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Latest Real Estate News
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Like housing markets overall, the market for luxury homes is growing tighter as the spring buying progresses. Though still a buyer's market, the ILHM Luxury Housing Report for last week shows a pattern of rising prices and fewer days on market since the first of the year.
Eleven of the nation's 20 largest metro areas based on population documented annual increases in foreclosure activity, led by the Florida cities of Tampa (59 percent) and Miami (38 percent). Other cities with increases included St. Louis (29 percent), Chicago (26 percent), Philadelphia (24 percent), and Atlanta (21 percent).
Closed sales were 4.1 percent higher in April than a year earlier, continuing a ten month run of year-over-year sales increases in the 53 markets tracked by the RE/MAX National Housing Report.
In April lenders loosened up slightly on the loan-to-value ratio used to make approval decisions on mortgage refinance applications. However, but the lid is still screwed down tightly on purchase mortgages used to buy homes, according to the Ellie Mae Origination Insight Report.
The national for-sale inventory of single family homes, condos, townhomes and co-ops fell to the lowest level since 2007 in April, providing further evidence that the inventory draw down is continuing into the spring home buying season.
This year homeowners are paying, on average, $128 more per year for new homeowners insurance policies than they were at the beginning of the year. In some states, rates are up as much as 39 percent.
Pro Teck Valuation Services' May HomeValueForecast.com Update has some good news for many metro areas hardest hit by price declines may be recovering due to increasing home sales and reduced inventories of homes, including Midwestern Rust Belt markets like Detroit, Peoria, and Troy, MI.
It may be hard to believe, but the dramatic drawdown in inventories during this spring buying season is bringing some cries of "housing shortage" from hotter markets around the county. But is there solid evidence to support such a claim?
Short sales, once a rare event in local real estate market, today are nearly as prevalent as foreclosures as lenders seek to avoid adding to their foreclosure inventories and troubled homeowners opt for a faster way out of default.
When the bottom arrives in the mythical national housing market some time later this year, how far will we be from the heady peaks of the real estate boom when prices were at their zenith?
Standard and Poor's Rating Services' estimates that the time it will take to clear the supply of distressed homes, or the shadow inventory, on the U.S. market is now 46 months. For the city with the greatest estimate of the time it will take to clear its inventory of foreclosures and short sales, New York City, it will take 202 months, or nearly 17 years.
It's no secret that this is a good time to buy, but more and more sellers are beginning to think that it's also getting to be a good time to buy… at least better than it was six months ago.
Job seekers who give up looking for employment are not counted as unemployed. They become invisible to the statisticians, but when the job picture improves, as it has in recent months, they flood employment lines and have a huge, unforeseen impact on unemployment rates.
For years, the Washington metro area has ranked high on every list of the nation's hottest markets. Now, however, the region's multiple listing service, MRIS, is holding its breath and closely monitoring the situation as a wave of backlogged foreclosures freed by the resolution of the Robogate processing scandal prepares to wash over local markets and threaten vulnerable jurisdictions.
March foreclosure starts increased a modest 8.1 percent in March over February while foreclosure sales continued to behave somewhat erratically, dropping to their lowest level since December 2010, and most sharply in non-judicial states.
