Consumer

Conventional wisdom says spring is when you sell a house. The flowers are blooming, the yard looks its best, and buyers are out in force. But in northern New Jersey, where inventory has been well below normal for years, waiting for April or May means walking into the heaviest competition of the year. Julia Gaffney, ...

Harris County, Texas, has roughly six months of housing inventory on the ground, and according to one 23-year Houston-area veteran, the slowdown feeding that surplus is not a brief dip. Sandra Marconi, a real estate agent and MAPS coach with Keller Williams in Houston, said the current environment could last far longer than most buyers ...

In Philadelphia’s residential market, the neighborhoods generating the most buzz are not necessarily the ones where buyers will see the strongest returns. Buyers willing to look past the most hyped areas and hold for at least five to seven years may do better in the less prominent blocks ringing Center City, according to Ariel Morgenstein, ...

When a home sits on the market for months, the instinct is almost always the same: cut the price. In San Antonio right now, where inventory is high and buyers have leverage, that instinct is costing sellers money. Many stale listings were never priced wrong in the first place, according to Janet Wingrove, team lead ...

Buying a home in New York City has long meant one thing financially: go to a bank, get a mortgage, close the deal. But in Queens, a different kind of listing is appearing more often – one where the seller, not a bank, holds the debt. For buyers struggling to qualify for traditional loans while ...

The assumption that New York City homeownership requires seven figures or generational wealth is so entrenched that many buyers never bother to look. But in the outer boroughs, entry-level properties are closing right now at prices that contradict that narrative entirely. Jonathan Ettricks, a Realtor with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Laffey International Realty, works across Queens, ...

When people talk about what is holding back the luxury housing market in Los Angeles, they tend to focus on interest rates and economic uncertainty. Adam Brawer, a residential agent focused on the west side of Los Angeles, points to a different factor: a local transfer tax that has compounded the rate-lock problem for sellers ...

Across the outer suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, new-construction builders are offering mortgage rates that start around five percent – well below what most buyers can get on the open market. The catch is that those homes sit in outlying communities where the drive to work, shopping, and services is significantly longer. For first-time buyers already ...

When a housing project costs $500,000 per unit, it looks like waste – unless half that money goes into building roads, water lines, and power infrastructure that most American communities already have. That distinction is at the heart of a funding dispute in southern Arizona, where the state denied a tribal housing authority’s tax credit ...

Below the luxury tier, Manhattan’s condo and co-op market has a mismatch problem. Buyers under $2 million overwhelmingly want units that are updated, low-cost to maintain, and ready to occupy on day one. But a large share of available inventory needs renovation – and sellers who have not adjusted prices for that reality are watching ...

For decades, home appraisals have arrived as dense, narrative-heavy documents filled with jargon that most buyers skim before handing back to their lender. A sweeping data-standards overhaul now rolling out across the industry is changing that – and according to Narainder Chandwani, Founder & CEO of apprAIz, a GSE-verified technology platform for appraisers, the new ...

When average home prices dip in a county-level report, the natural instinct is alarm. Your home is losing value. The market is softening. But in Collin County, Texas – one of the fastest-growing counties in North Texas – the headline numbers are telling a misleading story, according to one team that has been working the ...

Investors looking at affordable properties in Chicago’s south suburbs are running into an obstacle that does not show up in any listing: several villages have rewritten their rental standards in ways that effectively bar new investors from renting out properties within village limits, according to Aaron Gaines, a Realtor with Keller Williams Preferred Realty who ...

In conventional real estate, location drives price. A corner lot, a cul-de-sac, a waterfront view – these separate a quick sale from a lingering listing. But in the luxury motor coach resort market near Palm Springs, California, the improvements on a lot – not its position in the resort – create entirely separate seasonal markets, ...

In northern Bergen County, New Jersey, two nearly identical homes on the same street can sell months apart – one in a bidding war within a week, the other lingering with price reductions. The difference is not location, lot size, or school district. It is whether the kitchen has been updated and the bathrooms look ...