Mortgage fraud climbed 12.4 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2018, and about one out of every 109 mortgage applications has been found to contain false or misleading information, according to real estate data firm CoreLogic. “Because home prices are rising and demand is strong, most mortgage fraud in this type of market is motivated by bona fide borrowers trying to qualify for a mortgage,” says Bridget Berg, CoreLogic’s prin
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
More builders are outfitting newly constructed homes with smart-home technology, and many buyers say they’ll pay extra for it, according to research from John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Sixty percent of home shoppers say they’d spend more on a home with a smart thermostat, the consulting firm’s survey of more than 23,000 shows. Slightly more—67 percent—say they’d pay extra for an oversized kitchen.More than 60 percent of new-home b
Facebook is removing thousands of targeting options from its advertising platform after the Department of Housing and Urban Development accused the social media giant of discriminatory practices with its housing ads.HUD filed a complaint last Friday against Facebook that claimed the social network’s advertising platform allowed users to discriminate against prospective renters and buyers by being able to limit who saw their ads based on the us
Lots located next to power lines tend to sell for a whopping 45 percent less than similar lots further away from high-voltage transmission lines, according to a new study in the Journal of Real Estate Research. Lots that are non-adjacent to power lines but are located within 1,000 feet of them often sell at a discount of 18 percent, researchers Chris Mothorpe and David Wyman, the authors of the study, found.The study focused on the value of vaca
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing Facebook of violating the federal Fair Housing Act and allowing landlords and home sellers to use the social network’s advertising platform to engage in housing discrimination. A Facebook tool enabling advertisers to filter which users see housing-related ads based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability, or ZIP code limits housing options for prot
Alliance Residential Company, one of the largest multifamily developers and managers in the U.S., is rolling out a new initiative to outfit 25,000 luxury apartments across the country with smart-home technology through partnerships with Google, Nest, and Dwelo, among others. “We wanted to ensure that from the moment our residents move in, they are able to control multiple aspects of their home—access, climate, and lighting—from a single, si
More than 43 percent of renters say they’ve found online rental listings that seemed fraudulent, and more than 5 million say they’ve actually been scammed—sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars—according to a new report released by rental website ApartmentList.com.Renters may be less diligent in researching apartments when feeling the urgency to move, says Igor Popov, chief economist at Apartment List. “There are lots of cases wh
A new partnership between digital notary platform Notarize and Title Resources, a national title company, is ushering in faster and fully digital closings on real estate transactions in a handful of states. Consumers are able to complete a 100 percent digital closing process in 15 states, where they won’t have to be present at the closing table.Many lenders and title companies now offer digital applications and underwriting processes. However,
A smartphone that boasts a bendable screen is expected to hit the market early next year. Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest phone maker, reportedly plans to introduce its long-awaited foldable-screen smartphone in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reports. The screen can be folded in half, like a wallet.The prototype—known internally by its nickname, “Winner”—features a screen of about 7 inches, or about the size of a smaller t
This website includes images sourced from third party websites including Adobe, Getty Images, and as otherwise noted.
