Unsure about how much you need to save in order to make a down payment on a home? There are several options.
It’s not always easy to save up enough to make the traditional 20 percent down payment on a home. Fortunately, lenders today offer many low-down-payment mortgages. But when deciding how much to put down, you should consider the following:

The residential housing market went into a tailspin over a burst housing bubble and a whole lot of bad mortgages. The commercial real estate market has suffered a different sort of one-two punch.

Between the recession and the financial crisis, many commercial property owners were left struggling, and many banks were stuck with troubled loans on everything from shopping malls and hotels to office buildings. Exposure to commercial real estate has fueled losses at major banks such as Morgan Stanley, which reported a second-quarter loss of more than $1.2 billion on Wednesday.

by Charles Feldman on March 12, 2008
If someone were to have said, say a year ago, that there would be a crisis in the subprime mortgage market that would lead to world-wide economic chaos, that person would no doubt have been laughed at.

Sadly, though, that is exactly what has happened and the evidence just this week is overwhelming.

But, before the depressing news, how about a little uplifting news? You know you want it!

MONEY CULTURE / Daniel Gross
So far, America's real-estate agony has been confined largely to the vast residential sector. Commercial (office buildings) and retail (malls, strip malls, big boxes) real estate have held up rather well, even though those markets were propelled by the same factors that sent housing into orbit: easy credit, an abiding faith in perpetually rising asset values and misplaced optimism about economic expansion.