A new bill that will direct up to $300 million a year to an affordable housing fund effortlessly passed in the House on September, 18, 2007 by a vote of 348 to 72.

The bill is intended to tackle the impending crisis involving roughly two million adjustable-rate mortgages which are due to reset to higher rates during the next two years.

“We do not have a general program for helping build affordable family housing, and that’s what this bill would do,” said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

A Real Estate Investment Trust or REIT is a tax designation for a corporation investing in real estate that reduces or eliminates corporate income taxes. In return, REITs are required to distribute 90% of their income, which may be taxable in the hands of the investors. The REIT structure was designed to provide a similar structure for investment in real estate as mutual funds provide for investment in stocks.

Like other corporations, REITs can be publicly or privately held. Public REITs may be listed on public stock exchanges like shares of common stock in other firms.

I moved into a studio apartment in SoMa in May. The apartment downstairs rented for $850 in May and went vacant end of September. That apartment is now being shopped for $200 more a month.

- Thomas Xavier, 33, SoMa, S.F.

Same thing happened in Vail and Aspen. Now there is nowhere for the teachers and other low-wage earners to live. Some drive up to 100 miles each way to work. However, there is now a major shortage of workers in these towns and the service is suffering. The greedy real estate industry has created a monster that could indeed come back to bite them. Hope S.F. does not make the same mistake.

Bay Area homes sales sank to a two-decade low in September, as tighter lending standards walloped an already-declining market.

A total of 3,118 existing single-family homes changed hands in the nine-county Bay Area in September, down 44.8 percent from 5,645 homes last September and down 34 percent from August, according to a report from DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla (San Diego County) research firm.

It was the slowest September since DataQuick started recording statistics in 1988 and the 32nd consecutive month of declining sales.

A new application for the popular Facebook online social networking site allows users to enlist the help of their group of contacts in buying or selling a home.

The LivePads application, available at http://apps.facebook.com/livepads, allows Facebook users who are searching for a home to enter their desired criteria for a home, to view a list of possible matches pulled from the Google Base site, and to save houses they like to their Facebook profiles. They can also choose to share these sample homes with a real estate agent or their personal network.