Finance - Real Estate, Updates, News & Tips

Gen Z May Prove to Be Serious Competition for Millennials in Housing

Generation Z is being categorized as optimistic when it comes to real estate investments, and it's showing a lot of interest in homeownership despite their young age, according to a new generational survey of more than 2,000 renters, owners, and those living with families conducted by PropertyShark.com, a real estate website. Generation Z includes those who were born after 1995.Eighty-three percent of Gen Z respondents surveyed say they plan to b

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Study Reveals ‘Starbucks Effect’ on Home Prices

Having a Starbucks open near a neighborhood could increase nearby home values, potentially by a few thousand dollars, a new study from Harvard Business School finds. The study’s authors focused on gentrification of neighborhoods using Yelp data, but discovered the “Starbucks effect” during their research.Using Yelp data to find the entry of each Starbucks in a ZIP code, researchers found a 0.5 percent increase in housing prices within a yea

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Top Towns for an ‘Affordable’ Retirement

Get ready for a flood of retirees. With 74 million members, baby boomers are the largest generation on record to retire. And if they follow previous generations, retirement will prompt them to want to move. Many will head to warmer climates, but they’re also—unlike previous generations—in search of more active lifestyles too, looking for social and recreational opportunities, nearby restaurants, and shopping.“It’s going to be a tsunami

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Ultra-Luxury Market Grapples With $1B in Price Reductions

A sprawling family estate in Manalapan, Fla., has seen a price reduction of $57 million in the last year and is now listed for $138 million. And a home originally listed for a whopping $250 million in Bel Air, Calif.—the nation’s most expensive property at the time—was marked down $62 million in April and is now listed for $188 million.These are two examples pointing to a larger trend of mega price reductions in the ultraluxury real estate

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Mortgage Borrowers Get Loan Approval With Lower Credit

New mortgages are being approved with lower credit scores, and FHA loans appear to be leading the shift, according to studies by credit developer FICO and other entities. “As we get further away from the Great Recession, underwriting criteria seems to have eased, and a broader section of consumers are obtaining mortgages as a result,” according to FICO’s report.New loans for borrowers with FICO scores reaching as low as the 400s jumped from

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Home Prices Are Climbing Three Times Faster Than Rents

The jump in home prices has prompted the cost of homeownership to outpace that of renting in more places across the country. The monthly costs of owning a home have increased by 14 percent over the past year—more than three times the 4 percent increase in monthly rental costs, according to a new analysis by realtor.com®.Only 41 percent of the U.S. population now lives in a county where a median-income household can afford to buy a home at the

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Judge Orders Aid Cutoff to Hurricane Maria Victims

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that federal aid to house more than 1,000 Puerto Rican families who fled to the mainland U.S. after Hurricane Maria must end in two weeks. The families have been living in U.S.-funded housing in hotels and motels across the country since leaving Puerto Rico following the storm September 20, 2017. Hurricane Maria caused massive destruction to the island, killing nearly 3,000 people, destroying homes and businesses

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Mortgage Rates Mostly Holding Steady

Mortgage rates haven’t been this stable since the fall of 2016. Rates did inch up this week, but only slightly and are still offering prospective buyers a window of opportunity, says Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist.“The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage barely inched up this week, continuing the summer trend of essentially being flat,” says Khater. “While sales and price growth have softened these last few months, this leveling of r

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First-Time Buyers Have Bought 985K Homes This Year

Home sales may be slowing overall, but not among first-time home buyers, according to a new report. Genworth Mortgage Insurance culled all publicly available government and proprietary mortgage industry data to see how this segment of buyers is faring in the housing market. In the first half of the year, first-time buyers purchased 985,000 single-family homes, the most during the first six months of a year since 2005, according to Genworth’s F

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News Corp to Buy Tech Platform Opcity

Realtor.com® is expanding its lead generation offerings for real estate professionals by bringing a new tech platform under its umbrella. News Corp, which owns Move Inc. and realtor.com®, announced it will be acquiring Opcity, a tech program that matches qualified home buyers and sellers with real estate professionals in real time.Opcity culls proprietary data sets to capture online leads and instantly connects clients who are ready to act with

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