prices for years. Inventories in these markets tend to be large. Demand tends to be low as the unemployed cannot be buyers. Finally, fear of further price drops all exacerbate the problem. No person or organization, including the federal government, has been able to help support the housing market, although the Administration has tried. Not a single plan has built even a thin net under home values, despite the best efforts of the best economic minds in the world.

See also:
The Best Paying Jobs You Can Get with a High School Degree
The Nine States Slashing Unemployment Benefits
The Worst Modern Stock Market Collapses

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]]>247 Wall Streetforeclosure crisishousing markets that may collapsehousing outlookworst housing markets24/7 Wall St.2011-08-15T17:20:00 00:00America's 10 Sickest Housing Markets (Slideshow)http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/08/05/americas-10-sickest-housing-markets-slideshow/http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/08/05/americas-10-sickest-housing-markets-slideshow/http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2011/08/05/americas-10-sickest-housing-markets-slideshow/#commentsFiled under:



For three years, the real estate market has been going in one direction -- primarily down. Some areas, however, have begun to recover. Recent S&P/Case-Shiller data show that among the top 20 housing markets in the U.S., 18 had very modest improvements in sales prices during May. Others, like Washington and Boston, have began to at least stabilize from a year ago.

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Few markets, however, can match Washington and Boston. Robert Shiller has been stating that home prices could fall another 10 percent in the next year. Inventories in some major metropolitan areas would then take years of sales to get back to 2005 levels. At that time, the normal inventory of homes for sale was replaced on average every six months and it was unusual for a house to be on the market for a year.

Foreclosure rates remain high and only the robo-signing scandal has slowed the process. Once this is resolved, economists fear that the market will be flooded with even more vacant, unsold homes.

24/7 Wall St. has taken a new look at the housing market to find the very weakest cities by identifying those with the highest homeowner vacancy rates and rental vacancy rates. These are markets where demand has clearly collapsed.

These are cities where the requirement for living space has dropped well below the national average. Further, vacancy rates of many cities were stable during the recession, but accelerated sharply higher in the last year.

Similarly, housing prices in several of these markets have decreased at a faster rate in the last three quarters than during the recession. These cities, like Detroit, St. Louis, Dayton, and Atlanta, also tend to be the larger and older among the top 75 metropolitan areas. Their economies were damaged long before the recession.

Methodology: 24/7 Wall St. pulled Census data on the 75 largest U.S. metropolitan areas and ranked the cities with the highest overall vacancy rates for both homeowner vacancy and rental vacancy for the second quarter of 2011. We picked the cities with the worst rates in each of the two categories to create meta-data ranks. We then removed the cities that had an improved homeowner vacancy rate in either the last twelve months or the last quarter. We believed that any sign of improvement in homeowner vacancies, the more telling of the vacancy rates, should disqualify a city. To improve our analysis, we also looked at unemployment rates for these cities provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We also used historical median home prices, as provided by the National Association of Realtors.

The analysis shows that some cities have home vacancy rates over 5 percent and rental vacancy rates over 10 percent. Obviously, these levels of unused inventory have the effect of driving down both home and rental prices month after month. It also means that there is comparatively little demand for the purchase of new or existing homes. These 10 markets are essentially dead as far as real estate prices and sales activity are concerned.

These are America's 10 sickest housing markets.

Also see:
How to Get a Home Loan with Bad Credit
First-Time Homebuyer's Guide

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]]>Case Shillerhousing crisishousing marketsickest housing markets24/7 Wall St.2011-08-05T14:00:00 00:00