Every month we conduct hundreds of interviews with active market practitioners - thousands to date - publishing the insights that drive smarter real estate decisions.
Market Intelligence, Straight From the Source.
Real Estate Professional?
Join 4,500+ active industry professionals contributing expert insights across our media network.
Featured Articles
Spokane’s residential market has settled into a pattern that rewards discipline and punishes nostalgia. Sellers who list based on what they remember from a few years ago – when homes drew multiple offers within days – are finding that the market has moved on without them, according to Kim Hagel-Barkley of The Barkley Group in ...

The gap between Houston’s residential market and its coastal neighbor shows what happens when short-term rental speculation meets a correction. Harris County, Texas, currently has roughly six months of housing inventory – enough to classify it as a balanced-to-soft market where sellers need to price carefully and present homes in strong condition. But the sharper ...

The U.S. rental market built aggressively during the pandemic era, particularly in Sunbelt cities like Nashville, Austin, and Dallas. Now much of that new inventory, especially high-end apartments, is sitting partially empty, competing for renters whose budgets have tightened considerably since construction began. The disconnect is straightforward: developers built expensive Class A apartments in markets ...

In most American markets, holding a property for ten or twelve years builds a cushion of equity. In Manhattan, that assumption no longer holds across large segments of the market, according to Nikolay Afanasyev, Founder & CEO of CITY SPHERE Property Group, a boutique brokerage covering Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. Rising building carrying costs, ...

For buyers waiting on the largest purchase of their lives, the appraisal process is one of the last black boxes in a home purchase. Turnaround time isn’t a single number; it’s the sum of scheduling, inspection, report production, quality review, and any revision cycles that follow, and thin appraiser panels and uncontrolled revision cycles are ...

Consumer

A condo has long been the natural first step for budget-conscious buyers. It is usually cheaper than a detached home, requires less maintenance, and sits closer to urban job centers. But in Boulder, Colorado, and across the Denver metro area, many first-time buyers are skipping condos and choosing single-family homes instead. The reasons go beyond ...

Two homes listed at $400,000 in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro can carry noticeably different monthly mortgage payments, depending on the county or school district. The gap has nothing to do with the loan or the lender. It comes down to property taxes. Buyers who ignore that line item may misjudge what they can afford. Kristyn ...

In the suburbs north of Austin, Texas, builders are cutting prices so aggressively that some signed contracts are falling apart. Affordability and high interest rates still play a role. But Ahmad Homidi, a real estate agent with eXp Realty, says the pattern he is seeing right now is different. Buyers back out after a competing ...

When national builders offer rate buydowns, closing-cost credits, and upgrade packages to move inventory, buyers gain leverage. The incentive itself is a signal: the builder needs you more than you need the builder. In the custom luxury market of Wake Forest, North Carolina, those signals do not exist. That absence shapes how buyers negotiate. Dave ...

Buy a home in the San Francisco East Bay for $1.3 million, rent it for $4,500 a month, and the yield looks thin next to what lower-cost markets across the country deliver. This yield gap sends many investors elsewhere. Lisa Doyle argues they are using the wrong measure. A real estate professional at The Doyle ...

There is a growing divide in the Florida Keys housing market, and it runs along a single fault line: whether a buyer needs a mortgage. Cash buyers – many of them retirees and business owners from out of state – are driving the market’s strongest numbers. Buyers who depend on financing face compounding costs that ...
Industry Profiles

Distress hasn’t disappeared from Chicago’s housing market. Cook County recorded more foreclosure filings than any other county in the country in the first quarter of 2026, and nationwide foreclosure filings were still running double digits higher year-over-year through the middle of the year, according to ATTOM Data Solutions. But rising foreclosure filings don’t automatically translate ...

Across Houston’s suburban corridors, a painful math problem is playing out. Homeowners who bought during the pandemic-era rush, many of them paying $80,000 to $100,000 above what their properties are worth today, are finding that they cannot sell without taking a significant loss, according to Kelvin Louie, who leads KL Integrity Group, a Houston-based real ...

In a market where inventory has loosened and sellers are offering concessions, the expected result would be more transactions. In parts of North Texas, the opposite is happening. Qualified buyers are browsing for months, viewing dozens of homes, and declining to commit, not because they can’t find something, but because they can’t stop wondering whether ...

Stock portfolios get diversified. Bond holdings get diversified. Even alternative investments get spread across categories and geographies. But the single largest asset on most American household balance sheets – the home – sits as a fully concentrated position in one property, in one neighborhood, in one local market. Economists have been documenting the cost of ...

Properly priced homes in Miami-Dade and Broward counties are going under contract within weeks. Overpriced listings are sitting for months before sellers either cut or withdraw entirely. The gap between the two outcomes reveals less about market weakness than about seller psychology still anchored to peak-era comparables, according to Lawrence Resnick, a Realtor with The ...

The pandemic-era housing market in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex created price expectations that, for many sellers, have never recalibrated. In Garland and Rockwall County – two adjacent but structurally different submarkets east of Dallas – inventory has loosened, but transactions remain constrained by a basic disagreement between the two sides of the deal. Sellers remember ...
Perspectives

Buildings that broke ground during the low-rate environment of 2020 to 2022 are completing at once. The resulting inventory surge is pressuring landlords who expected to hold pricing power. Philadelphia’s rental market is absorbing this wave of new apartment inventory. Developers set it in motion years ago, when they locked in favorable financing during the ...

In Chicago’s south and west suburbs, the typical distressed seller no longer fits the familiar profile. These homeowners are current on their mortgages. They haven’t lost jobs or taken on reckless debt. The pressure forcing them out is the property tax bill. Rising insurance premiums and HOA fees have compounded the problem, according to Aaron ...

In central Collin County, Texas, homes priced between $1.3 million and $1.6 million sold briskly during the 2020–2022 run-up. Now they linger on the market. The reason is not poor condition or weak marketing. The buyer who once dominated that price band has disappeared from both directions. When the Middle Disappears According to Sean Elliott, ...

Roughly one-third of residential inventory in Manhattan does not sell on its initial listing and instead cycles through multiple brokers, according to Nikolay Afanasyev, Founder and CEO of City Sphere Property Group, a boutique brokerage covering Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. Afanasyev attributes the pattern primarily to sellers pricing properties above what the market will ...

A financing tool long reserved for community facilities has, according to one tribal housing official, been applied to tribal residential housing for what she describes as the first time. This could offset 20 to 25% of total project costs for tribes facing severe housing shortages and limited access to conventional capital. Alexandra Terry, Deputy Director ...

Rents in Chicago’s multifamily market are rising faster than in any other major U.S. market, according to Lawrence Dunning, a broker with The Dunning Team at Fulton Grace Realty. Yet buyers and sellers cannot agree on what buildings are worth. Rising construction costs and higher borrowing expenses have created a valuation standoff. Transaction volume is ...
Real Estate Investment

Buy a home in the San Francisco East Bay for $1.3 million, rent it for $4,500 a month, and the yield looks thin next to what lower-cost markets across the country deliver. This yield gap sends many investors elsewhere. Lisa Doyle argues they are using the wrong measure. A real estate professional at The Doyle ...

The fix-and-flip playbook that worked across the Ozarks for the past several years is breaking down. Homes are sitting close to 90 days on the market and closing roughly $10,000 below list price, according to Rachel Countryman, a residential and commercial agent with eXp Realty who works across southern Missouri. With buyers demanding move-in-ready condition ...

Small investors eyeing Orange County often default to the most familiar playbook: buy a single-family home, rent it out, build equity over time. But at Orange County’s current entry-level prices – $1.5 million to $2 million for a starter-to-mid-range home, according to Kathy Thomson, a residential agent with eXp Realty who has worked across Orange ...

Home prices across Chicago’s western suburbs remain high enough that short-term investors cannot execute the buy-low half of a flip. With roughly one and a half months of single-family inventory across DuPage County, according to Debbie Pawlowicz, owner and designated managing broker at DPG Real Estate Agency in Lisle, Illinois, sellers have little reason to ...

Buildings that broke ground during the low-rate environment of 2020 to 2022 are completing at once. The resulting inventory surge is pressuring landlords who expected to hold pricing power. Philadelphia’s rental market is absorbing this wave of new apartment inventory. Developers set it in motion years ago, when they locked in favorable financing during the ...

A financing tool long reserved for community facilities has, according to one tribal housing official, been applied to tribal residential housing for what she describes as the first time. This could offset 20 to 25% of total project costs for tribes facing severe housing shortages and limited access to conventional capital. Alexandra Terry, Deputy Director ...
Explore Categories
Get Our News and Company Updates
Sign up to our mailing list for KeyCrew’s latest reporting and company news, straight to your inbox.





