News flash: homebuyers care about the perceived quality of a property. Though hardly news to agents, the 2011 National Association of Realtors Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, just released in November, found that 67 percent of homebuyers decided

Down payments can make or break a housing contract, and recent data from LendingTree, which reports that the average down payment on homes is just 12 percent, would appear to be welcome news. After all, high down payments and

Everyone has a hypothesis on what specific factor is prohibiting housing from a true, sustainable recovery. Typically, such hypotheses feature a stock list of usual suspects – excess inventory, REOs and foreclosures, vacant properties, unreasonably tight financing and contract failures. An academic

Construction spending in November exceeded economists’ predictions and rose 1.2 percent from October to $807.1 billion, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce. All in all, construction spending was positive across the

Numerous disagreements swirled around Congress’ passing last month of the payroll tax cut extension, but none proved more controversial with real estate professionals than the agreed funding method for the tax cut – and now a date has been

After a strong summer, home values have been charting a rough course in recent months. Between CoreLogic’s HPI, LPS’ home price index and Radar Logic’s RPX, home values in the most recent data sets declined between 1 and 2

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has renewed a waiver for an anti-flipping regulation through 2012, according to a press release just issued by the agency. Originally passed to limit home flipping – the housing strategy of buying cheap properties

The National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) Pending Home Sales Index, a measure of housing contracts for pending sales, rose 7.3 percent in November to its highest level in 19 months, according to a new press release from the association.

Unprecedented, historic, monumental – lots of big adjectives are thrown around about housing today, but a new piece by John Gittelsohn in Business Week highlights a couple of the unique opportunities in today’s market. Affordability is a main feature of today’s market,

New single-family home sales in November rose 1.6 percent from October, a seven-month high that still continues a 19-month trend of mostly sideways growth at a low level. According to new data jointly released by the U.S. Census Bureau and

After a nearly three-point jump in October, the Architecture Billings Index, a forward-thinking measure of future construction activity, increased by 2.6 in November to 52.0, the first positive level for the index since August. Additionally, the new projects inquiry, a

Multifamily housing has been in the news quite a bit the last couple months, as analysts have pointed to the sector as one of the few bright spots in construction, if not the entire housing market, in recent months.

As promised, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released its revised totals yesterday on existing-home sales, and the “meaningful” changes the association had foretold came out to a 14.6 percent downward revision for 2010’s existing-home sales and a 14.3

One of the key provisions to the HARP 2.0 revisions was eliminating the LTV ratio limits that restricted a huge swath of underwater homeowners from refinancing their mortgages; it would appear that Fannie Mae has taken it one step

Foreclosures, on average, take a long, long time to complete in the U.S. In fact, according to the latest data from Lending Processing Services, it takes an average of 631 days to foreclose on a property, and if current

A new economic report from the Fannie Mae Economics & Mortgage Market Analysis Group states that the U.S. economy is poised to finish the year strongly, though 2012 may prove to be a tricky year. According to the report, the