All Blog Posts Tagged 'media' (222)

The biggest drivers behind the rebound in luxury home sales: Low mortgage rates, rising consumer confidence, cash buyers, and international buyers, according to real estate professionals and brokers who spoke at the recent National Association of Real Estate Editors conference. 

In 2012, there were 697 home…

Fannie Mae introduced a new tool to help real estate professionals successfully close short sales.  Listing agents are now asked to register accepted short sale offers with Fannie Mae to provide greater transparency into the process and allow Fannie Mae to proactively work with the mortgage servicer to finalize the…

More and more cities throughout the United States and Canada are relaxing zoning codes to permit multiple dwellings on a single lot. 

Planners prefer these "accessory units" because they direct growth to already developed land and infrastructure, thus reducing the cost of city services. Such dwellings are…

For the past three years, the average size of new homes has been on the rise. The median new-home size in 2012 reached a record high at 2,306 square feet, according to newly released data from the Census Bureau. That is an 8 percent increase from 2009. 

During the Great Recession, Americans showed a…

Business Insider recently ranked 15 cities by their projected annualize change in home prices between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2017. Many of these cities have seen large declines in home prices over the last few years, but are expected to post major gains and strong rebounds in the…

More investors are rehabilitating homes and looking to sell them for profit, a move known as flipping. 

RealtyTrac recently evaluated more than 600 metro areas to find where flipping single-family homes offers some of the highest returns based on the investor’s gross profit. The top eight metros for…

Builders are feeling more confident about new-home sales, sales expectations for the next six months, and prospective buyer traffic, according to the May reading on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. 

The index—which gauges builders’ sentiment on those three…

The luxury home market is gaining momentum, with prices rising and many areas where upscale housing once struggled now turning into a seller’s market, according to the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing. 

“Prices have been trending up fairly strongly since the beginning of the year,” Laurie Moore-Moore,…

About 96,000 borrowers will receive an additional check to correct errors made in initial payments sent to compensate them for foreclosure mishandlings. The payments are part of a nationwide settlement. Some borrowers were issued amounts that were too low, the Federal Reserve announced, and the new checks will make up…

Where do luxury homes tend to sell the most? Coldwell Banker’s Luxury Market Report recently revealed the top U.S. cities with the highest number of luxury home sales in the $1 million-plus category. The cities in the top 10, along with the number of sales in the $1 million-plus tier for 2012 : 

• New…

Some cities are posting big drops in population, due to unemployment, crime, or even Mother Nature. CNNMoney recently highlighted Census Bureau data that shows the U.S. cities that are seeing the most rapid declines in residents. 

The five fastest shrinking cities in the U.S.…

Home owners who faced a wrongful foreclosure will receive compensation from lenders in amounts ranging from a few hundred dollars up to $125,000 beginning in April, federal bank regulators said this week. The average payment represents about $850 per eligible loan.

The review was designed to determine…

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released its annual report on homeownership vacancy rates on the 75 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S for 2012.

The data is used extensively by public and private sector organizations to evaluate the need for new housing programs and initiatives, according to the U.S.…

Inventories of for-sale homes have fallen to record lows in many areas, but some markets are still reporting plenty of choices for home buyers. Plus, in some areas home prices haven’t experienced large increases as in other places this past year. 

Realtor.com reports the following five best locales for…

Billionaire B. Wayne Hughes, a sharecropper’s son who became a billionaire pioneering warehouses for Americans needing storage space, is buying thousands of houses to rent as more people find homeownership out of reach.

Hughes, 79, has purchased about 10,000 properties through his American Homes 4…

ZipRealty, a real estate brokerage company, is finding more housing markets starting to tilt in sellers’ favors. 

For the average home in the U.S., the gap between the listing price and closing price is narrowing with sellers able to get more than 98 percent of their home’s listing price back. Also,…

The suburbs have the highest concentration of wealthy people, more so than cities, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data. 

The wealthy tend to stay near major population centers, according to the study. For example, the region with the highest concentration of wealthy households in the nation is…

In a historical context, home prices typically increase about 3 to 4 percent a year. 

But in the years preceding the housing crash, prices in 2002 started soaring 7 percent a year, then 8 percent in 2004, and 12 percent by 2005, CNBC.com reports. 

A “new bubble” may be forming, CNBC columnist…

About 85 percent of online listings include photos, but the type of photo really can make a big difference, says Ken H. Johnson, an associate professor of finance at Florida International University’s Hollo School of Real Estate and co-author of a 2011 study on photos in real estate.

“When people first look…