Costco, the popular warehouse club chain, is a great place for food, office supplies, clothing and…mortgages? Yes indeed – Costco has partnered with First Choice Bank and 10 other lenders to offer home purchasing and refinancing products through its

New pending home sales data from the National Association of Realtors is reporting a 14.4 percent increase from April 2011. The data, which is gleaned from the Pending Home Sales Index, was down monthly by 5.5 percent after three

The First Multiple Listing Service (FMLS), a 55-year-old MLS that serves more than 30,000 agents throughout Georgia, was in the news last week when Lane Bailey, a Realtor in the state, discovered that when uploading photos to FMLS, agents

CoreLogic filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Redfin late last week, alleging that a new home price tool the online brokerage released in March violates an existing patent. A home price estimator, Redfin’s Home Price Tool was designed to give prospective

Home values nationwide have began to stabilize in S&P’s latest Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and the markets in Texas are leading the charge to recovery. From February to March, national prices were unchanged, and though S&P does not track

Agents looking to take their selling skills to another dimension will have one more tool in their arsenal. Miami-based software development company Evolution Ventures has recently launched their Sage iPad and web-based application for Realtors in the Chicago

It’s no mystery that housing has been on a bumpy path since 2007, but the past month, a wide range of data has come out all but endorsing a new housing recovery. From home sales, to interest rates, to

Internet syndication has changed the real estate industry as we know it, but that doesn’t mean that all brokerages want to use it. Edina Realty, the Twin Cities-based brokerage that famously pulled its listings from Trulia, was in the

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) announced earlier this week its purchase of 437 N Rush, a two-story building that borders the west side of the association’s Chicago headquarters off Michigan Avenue. NAR will now own the entire block

Appraisals – can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. A topic we have covered numerous times, appraisals have been a consistent source of headaches for agents in the post-boom market, with contract failures a common result of the

The National Association of Realtors announced this week the merger of its Realtors Federal Credit Union (FCU) with the Northwest Federal Credit Union. The end result of a nine-month inquiry by Bob Goldberg, the senior vice president for sales, marketing,

The current technological landscape allows for seemingly limitless creativity when it comes to agent marketing efforts, and Cody Phillips of Prudential Gary Greene has surely offered one of the most interesting (and fun) videos of

The housing recovery continued rolling along this morning, with the Commerce Department reporting that new home sales rose 9.9 percent in April from last year. Sales rose 3.3 percent from March to April, and year-over-year median price of new properties rose

Housing starts are among the most influential collections of data in the world of real estate, but a Washington Post blog has laid bare some troubling flaws with the data’s collection. Here are the five most notable inconsistencies with the

Existing-home sales in the South increased 3.5 percent from March to April, according to the latest data from NAR, with a yearly increase of 6.5 percent. Nationally, sales were similarly strong, rising 3.4 percent from March and 10.0 percent from April,

RE/MAX  surveyed 1,022 of its residential experts in its quarterly RE/MAX Market Insights, and it found numerous signs of a market recovery in real estate, from pricing data to sales activity. Here’s what we thought were six important takeaways from