Month: May 2024

Subscribe Now: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / PlayerFM Julian Hebron of The Basis Point rejoins the show to myth-bust many of the media reports that have painted the real estate market with a broken brush. From affordability to supply, and the impact of A.I. to the seminal broker commission settlement, Julian shows why potential homebuyers and sellers are in the sweetest spot they’ve been in for years. Plus, more investors are sniffing around the junk bond market in search of higher and higher yields, but the rising stench of defaults is sending out warning winds.…

New listings climbed during the past week and there are now 72,000 more single-family homes on the market. It appeared that new listings might be on the decline already, but the pace picked up a tad this week, which is encouraging. More people coming off the sidelines to sell their homes is a healthy signal for the market.  Of course, we have to keep watching the sales rate too. No one wants a scenario in which there’s a flood of sellers but no buyers. So, it was encouraging that new…

When real estate broker April Strickland looks at her local housing market in Gainesville, Fla., she sees a mismatch. Industry data shows that only a few hundred homes are sold each month, she said, yet there are more than 1,500 local Realtors. Strickland has seen the ups and downs of the housing market since 1995, when she started managing her parents’ rental properties as a teenager. But she says the business environment of the past two years is the most challenging she can remember — slower even than the years…

Harsh conditions have slowed the U.S. housing market, which has forced real estate agents to leave the field, The Washington Post reports. The industry swelled with newcomers during the pandemic but has slowed significantly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 440,000 full-time real estate agents and brokers in 2023, about 72,000 less than in 2022. The National Association of Realtors had nearly 1.5 million agents registered as of mid-April, down more than 100,000 from 2022. With relatively high interest rates, deals have become scarce for many agents.  A survey of…

Should you consider investing in Seattle real estate? Well, to answer that question we should take a look at its economy and jobs. Many real estate investors have asked themselves if buying a property in Seattle is a good investment. You need to drill deeper into local trends if you want to know what the market holds for this year. Seattle is a fairly walkable city in King County of Washington. It has a mixture of owner-occupied and renter-occupied housing. According to Neighborhoodscout.com, a real estate data provider, three and…

Twenty years ago Dave Burt was working at BlackRock, the big investment firm, when he started worrying about the health of the U.S. housing market. This was in the midst of a housing boom, when mortgage rates were low and lending standards were lax. Part of Burt’s job was to evaluate the subprime mortgages that were pooled together in complex securities, looking for risk.  “By the end of 2005, I couldn’t believe how offsides the market had gotten, in terms of its willingness to continue extending credit that had no…