Searching for a home in Boston can be a daunting task if you live abroad. Mondoboston.com exists to help introduce international buyers to Boston and the home buying process. Use our site to find out more about the logistics of house buying in the United States. Catch up on neighborhood news, surf our links to other Boston real estate websites, and check out our featured house listings. Our neighborhood descriptions can help give you a feel for each downtown neighborhood, and our picks can help you find the best places to find the important stuff in life… like a loaf of crusty bread or a decent wedge of cheese. Ultimately, should you decide you need a realtor, we can even help you find a professional who can work with you in your search for a place to call home.

According to a report in today’s Boston Globe, the changes, while small, signal a market shift that is making apartments harder to find and afford when many families are struggling with lost jobs, lost homes, and pay cuts.

Vacancy rates fell to 6.2 percent in Greater Boston in the second quarter of the year, the lowest level in
18 months, while average asking rents increased for the first time since 2008, rising 1.2 percent to $1,717 a month, according to Reis Inc., which tracks occupancy in buildings with 40 units or more.

According to Mario Breglia, president and founder of the Institute of Real Estate Research (or istituto di ricerca Scenari Immobiliari) if you’re looking to invest in real estate in Italy, you should check out new houses built on the periphery of large cities, where prices have declined recently by as much as 30 percent. Breglia also considers buying houses in medium-sized cities like Piacenza, Novara, Parma and Modena a good investment. Outside of Italy, however, Breglia recommends approaching real estate with caution. The reality, he says, is that housing prices in once alluring investment spots like Madrid and  Miami have fallen about 10 percent, but that’s more or less the same as in Italian cities like Rome. In another words, there may be fewer bargains in such cities than many people imagine — especially for houses located in the best areas.

In short, if you’re Italian and looking for a good deal, you’re better off sticking close to home.

After years of visiting other cities both nationally and internationally with bustling indoor food markets featuring locally grown food and artisan cheeses, seafoods and meats, we are thrilled by the news that Boston will be opening its own downtown public food market showcasing New England agricultural businesses.

Petit Robert Central comes to Downtown Crossing

According to the Boston Herald, the folks behind Petit Robert Bistro and Chez Jacky (new to Brighton on Commonwealth Avenue) are going to be opening a new spot called Petit Robert Central on Arch Street, two blocks east of Washington Street on the western edge of the Financial District. The space they’re taking over is the former home of Vinalia. The Petit Robert Central will be the largest of the five restaurants for the owners, with a capacity of 250. Once it opens later this summer, the eatery will serve lunch and dinner seven days a week. Petit Robert Bistro currently has locations in the South End of Boston, Kenmore Square, and Needham. The address for this upcoming French restaurant in Downtown Crossing will be: Petit Robert Central, 101 Arch Street, Boston, MA, 02110.

Foumami Opens in Boston’s Financial District

A casual Asian sandwich bar has opened its doors in the Financial District of Boston, featuring gourmet sandwiches with Chinese, Japanese and Korean influences. Foumami, now open on Franklin Street (by High and Oliver Streets) serves breakfast and lunch, and customers have the option to dine in or take their orders out.  Foumami also has an outdoor seating area and will offer catering. Hours for Foumami are 6:30 AM to 5:30 PM Monday through Friday. (The restaurant is closed on weekends.) The address for this new Asian sandwich bar is: Foumami, 225 Franklin Street, Boston, MA, 02110. the phone number is (617) 426-8858. And their website can be found at: http://www.foumami.com/

Max Brenner Coming to Boston’s Back Bay This Fall

A small chain of upscale chocolate shops and cafes with locations in the United States, Asia, Australia, and Israel is coming to the Back Bay of Boston this fall. Max Brenner will be open on Boylston Street, making this the fourth shop to open in this country (two are currently open in New York and Philadelphia, with a third opening this summer in Las Vegas).  Max Brenner features such items as chocolate pizza, fondue, cookies, waffles, ice cream, shakes, smoothies, and hot chocolate, as well as a variety of breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner dishes. The address for this chocolate shop and cafe coming to the Back Bay of Boston will be: Max Brenner, 745 Boylston Street, Boston, MA, 02116. The website for Max Brenner can be found at: http://www.maxbrenner.com/

The Meat House will be opening on Beacon Street (about a block east of the Harvard Street intersection) at the end of the month, offering wine and beer as well as meat, cheese, marinades, produce, baked goods, and prepared meals.

The Brookline Meat House is the second to open in the Boston area this year, following the opening of a store on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington Heights. Other locations near Boston include shops in Beverly, Chelmsford, Franklin, North Andover, and Walpole.

The address for this upcoming butcher shop in Coolidge Corner will be: The Meat House, 1285 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA, 02446. The website for the company is: http://www.themeathouse.com/. We’re happy to know that another useful service is opening in Brookline but we’re kinda sad to note that the small, independent shops of this ilk seem to be forever banished from the American landscape. We miss the old Brookline.

McMansions continue their growth in Boston’s suburbs.

More Downtown luxury condos are moving into foreclosure.

Mortgage Rates on the Increase?

Condos Institute Community Gardens

A Falling Homeownership Rate

However, buying vacation property is not always as simple as one might think, and in today’s rocky market, there’s another question of whether it even makes sense. Some say yes, as prices have come down considerably in vacation hot spots such as Cape Cod or along the Maine coast. Others, however, feel that in a shaky economy, taking on another financial responsibility is risky at best. Still, many of us hang onto the dream, and for those who do, here are a few things to bear in mind as you search for the perfect vacation house.

1) Location, location, location. It may seem obvious, but in the heat of the moment, we sometimes forget how important it is to find prime territory. How close are you to the beach, the lake, or the nature preserve? Is it worth buying a place that requires that you drive? Maybe not. Also consider how accessible your vacation home is from your primary home. Will you have to drive more than two hours to get there? How close is it to major interstates and highways? The best way to get a handle on location is to build familiarity with your potential vacation community by spending several vacations in the area.

2) Think about your vacation habits. Do you enjoy visiting new places? Maybe it makes no sense to tie yourself down to one second home. In this case you maybe a timeshare makes more sense. Are you the type that likes to “putter around” even on vacation, or do you prefer to laze around on the lounge? If you’re a putterer you’re likely to adapt well to the requirements of owning a separate single family home. But if you don’t want the responsibilities of fixing broken things and mowing the lawn, you might opt for a vacation condo where these things are taken care of for you. Do you plan on bringing lots of friends and family down to vacation with you? You’ll want a large place with several bedrooms. Or is your second home strictly a retreat? If so, you can get away with just one or two bedrooms. Choose a home that is not just beautiful, but practical.

3. Pick the right house. Look for a house with a view and privacy that is located on a level lot.  Proximity to water is always good, as is proximity to trails, bike paths and other natural amenities.

4. Be prepared for the financial expense. Banks require larger deposits for vacation homes. In some instances, you may actually decide to buy a place with cash. And after you’ve bought your place, rest assured that there will be plenty of maintenance issues both during the season in which you use your home, and also off season.

1) House Lust: America’s Obsession with Our Homes. By Daniel McGinn. $14.97, Kindle edition at Amazon.com

From Publisher’s Weekly: Despite the current downturn in the housing market, the country’s mania for homes that exploded during the last half-decade is still alive and well, according to Newsweek writer McGinn. The fascination with homes—talking about, valuing, scheming over, envying, shopping for, refinancing, or just plain ogling homes—has continued even after the market has cooled, McGinn argues, and can be seen in the ongoing popularity of HGTV, the 24-7 real estate and home improvement cable channel and its flagship show, House Hunters. To prove his thesis, McGinn entertainingly explores the gamut of housing obsessions, from buying personally designed and oversized trophy homes, attempting large-scale renovations and spending obscene amounts of time on real estate Web sites such as Zillow and PropertyShark to actually going out and getting a real estate license, which McGinn himself does after only minimal training. It is this ability to get inside the actual lives of the housing-obsessed rather that relying purely on statistics to prove his point that makes this book as enjoyable as an episode of Flip This House, another popular housing reality show that McGinn cites in a book that is, at heart, all about behavior, not economics. (Dec. 26)

2. Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That Home. By Meghan Daum, $16.47 at Amazon.com

From Publisher’s Weekly: By turns disarming and tedious, Daum’s (The Quality of Life Report) cautionary tale about house lust tracks her dizzying succession of moves from New York City to Lincoln, Neb., to Los Angeles. Place becomes inextricably linked with being, and fashioning an impressive shelter creates a whole life, from choosing college at Vassar because it could ultimately secure her a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan to a self-empowering, self-confessed hare-brained relocation at age 29—single, and now an established journalist and author—to the plains of Nebraska to achieve the perpetually elusive domestic integrity. Desiring to be that person who deserved to have the perfect living situation, Daum is seized by full-blown real-estate addiction, despite her inability to afford anything like her dream place, and she eventually migrates from the modest charms of a Lincoln farmhouse to the parched crevices of L.A., where she aims to write a screenplay. Here the locus of her memoir fixes on the purchase of a dilapidated bungalow in Echo Park in 2004: becoming a homeowner translates into being an evolved human. Alas, the outcome is sadly predictable, even the finding-the-man-to-fill-the-house with, but Daum’s treading in the wake of the burst housing bubble is sweet and timely. (May)

3. Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. By Edmund L. Andrews, $14.94 at Amazon.com.
From Publisher’s Weekly: Starred Review. As I write in February 2009, I am four months past due on my mortgage and bracing for foreclosure proceedings to begin. Thus begins this cautionary and critical examination of the housing crisis, a story that turned personal when New York Times economics reporter Andrews got caught up in the housing bubble after falling in love with a woman and a house. Bringing in $120,000 a year in salary—most of which went to child support and alimony to his ex-wife, Andrews says he was able to get a don’t ask, don’t tell mortgage with the assumption that his new wife, Patty, would be able to get a job to keep them afloat, an expectation that didn’t work out as planned. Because of his economics journalism background, Andrews says he should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, and he castigates himself as well as fellow borrowers, the financial industry that took advantage of them and a government that didn’t put the brakes on the crisis that many economists warned about but that Alan Greenspan, the Bush administration and others ignored. This deeply personal exposé is timely and sobering in its candor. (June)

4. Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses. By Marjorie Garber, $12.82 on Amazon.com.
From Publisher’s Weekly: Anyone who has looked, even casually, at what are called “shelter” magazines, or who has engaged in the exhausting process of buying or selling property, will have been struck by the peculiarly erotic quality of the language used to describe the houses we live in or seek to own. Perhaps prompted by her own foray into real estate, Garber, author of Symptoms of Culture and Dog Love, among many other books, applies her richly stocked scholarly imagination to a consideration of the cultural role of the house. In a series of witty essays on the “House as Mother,” as “Beloved,” as “Body,” as “Trophy” and the like, Garber segues smoothly in the course of a page or two from Freud and Jung to Chaucer, Shakespeare and popular film, effectively elaborating her contention that the house is not just something on which we lavish our erotic or emotional attention in lieu of a more appropriate object, but is also “a primary object of affection and desire.” As a professor of English at Harvard and director of its Humanity Center, Garber is an established academic. While dazzling, her erudition is not intimidating; this book is bound to prompt lively after dinner discussion and perhaps a little abashed self-recognition in the nation’s suburban great rooms and downtown lofts. (July)

5. Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us. By Alyssa Katz, $15.55 on Amazon.com.

From Publisher’s Weekly: Starred Review. This richly detailed analysis of the recent (and ignominious) history of the American real estate market opens on a note of false optimism: in 1991, after 20 years of toil, urban housing activist Gale Cincotta successfully argued that Congress should require that 40% of the home loans issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go to low-income buyers. The Clinton administration extended this campaign for higher ownership rates among low-income populations throughout the 1990s. Katz, a journalism professor at New York University, draws on an impressive number of interviews and thorough secondary research to illuminate the disastrous consequences of pushing underqualified buyers into ownership. Many of the topics she addresses will be familiar to readers by now—predatory subprime loans, get-rich-quick house flipping schemes, scandalous mortgage frauds—but Katz writes with authority and empathy. The many people the author interviews, from the single mother in Cleveland who lost her house just two years after buying it to the family living near Sacramento whose new home is already falling apart, become the heroes, victims and sometimes culprits in this gripping account of collective irresponsibility. (June)

Yoga has become a very necessary part of life for many folks around town. It’s a great way to increase strength and flexibility without the knee issues and hip problems caused by certain more vigorous forms of exercise. It’s also easier than ever to find yoga classes to suit your body and fitness level. More vigorous styles of yoga can also work up a sweat and burn calories.

Here’s a quick guide to places offering yoga classes around Boston. You can find classes for as low as $5 per class, or for as much as $25 per class. The going rate around town seems to be about $15 per class:

Boston Area Classes
Back Bay Yoga - Back Bay
Bikram Boston - Leather District
Core de Vie - Beacon Hill
Exhale - Back Bay
Dahn Yoga - Back Bay, Beacon Hill
Life in Synergy - Back Bay
North End Yoga - North End
O2 Yoga - South End
OM Warrior - Downtown
Sadhana - South End
South Boston Yoga - South Boston
South End Yoga - South End
Sports Club LA - Downtown crossing
All One Yoga - Boston/Brighton
Savin Hill Yoga - Dorchester

Allston/Brighton
Urban Renewal Yoga - Allston
All One Yoga - Brighton/Allston

Brookline
The Inner Space
Baptiste Power Yoga Institute
Barbara Benagh/The Yoga Studio
Brookline Yoga

Charlestown
Charlestown Yoga

Cambridge
Karma Yoga - Harvard Square
Black Lotus Yoga - Cambridgeport / University Park MIT
Yoga In Harvard Square - Harvard Square
Baptiste Power Yoga Institute - Porter Square
Arlington Center - Arlington
Dahn Yoga - Harvard Square, Davis Square
Art Soul Yoga - East Cambridge
Soni Yoga - Cambridge
Patricia Walden and assoc teachers - Cambridge
Om City Yoga - Cambridge (Porter Square)
Prana Power Yoga - Cambridge (Central Square)

Somerville
Yoga in the Square - Davis Square
O2 Yoga
Moving Celebrations - at The Armory

Jamaica Plain
Blissfull Monkey - Jamaica Plain
Dahn Yoga - Jamaica Plain
The Loft, Jamaica Plain (call 617-794-0188 for schedule)