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
Is Villainous ARM Making a Second Grab?
With mortgage rates rising, more and more homebuyers are considering something that most probably thought out of the question: taking on an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) in order to make a home sooner than they otherwise could. ARMs (and the lenders who originated them) received a large portion of the blame ...
Total U.S. properties with foreclosure filings had a noticeable decrease of 18 percent in November, per a report from ATTOM Data Solutions, parent company of Realty Trac. The total 86,561 foreclosure filings in November was down 18 percent from the previous month and down 17 percent from one year ago ...
BEWARE! If you own an apartment building or other commercial structure that was constructed in the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s, you need to be aware of potential PCB contamination and any liability associated with it. PCBs could be the new "asbestos" in apartments and commercial buildings, as well as in ...
A Look Ahead to Existing Home Sales for 2017
Existing home sales probably won’t increase much in 2017, according to a new forecast from the National Association of Realtors and its fourth-quarter Housing Opportunities and Market Experience (HOME) survey. A majority of renters - 57 percent - say now is a good time to buy a house but that’s down ...
Rising Home Values Mean Fewer Underwater Mortgages
About 11 percent of U.S. homeowners were underwater on their mortgage during the third quarter, down from 13.4 percent a year prior, Zillow reports. That’s great news if you consider where things stood a few years ago. Back in early 2012, about 15.7 million Americans owed more on their mortgages ...
Starter Home Inventory Continues to Dry Up
The supply of U.S. starter home inventory has dropped off 12.1 percent since a year prior. The steepest year-to-year decline in three years, according to the latest Trulia Inventory and Price Watch. And if first-time buyers are able to find a house they like, it will consume about 38.5 percent ...
Experts Doubt Airbnb-Style Services Hurt Housing Inventory
Do short-term-rental services like Airbnb and HomeAway make it harder for average renters to find affordable housing? Zillow decided to ask housing experts. According to the new Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey, most of them don’t believe short-term rentals are the root of the inventory shortage. Only about 5 percent ...
Just Who Is Treasury Pick Steven Mnuchin?
How much do you know about President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Cabinet nominee Steven Mnuchin? Senate confirmation will put former Wall Street insider Mnuchin at the helm of the Treasury Department. As chief, he would be in charge of the nation's finances, policy, banking regulations and the IRS. His name would ...
Trulia’s American Dream Survey Reveals 2017 Insights
Renewed Republican optimism. Fewer Millennials believing homeownership is part of their American Dream. And the Sunshine state, Florida, dominating the housing market’s “to watch” list for 2017. These are just a few items revealed in Trulia’s American Dream Survey, with results published in the company’s annual 2017 Housing Outlook Report ...
Home-Flipping Cools Off in Q3 2016
U.S. home-flipping activity decreased in the third quarter of 2016, after hitting a six-year high in the previous quarter, according to a new report from ATTOM Data Solutions. ATTOM Data Solutions is the parent company of RealtyTrac and curator of the nation’s largest fused property database. The Q3 2016 Home ...
Little Movement in Pending Home Sales
Pending home sales — deals involving existing homes where the contract has been signed, but the transaction hasn’t closed—were up slightly in October, according to the National Association of Realtors. The NAR’s Pending Home Sales Index was up 0.1 percent on a monthly basis, and 1.8 percent higher than October ...
Fewer Purchase Loans, More Refi in Q3
Home loan originations were down about 2 percent in the third quarter compared to the second, though up 1 percent compared to a year earlier. The value of the loans was bigger, too—$502 billion, 8 percent higher than the same timeframe in 2015. If you dig deeper into the numbers, ...
New Single-Family Home Sales Down
Sales of new single-family homes—which had been trending up since 2015—dipped 1.9 percent in October, according to the National Association of Home Builders. The NAHB’s report was based on data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau. “Though slightly down from last month, ...
As more and more homebuyers look to parents and other sources for the lump sums required to make a down payment on a new home, the idea of down-payment assistance is becoming more familiar in the housing sector. However, any time that assistance goes undocumented with the mortgage lender, you’re ...
Good Times for Sellers … Won’t Last Forever
It’s an amazing time for sellers, but the momentum is expected to shift to buyers by 2018 or 2019, according to a Zillow survey of housing experts. In October, the median U.S. home value of $191,200 was up 6.2 percent compared to a year earlier, thanks partly to a 6 percent ...
A Facebook Face-Off About Housing
Facebook doesn’t shy away from a problem, even one as big as California’s affordable housing crisis. The social media giant recently announced that it would begin combatting its home state’s massive lack of affordable housing squarely in the most expensive metro area in the country, San Jose, where the median ...
Will Trump Really Dismantle Dodd-Frank?
As the Trump presidency takes hold, the debate over Dodd-Frank is growing. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to dismantle the banking reform act. Fed Chief Janet Yellen has promised to defend it. Congress has the power to change it. And, the battle has already begun. The House just passed an ...
Trump Taps Carson for HUD Secretary Position
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated retired neurosurgeon, outspoken Obamacare opponent and former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson for the position of U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). By tapping Carson for the position, Trump diverges once again from the “norm” of appointing individuals with bureaucratic experience in government ...
Rental Vacancy Increase in October 2016
Morningstar Credit Ratings has recently published its Single-Family Rental Performance Report for November 2016 showing vacancies increased to 5.2 percent in October while transactions worked through the summer’s increased lease expirations. Rental properties backing single-family rental securitizations increased by 4.4 percent from prior contractual rents. They are now below the ...
U.S. Home Refi Originations Increase
ATTOM Data Solutions’ newly released U.S. Residential Property Loan Origination Report for Q3 2016 shows more than 1.9 million loans – 1,919,180 – were originated on U.S. residential properties. This is down 2 percent from the previous quarter and up less than 1 percent from last year. Purchase originations were ...
Red-States for the Win: Why Blue-State Investors Buy Elsewhere
No matter what side of the political aisle you prefer, odds are that when it comes to your real estate investment portfolio, your choices tend to be more red than blue. A recent report from ATTOM Data Solutions indicates that although deep-blue California is home base for a vast population of ...
7 Ways Landlords Could Benefit from a Trump Administration
Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2017, with plans to fully “shake things up” on Capitol Hill. Whether he can pull that off remains to be seen. No one really knows what the future holds, but we do have ...
Scaling the Wall of Maturities
A significant portion of outstanding commercial and multifamily mortgages held by CMBS-backed lenders were to mature in 2016-17—an upcoming “wall of maturities.” Online marketplace lenders have a place in sorting out these pre-Recession commercial loans. After-Effects of the Great Recession A huge number of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) conduit loans ...
5 Things We’re Thankful for in Today’s Real Estate Market
When William Arthur Ward wrote that “gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings…and change ordinary opportunities into blessings,” it is a near certainty that he did not have the 2016 housing market in mind. However, as a self-described “Christian optimist,” there is little doubt that were he still opining in ...
Where Out-of-State Investors Live and Buy
About 16 percent of the nation’s single-family rental homes - or 3.4 million properties - are owned by out-of-state investors, according to a new study from ATTOM Data Solutions. In many cases, ATTOM found investors lived in blue states with hotter housing markets and were buying in red states where properties ...
