Silicon Valley Housing Blog by Steve Leung

Okay, this is a blog about Silicon Valley but New Orleans is a city dear to my heart because I grew up there.  And even 17 months after Hurricane Katrina, they're still trying to rebuild infrastructure.CNN.com's article Struggling New Orleans Schools Are Having Trouble Finding Teachers details on...

That's the headline from the Silicon Valley Business Journal.  The San Jose Mercury News states it more plainly as "More Californians fall behind on their mortgages." Impact on Silicon ValleySo what's the impact here in Silicon Valley?  "None right now.  Literally none," according to John Karevol...

Choosing the right school for your children is such an important decision that it may help determine where you decide to live. It's not a simple choice, but with the right resources, you can be confident in your decision.   Standardized Test Scores. The California Department of Education measures...

I'm not an MLS apologist.  I believe that information wants to be free and that agents should be good interpreters of information and not gatekeepers, but we're coming to a point where listing real estate is going to get much worse before it gets better.While Zillow.com made the big splash in all...

In Part 1, we talked about the financial half of deciding how much house you can afford.  But how happy you are after buying the house depends on how well you balance the financial of your decision with the psychological ones. Is More Really Better?Hugh Chou writes an excellent article, "How Much...

Getting a mortgage and buying a house involves around 300 sheets of paper.  And many people are intimidated by the monumental stack of formerly living trees or the terms they don't know printed on them.  But with only a few key concepts, you can usually protect yourself from getting very ripped-o...

Your FICO score is the number makes-or-breaks your ability to buy a house and determines whether you get the best rates or get charged enormous fees. You can directly affect the strength of your credit and, in turn, how much your dream house really costs you. When applying for a mortgage, your cr...

As with most decisions when buying a house, figuring out how much house you can afford is half financial and half psychological.  How happy you are after your purchase depends on how well you balance the two. The Financial HalfHow much of a house you can afford financially boils down to convincin...

Navigating the acronym soup of only Bay Area public transportation systems is much easier because of the 511.org TakeTransit Trip Planner. Just enter your starting point and destination, and it'll tell you not only what to take, but provide you schedule info and how much it will cost. The system ...

Here's a realistic scenario about a family that is upgrading to a new house where the sale for the old one fell through.  The question is: what would you do now?Unfortunately, a great way of dealing with Catch-22 situations is to avoid them completely.  It's a matter of clearly communicating what...