Consumer

When buyers from high-cost cities start looking for affordable alternatives, they tend to focus on price. What many underweight, and what real estate professionals working in Birmingham say matters more, is the question of what actually drives the local economy and whether that foundation is likely to hold. Gene Darden, a broker and team leader ...

Not long ago, fire insurance was an afterthought in a Los Angeles home sale. Buyers would get to the final days of escrow, the escrow officer would flag that coverage was not yet in place, and everyone would scramble to sort it out before closing. That scramble is over. Insurance has moved to the front ...

Albany, New York does not show up on most national lists of hot real estate markets. It lacks the name recognition of Boston or the scale of New York City. But investors who have been priced out of those larger metros are increasingly looking at the Capital Region, and agents working the market say the ...

The Southwest Florida housing market is cooling. Inventory is up, prices have pulled back in parts of the region, and buyers are harder to qualify than they were two years ago. But the slowdown isn’t hitting every community the same way, and buyers and investors who treat the entire region as one market may be ...

If you have been searching for a vacation home on Long Beach Island, you already know the frustration. There are almost no listings. And experts who work this market say the shortage is not a temporary blip – it is a structural condition driven by fixed land supply, protected wetlands, and buyer demand that has ...

The most affordable land in New Jersey with a workable commute to Philadelphia is not where most buyers are looking, and that mismatch is starting to close. Agents with broad territory across South Jersey are pointing to Cumberland and Salem counties as the part of the market where value still exists, at a moment when ...

The standard advice for first-time rental investors sounds sensible: start small, buy one property, get your footing, then grow. But some experienced investors and the agents who work with them argue that single-property ownership is actually the riskiest way to enter the rental market, not the safest. Shirley Weems, a Realtor with Waterman Real Estate, ...

Something unusual is happening in the Southwest Florida housing market in mid-2026: the more expensive the home, the faster it tends to sell. That pattern runs counter to what most people expect from a market that has been cooling since the pandemic peak, and it has real implications for anyone trying to buy or sell ...

Florida’s insurance costs have become one of the loudest reasons people cite for avoiding the state’s housing market. The concern is real – premiums have climbed sharply, and flood zone designations have made some properties genuinely difficult to insure at any reasonable price. But builders and contractors working in the market point to a distinction ...

Small investors eyeing the northern Indianapolis suburbs in 2026 are often looking for the wrong opportunity. The search for a quick flip, buy distressed, renovate, sell at a profit, runs into a market where prices are already strong and undervalued properties are scarce. What the data and experienced observers on the ground suggest is that ...

When a tenant and landlord both want to part ways, a cash-for-keys agreement used to be one of the cleaner solutions available. The landlord pays the tenant to vacate voluntarily, the tenant walks away with money in hand, and both sides avoid the cost and stress of eviction court. In Santa Monica, that option has ...

When housing inventory is this tight, buying land and building from scratch can look like a logical workaround. In the Hudson Valley, the math on that strategy is harder than most buyers expect, and one factor that rarely shows up in early conversations is the tax treatment of new construction. A Two-Part Cost Problem Brokers ...

The idea that rising home prices benefit everyone in a housing market is getting harder to defend. What real estate professionals are seeing in markets like San Luis Obispo County tells a more complicated story, one where the same price appreciation that rewards longtime owners is systematically locking out everyone else. Hal Sweasey, broker and ...

Pasco County, Florida, has a reputation problem. For years, people who knew the Tampa Bay area thought of it as farmland, aging homes, and not much else. That picture is nearly a decade old, but it persists, and for buyers still acting on it, the gap between perception and reality is closing in ways that ...

A ballot measure arriving in November 2026 could do more to change Central Florida’s housing market than any interest rate move in recent memory. Real estate professionals in the region are watching it closely, and some argue that buyers who understand what is at stake will be better positioned than those who don’t. Lisa Foor, ...