From The Washington Post, FHA delinquencies dropped significantly in February after several months of increasing. Definitely good news. Now we need more investors to get back in this market, the good signs keep coming.

Jonathan Stempel of Reuters wrote yesterday that Berkshire Hathaway's "oracle" Warren Buffett sees the housing crisis as mostly behind us, as do we at our firm. Writes Stempel:

Okay so new home sales numbers weren't reported to be up last week. So? First of all, the housing market is local in nature. If all politics is local as Tip O'Neill said, then real estate and housing is darn near skin-tight.

Austin is an odd bird in the Texas aviary of real estate, both commercial and residential. The Austin Business Journal is reporting that commercial and residential contracts combined are down almost 50% through August of this year over last year, which itself was not a stellar year.

The website alexa.com tracks various statistics regarding web traffic across the Internet worldwide. Its methods are sometimes questioned - full disclosure - they use a large sample of people who download their "toolbar" is how I understand they get their sample. Nonetheless it's a commonly referenced source for Internet traffic statistics.

We've recently completed a review of year-over-year sales figures in our general market area, and the results confirm a dynamic we've noted for several months now: inventory is low, which is supporting values of quality properties.