Consumer

The assumption that larger down payments protect against foreclosure has shaped U.S. lending rules for decades. But recent research suggests the relationship between equity and default is far weaker than policymakers assumed – and that a different variable predicts mortgage failure more reliably. Alexei Alexandrov, Senior Advisor at the Housing Finance Policy Center at the ...

When rents climb, or new construction runs over budget, most people blame material costs or labor shortages. But in fast-growing Sun Belt metros, a less visible problem is inflating project budgets: the declining quality of architectural and engineering plans. Incomplete or poorly coordinated designs introduce confusion on job sites, trigger costly change orders, and push ...

After a 24-month boom in 2020 and 2021 that pushed annual home sales to 6 million units nationally, the real estate industry has settled into a prolonged flat stretch, around 4.1 million units annually for four consecutive years. The brokerages built for the boom never restructured for the plateau. According to Craig McClelland, a partner ...

Housing markets are supposed to move on big forces – interest rates, job growth, inventory levels. But in Dallas Fort Worth, the momentum building through early 2026 broke not because of a rate hike or a recession, but because gas jumped from $2.60 to $4 a gallon seemingly overnight. For buyers already stretched to their ...

Buyers relocating to southeast Florida’s beachside neighborhoods often assume that spending seven figures guarantees a polished, updated home. In East Hollywood and surrounding areas of Broward County, that assumption leads to serious budget miscalculations. The gap between purchase price and true move-in cost is one of the biggest surprises facing out-of-state buyers. Lilli Schipper, a ...

The broader Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) housing market has cooled. Listings are sitting longer, buyers are pickier, and the negotiating balance has shifted. But one segment in the Frisco-McKinney corridor is defying that trend: distinctive, high-end properties on unusual lots. While generic inventory stalls, homes with irreplaceable features are still moving quickly, even above the million-dollar ...

In the retirement communities of Coachella Valley, two homes with the same floor plan, the same square footage, and the same street can sell $100,000 apart. The difference has nothing to do with location or timing. It comes down to whether the owner kept up with maintenance or let it slide for decades. John Gonnello, ...

Over the past decade, private flood insurance has grown steadily as an alternative to the federal National Flood Insurance Program. For homeowners in flood-prone areas, the appeal is obvious: potentially lower premiums, sometimes broader coverage, and a familiar private-market experience. But many buyers don’t discover the trade-off until it’s too late. Private carriers can cancel ...

Waterfront and vacation properties along Lake Conroe, Lake Livingston, and the Gulf Coast from Crystal Beach through Jamaica Beach are sitting in saturated inventory – and many owners who purchased during the recent boom cannot recover their investment at current prices. For owners who treated second homes as a store of value, the math has ...

A lender tells you that you qualify for $350,000. You start browsing listings at that number. Within weeks, you are under contract on a home that stretches your monthly budget past the point of comfort. In the affordable Houston suburbs, this pattern is playing out repeatedly in 2026 – and the borrowers most at risk ...

Building an ADU in a Los Angeles backyard has always meant one financial path: rent it out. A homeowner could house a family member or find a tenant, but selling the unit as standalone property required a costly lot split. A policy change already active in parts of California may eliminate that barrier, turning backyard ...

Short-term rentals made small-scale landlording look easy for years. Buy a house, list it on Airbnb, collect nightly rates that dwarf a traditional lease payment. But in Houston, experienced brokers are now steering investor clients away from that model entirely, and toward a strategy called co-sharing that trades flashy nightly rates for something harder to ...

Every time a home goes on the market in the United States, the listing data – price, photos, square footage, descriptions – enters a multiple listing service. From there, that data gets copied. According to Tim Dain, President & CEO of NorthstarMLS, the regional MLS serving Minnesota, some MLS databases get replicated hundreds or even ...

Sellers in Austin are conceding something on nearly every deal right now. But the form those concessions take determines how much value buyers actually capture. According to Joel Richardson, VP & Branch Manager at First Community Mortgage’s Austin office, buyers who direct concessions toward closing costs rather than price reductions get significantly more from the ...

If you’re shopping for a home in one of the fast-growing communities on the edges of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the math on building equity looks very different than it did a few years ago. The typical three-to-five-year ownership timeline, long considered enough to build a cushion before selling, may leave you competing directly against ...