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Item: Rent.com, which provided some good information for a "Home Economics" column in a recent Friday Business section, also sent along the results of a survey titled, "The Top 10 Cities for Bachelorettes." Seriously.
Philadelphia isn't among the 10, by the way.
"Only 17 percent of female renters are seeking eligible bachelors as neighbors, compared with 45 percent of male renters seeking single ladies next door," the survey found.
"Twenty-five percent of female renters would prefer to have furry friends [cats or dogs] as neighbors, instead of men.
"Ladies [yes, ladies] are less reliant upon maintenance staff than their male counterparts: 63 percent of female renters consider it essential to have a maintenance staff available, compared to 69 percent of men."
Item: The American Mortgage System, a new book on the mortgage industry produced by the Penn Institute for Urban Research, says that loans originated by local branches of a bank were significantly less likely to experience foreclosure than those originated at a distance.
The book, edited by Susan M. Wachter and Marvin M. Smith, makes three important points about low-income borrowers:
The growth of the securitization market allowed local banks to disregard risky mortgages by selling the loans to third-party investors.
Low-income borrowers were the most likely to be fooled into high-cost loans, maximizing the likelihood of default.
The vast majority of high-cost lending was completely unrelated to the Community Reinvestment Act, whose loans actually performed better on average than non-CRA loans.
Item: Pennsylvania has the ninth-highest closing costs in the nation ($4,522), according to new research from Bankrate.com. A year ago, Pennsylvania was eighth.
