Mortgage rates above six percent have buyers waiting on the sideline, but the wait itself may be the most expensive decision they make. According to Marty Medve, Co-Owner & Principal Broker at Trident Home Loans, the pattern has repeated across three rate cycles over 25 years: when rates drop even modestly, pent-up demand floods the ...
When most people think about insuring a home near the coast, they picture flood zones and waterfront properties. But buyers in New Jersey’s Monmouth and Ocean counties are running into a different problem – one that catches people off guard. Standard homeowners insurance, the basic coverage every mortgage lender requires, has become harder to obtain ...
People still move to Florida expecting a bargain. No state income tax, warm weather, reasonable home prices – that was the pitch for decades. But buyers relocating to Tampa Bay in 2026 are discovering a cost structure that the listing price doesn’t reveal: insurance premiums driven up by hurricane risk, property taxes that run higher ...
Raw land has spent most of the last few years as a quiet inflation hedge, a finite, tangible asset that investors treat as reliable protection against inflation because the cost of land tends to rise alongside the cost of everything else. Rural land prices in particular held firm through 2025 and into 2026, with no ...
Two towns can sit the same distance from Manhattan, offer the same dining and entertainment, and line the same river, yet trade at prices that differ by a factor of three. That gap, playing out right now between New Hope and Easton along Pennsylvania’s Delaware River corridor, illustrates how housing density and supply constraints create ...
Six months ago, Vero Beach’s barrier island market was still absorbing a pricing correction that had brought values 20 to 30 percent off their peaks. That correction has now translated into transaction volume that few coastal Florida markets are matching. Single-family closings in the 32963 zip code rose 27.9 percent in the first seven months ...
Dallas-Fort Worth continues to attract relocating buyers at a steady pace, but the market’s central tension in 2026 has little to do with demand. The challenge is on the supply side, specifically, the volume of new construction inventory that has accumulated since the post-COVID building boom and is now pulling buyers away from existing homes. ...
Banks price foreclosure homes to attract owner-occupants, but most of those homes cannot pass the appraisals that owner-occupants need to get a mortgage. The result, according to Janet Knopp, Principal Broker / Agent at Capital Region Preferred Properties LLC, is a market where REO properties sit in limbo, wanted by two buyer types but workable ...
During the post-COVID frenzy, entry-level buyers in Arizona’s West Valley were effectively priced out, not always by the home itself, but by the terms surrounding it. Prices ran up, sellers refused to help with closing costs, and the math didn’t work for someone who’d scraped together a down payment but had nothing left over. According ...
A population that doubles sounds like guaranteed appreciation. More people means more demand, which means your home is worth more, right? That is the assumption many buyers carry into fast-growing markets. But in Collier County, Florida, where local economic development officials project the population could double within the next eight to ten years, the math ...
In most housing markets, down payment assistance helps first-time buyers close a gap they could eventually bridge on their own. In Baltimore City in 2026, it has become the deciding factor in whether a finished rehab sells or sits, according to Salinda Adams, a Realtor and home improvement contractor at United Real Estate Executives who ...
When buyers look at Chicago and see property tax rates pushing toward 2 percent – sometimes higher in the suburbs, most recoil. But according to Chris Katsulis, Founder & Team Leader of the C. Thomas Group at The Nav Agency in Chicago, that heavy tax burden may be doing homeowners a favor by suppressing the ...
For most sellers, pricing a home “at market value” sounds like the responsible move. Pull comps, match the range, list. But in parts of West Austin right now, pricing at market value is functionally the same as overpricing, and sellers who want to move their homes in a reasonable timeframe need to list below it. ...
Homeowners in Lake Nona, Florida, who purchased between 2021 and 2023 and then refinanced to pull out equity are now discovering they cannot sell without writing a check at closing. The pattern is still small in scale, but it carries echoes of a much larger crisis, and it is already showing up in closed transactions. ...
In most housing markets, the question “what did that house sell for?” anchors every negotiation. Buyers pull comps, sellers cite recent closings, and both sides argue over which sale best reflects current value. But in North Texas, a nondisclosure state where sold prices never appear on public records, that anchor barely exists. As of mid-2026, ...
