Iowa Real Estate News,
From the Experts on the Ground.

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 ...

Tracy, California, has built its housing market on a simple bargain: drive an hour to a Bay Area job, get twice the house for half the price. But that bargain is under pressure. Interest rates have climbed, the broader economy has softened, and the rising cost of gasoline and diesel has made long commutes harder ...

Buyers evaluate a home based on what exists right now – the school down the road, the fire station response time, the condition of the nearest interchange. But in fast-growing small counties, what the local government is building today may matter more to long-term property values than anything visible on a drive-through. In New Kent ...

In a city where home values climbed sharply during the pandemic, some Austin agents are now telling sellers to stay off the market. The advice runs against the industry’s transactional incentives, but the logic is direct: in several Austin price ranges, the buyer pool has thinned enough that listing now risks closing below purchase price. ...

A self-employed borrower whose business deposits fifty thousand dollars a month can look, on a conventional mortgage application, like someone earning three thousand. That gap between actual cash flow and qualifying income is pushing business owners in the Chicago area out of the mortgage market entirely – not because they lack the money, but because ...

The path to a first home in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs has always required compromise. But the gap between what younger buyers want and what they can actually afford has stretched to a point where many are simply not buying, according to Karen Wydra, a 25-year residential agent with Ebby Halliday working the Garland and ...