Consumer

Lenders lose money on small mortgages. That single economic fact prices out the buyers who can least afford to be priced out – not through bias, but through arithmetic that treats a $100,000 loan the same as a $500,000 one in processing costs. According to Pavan Agarwal, President & CEO of Sun West Mortgage Company, ...

The conventional wisdom about empty nesters is simple: the kids leave, you sell the big house, you move somewhere smaller. In the Austin market right now, the opposite is happening. Retirees and late-career buyers are purchasing larger homes on the city’s outskirts – not to fill rooms with furniture, but to bring adult children and ...

In the D.C. metro area this summer, homes are sitting longer than they did a year ago. Many sellers instinctively slash the asking price. But that reflex may be costing them money. Time on market is not always a pricing problem. Sometimes the issue is presentation, timing, or simply the pace at which the right ...

When property taxes rise sharply in a market where rents cannot keep pace, landlords do not simply absorb the cost. They sell. In Montgomery County, Texas, that pattern is accelerating. It is creating a ripple effect: renters are displaced, the market floods with additional inventory, and buyers gain leverage. Maria Borrego, a Realtor with 20 ...

Across Polk County, Florida, days on market have stretched into the 90s and sellers are granting concessions on the majority of transactions. The surface data looks soft. But below $200,000, according to Jen Lay, team leader and listing specialist at The Lay Group with eXp Realty in Lakeland, the market operates under entirely different conditions ...

National headlines suggest property insurance is collapsing everywhere. Coverage is shrinking, premiums are skyrocketing, and owners are getting squeezed. According to Andrew Kowalske, Chief Product Officer at Blitz Insurance, the picture is more specific. Most markets are moving in a direction that favors property owners right now. Kowalske’s perspective comes from the excess and surplus ...

Many first-time buyers in San Antonio are following the same strategy: wait for lower mortgage rates, then buy. But that math may be missing a critical variable. The concessions and builder incentives available today exist precisely because the buyer pool is thin. When rates drop and more buyers enter the market, those perks disappear, and ...

When buyers cross the Hudson River from New York to Jersey City, most calculate their discount against Manhattan pricing, how much less per square foot they’ll pay compared to the island they just left. According to Patrick Southern, team leader at SERHANT (Properties by Southern) and a broker active in Jersey City since 2003, Manhattan ...

Homeowners trying to sell in Northern Virginia’s master-planned communities are discovering an uncomfortable competitive reality: the builder who sold them their home is still next door, offering incentives they cannot match. Federal job losses are accelerating the problem, pushing recent buyers onto the market before they have built any equity – and before the builder ...

Every spring, a fresh wave of buyers floods the North Jersey housing market. By August, many have quit, outbid repeatedly, watching homes sell for tens of thousands over asking, and deciding to try again next year. That annual attrition creates a quieter window in the fall. Not a buyer’s market, but a measurably less competitive ...

The assumption that larger down payments protect against foreclosure has shaped U.S. lending rules for decades. But recent research suggests the relationship between equity and default is far weaker than policymakers assumed – and that a different variable predicts mortgage failure more reliably. Alexei Alexandrov, Senior Advisor at the Housing Finance Policy Center at the ...

When rents climb, or new construction runs over budget, most people blame material costs or labor shortages. But in fast-growing Sun Belt metros, a less visible problem is inflating project budgets: the declining quality of architectural and engineering plans. Incomplete or poorly coordinated designs introduce confusion on job sites, trigger costly change orders, and push ...

After a 24-month boom in 2020 and 2021 that pushed annual home sales to 6 million units nationally, the real estate industry has settled into a prolonged flat stretch, around 4.1 million units annually for four consecutive years. The brokerages built for the boom never restructured for the plateau. According to Craig McClelland, a partner ...

Housing markets are supposed to move on big forces – interest rates, job growth, inventory levels. But in Dallas Fort Worth, the momentum building through early 2026 broke not because of a rate hike or a recession, but because gas jumped from $2.60 to $4 a gallon seemingly overnight. For buyers already stretched to their ...

Buyers relocating to southeast Florida’s beachside neighborhoods often assume that spending seven figures guarantees a polished, updated home. In East Hollywood and surrounding areas of Broward County, that assumption leads to serious budget miscalculations. The gap between purchase price and true move-in cost is one of the biggest surprises facing out-of-state buyers. Lilli Schipper, a ...