In the Boston area – and probably elsewhere – residential contractors are looking for work. For most of the last 20 years, and especially in the last decade, it’s been hard to find contractors willing to do small renovation jobs, but with the slump in residential construction, there appears to be window of opportunity. Read the full article

Elsewhere I've written about the localized nature of housing markets. I just discovered that there's a very cool resource at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank website that lets you map foreclosure and subprime mortgage exposure for each MA city and town. Read the full article

In response to rising natural gas and petroleum prices, Dow Chemical announced yesterday that it would increase some of its basic and specialty chemical prices by as much as 20%. The effect of Dow's increases won't be felt immediately by consumers, but expect other companies to follow suit. Smart shoppers will need to become smarter. Read the full article

Mark Twain is credited with saying a great many things that he may or may not have actually said. Among these is the observation that "People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination." If Twain did say it, he might have had housing statistics in mind. If you pay attention to news reports, you're likely to hear widely-varying assessments of the state of the housing market. Who's right? Read the full article

Journalists love ranking cities by all sorts of criteria. A recent addition to this genre is an analysis of the best cities for recent college graduates; Boston has been declared the Avis of post-college towns, topped out by archrival Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin is still getting his revenge on the Puritans. Read the full article

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