Consumer

When a housing market softens, the instinct is to blame prices. Sellers priced too high. Buyers can’t afford current levels. Cut the price, move the home. But agents working the Fort Pierce and Port Saint Lucie corridor on Florida’s Treasure Coast argue the real bottleneck isn’t price; it’s employment. Without a deeper job base, the ...

In most housing markets, the home that sold down the street gives you a reasonable sense of what yours might fetch. In Greater Boston right now, that logic has broken down. Two nearly identical listings on the same block can produce wildly different outcomes, one drawing a bidding war, the other sitting for weeks with ...

A year or two ago, almost anything listed in Jupiter or Palm Beach Gardens sold fast. Today, agents working those zip codes describe a market that has split cleanly in two: turnkey homes still move, while properties that need renovation sit. The dividing line is no longer just price or location; it is condition, and ...

For decades, buying a rental property in the San Francisco Bay Area looked like a sure thing. Prices climbed, rents rose, and a two- or four-unit building could generate income while appreciating steadily. That calculus no longer holds. Expanding rent control laws and tenant protections have made multi-unit rental investing in parts of Silicon Valley ...

When buyers relocate to the Buffalo area, they tend to gravitate toward the same well-known suburbs: Amherst, Williamsville, and the established neighborhoods of North Buffalo. Grand Island, sitting on a river island accessible only by bridge, gets overlooked by people who did not grow up near it. Agents who work the area say that oversight ...

Multifamily properties in Northern New Jersey are selling fast and well above asking price. That activity looks like a clear signal to investors, but agents working the market argue that the bidding intensity is outrunning the fundamentals for buyers who need to finance, and that the gap between what these properties are selling for and ...

The purchase prices look almost too good to be true. In Newburgh, New York, a small Hudson Valley city of roughly 30,000 people spanning three square miles, properties can be listed for figures that would barely cover a parking spot in Manhattan. Investors who spot those numbers on a spreadsheet often assume the hard part ...

Walk into certain manufactured home communities in Central Florida, and you’ll find homes built in the early 1980s selling for prices that would surprise most buyers who’ve written off the category entirely. The assumption – that manufactured homes lose value the way a used car does, steadily and without recovery, is one that brokers working ...

For most of its history as a second-home destination, the Hudson Valley ran on a single engine: New York City money. That engine is still running, but it is no longer the only one, and the change is starting to affect what gets built, what gets bought, and what prices look like at the top ...

Buying a vacation rental property on Marco Island sounds straightforward: a resort island that swells from 17,000 year-round residents to more than 60,000 during peak season, with a steady stream of visitors who need somewhere to stay. The demand case is obvious. What’s less obvious, and what catches investors off guard, is that some of ...

Having the money to buy a multimillion-dollar home in Silicon Valley turns out to be only part of the challenge. The other part, the part that surprises many buyers who arrive in the market for the first time, is learning how to compete in a system that does not reward wealth alone. Agents working at ...

Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet sit just a few miles apart on the South Carolina coast, but buyers and sellers treating them as interchangeable in mid-2026 are working from the wrong map. The inventory picture, the pace of sales, and the type of buyer each community attracts have diverged sharply enough that strategy in one ...

US buyers shopping for a second home or investment property abroad have historically gravitated toward the familiar: a beach condo in Mexico, a pied-à-terre in Europe, a vacation property in the Caribbean. But brokers working in international new development sales are seeing demand land in less expected places, and Costa Rica’s luxury resort corridor is ...

When buyers from high-cost cities start looking for affordable alternatives, they tend to focus on price. What many underweight, and what real estate professionals working in Birmingham say matters more, is the question of what actually drives the local economy and whether that foundation is likely to hold. Gene Darden, a broker and team leader ...

Not long ago, fire insurance was an afterthought in a Los Angeles home sale. Buyers would get to the final days of escrow, the escrow officer would flag that coverage was not yet in place, and everyone would scramble to sort it out before closing. That scramble is over. Insurance has moved to the front ...