When developers in Delaware claim to build affordable housing, their prices often don’t match what nurses, grocery store clerks, and hospital aides can pay. According to George Meringolo, founder of Little Living, major builders price their lowest-cost homes at $300,000 to $350,000. That is well beyond the reach of workers earning $35,000 to $70,000 a ...
In parts of Arlington, Texas, a well-priced listing sells within days. A few miles away, comparable homes sit for 60 days or more without a serious offer. Both outcomes feed into the same citywide days-on-market average, which measures how long homes take to sell. According to Lauren Kerschen, founder of DFW’s Finest Real Estate Group, ...
Low defaults and a steady economy can make the mortgage market look safe. But periods of calm are often when lenders begin loosening the habits that keep risk in check – and the people best equipped to notice are increasingly absent from the rooms where those decisions get made. That is the view of Clifford ...
In most Sun Belt relocation stories, the destination is Florida. North Carolina’s Triangle region shows a different pattern. Students arrive for university, stay for jobs, and start families. Then their parents follow. Dave Harney has nearly 20 years of real estate experience with Coldwell Banker Advantage in the Wake Forest area. He says this multi-generational ...
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 ...
A nonprofit in Delaware is building cottage-style homes for roughly 25 to 30 percent less than what outside contractors would charge for the same work, according to its founder. That cost advantage drives some of the lowest rents and purchase prices in the state’s new housing pipeline. But the advantage depends almost entirely on one ...
Year-over-year home price declines near 20 percent in Austin, Texas, have made national news, painting a picture of a market in retreat. But that number blends two very different markets, according to Nitin Kumar, a residential agent and investor with eXp Realty in Austin. One is the established suburbs near Austin’s job centers. The other ...
Borrowers shopping for a mortgage tend to compare interest rates first, treating the lowest number as the best deal. But that instinct can backfire when a lower rate requires thousands of dollars in upfront fees to secure – fees that many homeowners never recoup before they sell. Sam Verma, who founded Cohivra, Inc., a mortgage ...
