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 ...
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 ...
A lender tells you that you qualify for $350,000. You start browsing listings at that number. Within weeks, you are under contract on a home that stretches your monthly budget past the point of comfort. In the affordable Houston suburbs, this pattern is playing out repeatedly in 2026 – and the borrowers most at risk ...
The challenge facing homeowners trying to sell in North Texas isn’t soft demand; it’s that builders down the street are offering rate buydowns and design credits that no individual seller can easily match. Across Collin County’s fast-growing suburbs, Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, Celina, Melissa, new construction communities continue to expand. Those builders routinely offer incentives worth ...
The Coachella Valley real estate market is splitting along price lines. Properties above $1 million are still moving. Below $500,000, activity has slowed noticeably, a dynamic that complicates the conventional wisdom about retirement destinations as uniformly resilient markets. John Gonnello, a Realtor with HomeSmart Professionals in Palm Desert, California, has spent close to 40 years ...
The Austin housing market has shifted far enough toward buyers that seller concessions now appear on virtually every purchase contract crossing a lender’s desk. That alone marks a reversal for a market that, just two and a half to three years ago, required buyers to close in two to three weeks or risk losing a ...
The conventional wisdom about Houston real estate centers on its sprawling suburban subdivisions and energy-sector wealth. But in 2026, the market’s most active corridors aren’t in the established inner suburbs; they’re in communities like Crosby, Magnolia, Waller, and Dayton, where buyers are trading proximity for acreage, lower flood risk, and significantly more house per dollar ...
Houston’s housing market sits in an unusual position among major U.S. metros. The fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country has maintained modest positive home price growth while cities like Austin and Dallas have undergone post-pandemic price corrections. But that relative stability masks a growing tension on the ground: resale sellers are struggling to compete with ...
Balanced market data can mask what’s actually happening on the ground. In Cypress, Texas, one of northwest Houston’s fastest-growing suburbs, the numbers through July 2026 show stable pricing and no clear advantage for buyers or sellers. But according to Andrea Curran, Team Leader of The Andrea Curran Team at Compass, something shifted around the first ...
In lower Westchester County, New York, the supply-demand imbalance that defined the pandemic-era housing market has not corrected. At the million-dollar price point in White Plains, the county’s urban center, homes are moving in nine to twelve days. The driver is not speculation or pandemic migration. It is a structural relationship between Manhattan’s cost of ...
Seller concessions in San Antonio have shifted from rare to routine. Builders are covering closing costs and upgrades. Resale sellers are addressing deferred maintenance they once ignored. And buyers, particularly first-timers and millennials entering the market, are negotiating terms that did not exist when inventory was tighter. The dynamic is familiar across Sun Belt markets ...
Sellers in Austin are conceding something on nearly every deal right now. But the form those concessions take determines how much value buyers actually capture. According to Joel Richardson, VP & Branch Manager at First Community Mortgage’s Austin office, buyers who direct concessions toward closing costs rather than price reductions get significantly more from the ...
Buyers shopping for homes in Chino, California, face a gap of $25,000 to $40,000 depending on whether they choose new construction or resale, a gap created by builder incentives that resale sellers cannot match. According to Thomas Ryan, a Realtor with Thomas Ryan Real Estate at Real Broker who focuses on the Chino and Chino ...
In most markets, falling inventory pushes prices up and accelerates sales. In South Florida, that relationship has broken down. Inventory is thinning, but buyers aren’t competing for what remains; they’re waiting, unwilling to pay current carrying costs for homes that don’t meet their standards. The result is a market that feels slow across segments despite ...
