KeyCrew's Consumer Real Estate Coverage
The median age of a first-time homebuyer just hit 40, according to Larry Naselli, a residential real estate agent with Baird & Warner in Crystal Lake, Illinois. That figure reflects more than high prices and elevated interest rates. It also reflects a generation reaching financial adulthood later. Many start careers later, build savings later, and ...
Three years ago, buying a home in Citrus County, Florida, meant competing for scarce inventory in a market where sellers had no reason to negotiate. That dynamic has reversed. For buyers, the shift in leverage may matter more than any change in prices. Bruce Brunk, an agent with The Citrus County Dream Team at Keller ...
In a market where mortgage rates have squeezed monthly budgets, buyers on Chicago’s West Side are making a trade that would have seemed unlikely a few years ago. They are choosing homes that need work over homes that are move-in ready. A lower purchase price means a lower mortgage payment. For many buyers, picking up ...
In Cincinnati, a home insured for decades can become hard to insure the moment it changes hands. Many houses built before the 1930s still have knob-and-tube wiring, an early electrical system that runs ungrounded wires along porcelain knobs and through porcelain tubes. Buyers of these homes often hit a barrier many buyers and sellers don’t ...
Filing a home renovation permit and waiting weeks only to receive a correction letter listing problems you never anticipated is a common experience for homeowners. Each rejection round costs money in architect fees, contractor delays, and carrying costs on a construction loan. Most people blame slow bureaucracy. The actual cause, according to people who work ...
When comparing two similar condos in competing HOA communities, the one with lower monthly dues looks like the better deal. The opposite is often true: artificially low dues are one of the clearest warning signs that a community is headed for a special assessment. Joe Braun, co-founder and CEO of Solume, an Atlanta-based platform that ...
In a tight housing market, it is easy to assume that sellers hold all the cards. Inventory is low, competition for good listings is real, and buyers in Northern Virginia have spent years feeling like they are on the losing end of every offer. But the assumption misses something important about who is actually listing ...
The policies getting the most attention in the national housing affordability debate — credit score competition, restrictions on institutional investors, streamlined credit reporting — share a common flaw: they target costs that are trivially small relative to the two forces actually driving affordability out of reach for most buyers. Those two forces are constrained housing ...
In the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, two houses on the same side of town can have opposite outcomes. One goes under contract in two or three weeks. The other sits for 90 or 100 days with barely a showing. The difference, according to Heather Gill, a residential agent with eXp Realty who works across Carrollton, Plano, ...
The classic first-time home purchase – a young adult saves up, qualifies for a mortgage, and buys a modest house alone – is fading in the Kansas City metro. Out of 14 first-time buyer transactions Shannon Doser closed over the past year, she estimates roughly 12 involved financial assistance from parents or grandparents. Doser, a ...
Out-of-state investors scanning social media for short-term rental opportunities in Salt Lake City are running into a problem on the ground: multiple areas across the valley and surrounding cities are already restricting or banning nightly vacation rentals, and local policy is moving toward more restrictions, not fewer. Nick Booth, a residential agent who works across ...
After years of weekend sales and bidding wars, well-maintained investment properties in strong Indianapolis neighborhoods are sitting for 30, 60, even 90 days, according to Gloria Gear, a realtor who has worked the city’s investor market for a decade. The shift is catching sellers off guard – especially investor-owners who assumed the fast-moving conditions of ...
Central New Jersey’s housing market is no longer moving in one direction. It is splitting by geography, and the dividing line is distance from New York City. A home search that crosses county lines can mean stepping from a bidding war into a market where sellers are cutting prices – sometimes within a 20-mile drive. ...
Today’s mortgage rates in the Columbus, Ohio, metro sit around seven to seven and a quarter percent, according to Barbara Gale, who leads the Gale Group in Dublin, Ohio, and has sold residential real estate in the market for decades. Buyers treat that figure as a dealbreaker. Gale sees it differently: the average mortgage rate ...
When a home seller in Southern California gets sued over a property defect, the assumption is usually that they failed to mention something entirely. But the more dangerous pattern is subtler: sellers who disclose part of a problem, thinking they have covered themselves, while leaving the full scope hidden. That half-measure, according to Zachary Schorr, ...
