Home buyers searching along New Jersey’s commuter corridor often assume that if two towns are a mile apart, they must work roughly the same way. Same commute times, similar schools, comparable price dynamics. That assumption is one of the most expensive mistakes buyers make in this region, according to Sawyer Smith, Founder & Principal Broker ...
Ocean County’s Whiting and Manchester areas have long drawn retirees with a simple promise: dramatically lower property taxes than North Jersey. A single-family home here might carry an annual tax bill of $1,800, compared to $14,000 in Essex County for a similar property, according to Kenneth Freeman, a Realtor Associate and Senior Housing Specialist with ...
A narrative is building around Tampa Bay: that the city is on a trajectory to become Florida’s next premium market, rivaling Miami in desirability and price. Corporate relocations, data center construction, and population growth fuel the comparison. But for buyers evaluating Tampa today, the “next Miami” framing may obscure more than it reveals, and purchase ...
For a brief window when mortgage rates hovered near 3 percent, buying a vacation rental condo on Maui was straightforward math. Borrow cheap money for 30 years, collect nightly rental income that comfortably exceeded carrying costs, and build equity in a place you could visit a couple of weeks a year. The numbers worked on ...
Something quiet has been happening in the northern New Jersey housing market. Buyers who spent the past two years waiting for mortgage rates to fall back toward three percent are starting to move anyway, not because rates dropped, but because life did not wait. That shift in buyer psychology may matter more to the near-term ...
The story of people leaving big cities for Montana took hold during the early 2020s and became familiar shorthand for a certain kind of relocation. What is less understood from outside the state is that the profile of who is arriving in Whitefish has continued to change even as the headline narrative has stayed the ...
The balance of power in Northern Colorado’s housing market has tilted toward buyers, and sellers are feeling it. Buyers are arriving at the table more prepared than ever, and what they are asking for has changed in ways that would have been unusual just a couple of years ago. Sellers who resist these new expectations ...
When a housing market loses its outside buyers, prices feel it. That is the situation unfolding in Topanga Canyon right now, where a series of disruptions over the past two years has filtered the buyer pool down to people who already know the area, and shrunk it considerably. Agents working the canyon say the implications ...
First-time buyers in Conway, Arkansas, are running out of options, and the problem is more structural than cyclical. The forces squeezing entry-level buyers are not temporary, and buyers hoping conditions will ease soon may be waiting a long time. Emily Walter, executive broker and team lead at The Emily Walter Team under RE/MAX Elite, has ...
Thousands of people relocate to Florida every year without a clear picture of what owning a home there actually costs, and the gap between expectation and reality can be expensive. The sticker price on the home is only the beginning. Agents who specialize in out-of-state relocation are flagging a consistent pattern: buyers arrive focused on ...
Scroll through any real estate site in South Florida right now, and you will see a growing number of properties flagged as pre-foreclosure or carrying a lis pendens notice, a legal filing indicating a pending lawsuit, often related to mortgage default. It looks like a pipeline of distressed deals building up. But agents working the ...
The East Bay housing market is not one market right now; it is two, and they are behaving like strangers. At the high end, buyers with strong stock portfolios are spending freely, pushing sale prices past comparable homes. At the entry level, first-time buyers in the million-dollar range are hesitating, held back not by price ...
In a county with roughly 1.9 million taxable parcels, the vast majority of homeowners never challenge their assessed value. Property tax attorneys in the Chicago area say that inaction is far costlier than a failed appeal. The argument is simple: filing an appeal has no downside and a meaningful upside, yet most people skip it ...
If you own an older home in the Jacksonville or St. Augustine area and are thinking about a major renovation – expanding for a growing family, adapting for aging in place, or updating a property built decades ago – you may find the process takes longer than expected. One reason has nothing to do with ...
