We’ve already seen the promise of “free” gasoline being used to sell cars and concert tickets. Now McBride & Son, a prominent St. Louis home builder, is offering gasoline vouchers of $3,000 to $6,000 with the purchase of a new home.…

Homebuilders in St. Louis have a two-year oversupply of ready-to-build lots, banker David Kemper says, so two years is a good estimate of how long the housing downturn will last here. Kemper, chief executive of Commerce Bancshares, spoke this morning…

St. Louis housing prices dropped 0.04 percent in the first quarter, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight reported last week. That’s not bad, considering that OFHEO’s national index fell 1.7 percent, the largest quarterly decline on record.

St. Louis home…

Zillow.com’s home-price index for the St. Louis area fell 2 percent in the first quarter and 5.2 percent in the latest 12 months, the real-estate data firm said today. Its numbers paint a considerably bleaker picture than the latest government…

Houses in St. Louis appreciated in value by 2.56 percent last year, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight reported today. That’s well above the 0.8 percent increase for the nation as a whole, based on an OFHEO index that includes…

It was the slightest of declines, but a negative number is a negative number. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight says that house prices in St. Louis fell by 0.02 percent in the third quarter, in line with a national…

Wouldn’t it be nice if academic economists and all of their complicated formulas could help you with personal financial decisions? In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Sumit Agarwal, John C. Driscoll  and  David Laibson attempt to do just…

The St. Louis area faces a better than 1-in-6 chance of a broad decline in housing prices over the next two years,  according to a news release from PMI Mortgage Insurance.  Specifically, the firm’s “market risk index” for St. Louis shows…

Dean Baker, one of the experts I interviewed for today’s column on the subprime mortgage situation, thinks he has hit upon a way to help struggling homeowners without bailing out lenders. He calls it his Subprime Borrower Protection Plan. Here’s how…