News / Features
In another marker of the housing market’s recovery, the Federal Housing Administration announced last week that its reserves were back in line with federal requirements. The FHA stated that its insurance fund’s net worth at the end of September was
Last Thursday, Federal Housing Administration Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Ed Golding and National Association of Realtors President Chris Polychron announced changes to FHA condominium policies at the NAR national conference in San Diego. The changes, Golding explained, will change the FHA’s recertification process, owner-occupancy
Single family? Condo? 2,000-plus square feet? What defined the homes consumers bought this year? For our latest story in our continuing series on NAR’s 2015 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, we’re taking a detailed look at the homes
October provided yet more evidence of how integral multifamily building is to the current new construction economy October was a rough month for new construction, with housing starts falling 11 percent from September and 1.8 percent from Oct. 2014
The share of total residential real estate transactions carried out in all cash fell from 34.9 percent in Aug. 2014 to 31.7 percent this most recent August, according to a report from CoreLogic. Month-over-month, cash sales inched upward by
Marilyn Thompson, the vice president of sales at Martha Turner Sotheby’s International Realty, will be the brokerage’s new president. Thompson graduated from Louisiana State University and taught for seven years in Houston public schools. She then began her career in real
Is our love for large homes nullifying the progress in energy efficiency? Thanks to new technological advances in water use, insulation, heating and cooling and household appliances, today’s homes are more energy efficient than ever before. Yet new research
The mortgage process doesn’t often top the list of things people like to do, but as far as dealing with banks and moneymen go, customers are more approving of the mortgage process now than any other time in the
Many want to own a house, but the finances are only feasible for an increasingly select few It is a truth universally acknowledged that the vast majority of renters in America aspire to homeownership. Indeed, according to a recent
After some very positive months, builder confidence took a step back in November Builder confidence in the market for newly constructed single-family homes slipped three points to 62 from October to November in the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo
In WalletHub’s 2015 list of the best and worst school systems in America, Texas ranked among the bottom half of states, coming in at No. 27 overall – and No. 31 when only “quality” was considered. However, despite the
U.S. companies now hold 487 million barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly report. The figure is significant because it represents the highest stock for early November in at least 80 years, and has major
NAR and RPR push forward with Upstream initiative The National Association of Realtors and Realtors Property Resource have made an agreement with UpstreamRE LLC to develop a cross-industry platform for real estate data entry, collection and distribution for real
What does the typical homebuyer look like in 2015? Earlier this week, we reported on first-time homebuyers, and how they are now at their lowest market share since 1987. That information came courtesy of the 2015 Profile of Home Buyers
The investor-market dynamic has shifted since the boom and bust years. Returns are no longer astronomical and scooping up discounted foreclosures isn’t as easy as it once was, but the promise of profit has far from dried up, as
Houston’s exurbs, with their relatively low cost of living, are becoming hubs for new residents, according to a new report by Joel Kotkin in Forbes. Kotkin notes that last year, almost 80 percent of the Houston metro area’s new homebuyers