By Peter Ricci Any real estate agent will tell you how valuable the Internet is to any real estate business, but the Web’s value does come with one catch – if all agents are using it, how do you

By Peter Ricci The CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI) increased by 3.8 percent in July from a year ago, the highest year-over-year increase for the index in nearly six years, according to the California-based data company. Not since August

By Peter Ricci Construction spending in July was up 9.3 percent from last year in the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce. Though construction spending did fall slightly from June by 0.9 percent to

By Peter Ricci Distressed sales accounted for 23 percent of all residential housing sales in the second quarter, according to RealtyTrac’s Q2 2012 U.S. Foreclosure Sales Report. That total is up from a 22 percent share in the first quarter

By Peter Ricci Now this is interesting – after a solid month of rising interest rates impacting the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, fixed mortgage rates fell in Freddie Mac’s latest survey; yet, mortgage applications in

By Peter Ricci Bidding wars are normally the ultimate sign of a hot real estate market, that demand for real estate is so stratospheric that prospective homebuyers are nearly falling over themselves with offers for the homes. Sadly, bidding

By Peter Ricci It’s a narrative that many real estate professionals are all too aware of – a distressed property appears in a certain market, where it sits for months and negatively impacts the selling prices of the surrounding

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Gary Greene will be merging its operations with ERA Bogany Properties, effective September 1, 2012. As a result of the merger, Bogany’s office at 4710 Bellaire Boulevard will become the new home of

By Stephanie Sims Interested in what prospective clients think of the market? Redfin’s latest quarterly homebuyer survey answers could help you better reach and help your clients. Less than two weeks ago, Redfin collected data from 829 people across

By Peter Ricci The multifamily housing sector has been a true anomaly; while housing construction has bounced along on a largely sideways path for most of 2012, multifamily housing has been booming, with multifamily housing starts up 30 percent

By Peter Ricci The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator of home sales based on contract signings, rose 2.4 percent from June to July and reached its highest level in more than two years, or, since the expiration

By Peter Ricci The Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which we wrote about earlier today, is undoubtedly the most influential monitor for the nation’s home prices in the current market. But such enthusiasm, as Inman News has demonstrated in the past,

By Peter Ricci The National Association of Realtors’ new real estate TV ad is garnering quite a bit of attention in the real estate community, and not all of it good. Titled “Moving Pictures,” the ad plays from the

All three composites of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices ended 2012’s second quarter with positive annual growth rates, the first time that’s happened since the summer of 2010, according to the latest data from Standard & Poor’s. Though S&P does not track

Real estate appraisals are among the more consistent topics that we cover here at Chicago Agent, and for good reason – though real estate, after a prolonged slumber, has been posting some of its best numbers in years, the most

By Peter Ricci Shadow housing inventory and government-held REO inventory have both been on a steady decline the last couple years, and if new short sale guidelines from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) fulfill their aims, they’re a