Market & Trends
The world of real estate investing moves quickly. Catch the must-know news, market information, and trends for the industry here.
Back To: All Topics
Market & Trends
The world of real estate investing moves quickly. Catch the must-know news, market information, and trends for the industry here.
Back To: All Topics
Top 5 Cities for First-Time Home Buyers
Certain things make a real estate market relatively more attractive to first-time homebuyers than another. For example, first-time buyers benefit from low down payments, which tend to be found in areas with affordable median home prices, multiple financing options, and good employment opportunities upon which to base their new household ...
Mortgage Rates Hit Four-Year High
According to Freddie Mac, national average mortgage rates rose to 4.38 percent last week on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. That rate, while still historically low, is the highest posted since April 2014. 15-year fixed-rate mortgage interest rates averaged 3.84 percent (up slightly from the previous week), and five-year hybrid adjustable-rate ...
“Buying Time” in Creative Ways
Ask a real estate investor why they left their “9-to-5,” and they’ll usually say something about having more time. Investors are, in many cases, parents and grandparents seeking more time with family. Just as often, they are passionate entrepreneurs and community servants seeking more time in which to enact their ...
Deal Funding with Credit Card Stacking
If you are a real estate investor and have been looking for capital to fund your real estate deals, there is a good chance you have heard of credit card stacking. Credit card stacking is the practice that credit brokers use to help individuals acquire credit by applying for multiple ...
What is Time to a Real Estate Investor?
Time itself is an investment. Often, you put in time for a very specific purpose or to achieve a certain goal. That goal could be to obtain more time. For real estate investors, the initial investment of your time may mean you later have additional days to spend with family ...
Take Heed, Housing Affordability Issue to Worsen
You might expect the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) to be happy to hear about inventory shortages since that means there is a need for more new construction. But the NAHB’s chief economist has a warning to accompany the association’s latest report on home prices, mortgage interest rates, and ...
Real Estate Agent Jailed Over Profitable Short Sale
When an Arizona real estate agent helped his parents purchase a distressed property from a motivated seller in 2012, he probably wasn’t thinking about bank fraud. In all likelihood, his main focus was on getting his parents a good deal on the property, which they bought for $580,000 in a ...
Markets that Will “Double Up” in 2018
Although home prices have been rising briskly in many markets across the country, the prospects for investors in these markets can be quite different from market to market. This is especially true for investors in rental properties who need a longer-term perspective than those rehabbing and reselling. Jobs are the ...
Predictive Analyst Names Two Picks for HQ2
Last year, New York University (NYU) marketing professor Scott Galloway predicted that Amazon would purchase Whole Foods. In June 2017, the internet behemoth did so. Now, Galloway has another big, Amazon-related prediction: “It all comes down to two locations [for HQ2]: It’s either going to be the metro area of ...
The Stock Market: What You Need to Know
Last week, Wall Street went a little crazy. After more than a year of steady growth, the time was certainly ripe for a correction in the market, and that is what the market gave investors last week. February started off with some turbulence, with the Dow closing on February 2, ...
Mack Brown To Kick Off Think Realty Conference In Dallas
Mack Brown, former head coach of the Texas Longhorns, will kick off the Think Realty Conference & Expo in Dallas happening February 24th and 25th, at the Westin Galleria Dallas Hotel! Attendees will learn time-saving tips, how to get their real estate businesses started, solidifying and scaling strategy and how ...
Mortgage Lending: Buyers Simply Do Not Understand
While most Americans state they believe owning a home is part of the American Dream, only about eight percent of the population reports having the basic knowledge to figure out if they can afford a home and obtain conventional financing in order to make the purchase. Ally Financial recently surveyed ...
Mortgage Industry’s Bad News, Good News for Investors
When LoanLogic’s senior vice president of industry relations and consulting, Les Parker, starts blogging about volatility, it pays off for real estate investors to listen. “This year is shaping up as a year of volatility,” he observed, going on to predict that loan originations would plunge “as interest rates rise ...
A Ponzi Scheme, the SEC and a Real Estate Developer
What housingwire.com calls a “Mini-Madoff,” Robert Shapiro, luxury real estate developer of the WoodBridge Group of Companies, created a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, pilfering more than 8,400 investors. A minimum of 2,800 of those investors used their IRAs personal retirement accounts for the investment. Shapiro resigned from his position shortly ...
The Time-Suck to Avoid at All Costs
No, it’s not Facebook. This time-suck is not even that two-hour lunch meeting or the team conferences that seem to invariably run over their designated 30, 60, or 90 minutes. It’s something far more insidious that is eating up your workday and decimating your productivity: the “gotta minute?” meeting. In ...
WSJ Stacks up HQ2 Cities with Some Disappointments
Last month, Amazon released its “short list” of 20 cities still in the running to host the web behemoth’s second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, which many analysts predict will revolutionize the winner’s local economy and turn an already thriving economy into a super-engine for growth. While all of the cities on ...
Las Vegas Lagging Behind in Home Appreciation
When Black Knight, Inc., released its most recent Home Price Index (HPI) Report, analysts immediately noted that 12 of the 40 largest U.S. metros hit new highs in home values by the end of 2017. That list included Boston, Massachusetts; Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas. Notably, it did not ...
Expert Warning: Private Lending Social Media Scam
LinkedIn is arguably the most “professional” of social media platforms and, as a result, many real estate investors doing due diligence look to the website to find out as much as possible about potential private lenders and investment partners before they team up. However, even LinkedIn has its weak points, ...
“The Worst Mistake Ever” Revealed to Texas Agent
Julie Ziglar Norman, a real estate agent with Dallas-based Prime Properties Realty and vice president of business development at Ziglar Inc., has seen a lot of things. The worst mistake she’s ever seen in real estate, however, nearly defies explanation. “I think the worst mistake I ever saw an investor ...
3 Actions to Start Self-Directing Your Retirement
“Most financial advisors will tell you that you simply cannot have a better lifestyle in retirement than you did while you were working full time. Most financial advisors are wrong.” So begins Edwin Kelly’s 60-minute training on exactly how real estate investors should begin self-directing their retirement. Kelly, CEO of ...
Lender Reveals Biggest Investor Challenge
When Jon Shipley, a Senior Vice President at Longhorn Investments, thinks about horror stories, he doesn’t think about ghouls and gore. Instead, he thinks about the poor decisions real estate investors make when choosing their contractors. “Making the wrong choice in a contractor can completely change the outcome of any ...
Free Yourself: Fuse Time, Tenants & Tech
Ask Linda Liberatore, the president of national property management company SecurePayOne, what the most important thing in life is, and she’ll answer without a second thought: time. “Time is our most important resource, our true wealth,” she explained. “You want to learn to take the breath, to step back and ...
KB Homes Debuts Germ-Free Doors
As flu season continues to wreak havoc and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issuing dire predictions about the number of flu-related deaths likely before the outbreak is over, national homebuilder KB Home has decided to keep up with the times by announcing its standard interior door ...
Think Realty Magazine February 2018
+ WHAT'S INSIDE Think Realty | News & Events •Member Benefits Coaches Corner | Panel in Print • How Food Delivery Could Change Everything About Commercial Real Estate Marketing | Using Digital Media to Sell Real Estate Cover Feature | Good Timing Runs in the Family Market Breakdowns | 2018 ...
3 Most and Least Affordable Rental Housing Markets
HomeUnion recently released its annual report on the most and least affordable rental housing markets in the country, and Chicago, Illinois, topped the list. “With its low cost of living, relatively large housing inventory levels, and high affordability, Chicago is an excellent market for residents entering the renting pool,” said HomeUnion’s director ...
