FRIDAY - fired up, ready to go
- Garden Steps Can Take Your Landscape to a New Place
- Study Finds January, February Great for Buying
- Rising Mortgage Rates Are Dampening First-Time Buyer Plans for Spring
- Trump’s swift mortgage move angers real estate industry
- These 3 East Bay housing markets are among state’s “healthiest”
- Creating Housing That Older Americans Will Need
- Reconsidering the Old-Fashioned Vestibule
Enjoy!
Study Finds January, February Great for Buying - NerdWallet recently crunched two years of realtor.com® data that reflected the 50 largest U.S. metros. Researchers found that January and February were the top months for those looking to get a bargain. In those months, home sales prices were 8.45 percent lower on average than in June through August.
However, this year may be a little different. Buyer demand has remained high throughout the fall, and home prices did not take their usual dip this January, says Jonathan Smoke, realtor.com®’s chief economist. Still, he maintains right now is a favorable time to buy due to the ratio of inventory to sales (in other words, the number of homes for sale versus the amount of the competition). In 2016, he says, there were nearly double as many people buying in June than in January. Further, NerdWallet’s analysis found a 47 percent drop in January sales when compared with July over the past two years of data.
Rising Mortgage Rates Are Dampening First-Time Buyer Plans for Spring - New data from realtor.com suggests that the share of first-time buyers planning to buy in spring 2017 fell sharply when mortgage rates began to rise at the end of last year, dropping by as much as 10 percent since last October. At the same time, record low inventory levels, higher prices and heavy buyer competition is creating more urgency for active home buyers.
According to realtor.com®'s January survey of active home buyers, 44 percent of buyers planning to buy in spring 2017 are first-time home buyers. This has dropped significantly since the survey was conducted in October, when 55 percent of buyers of planning a spring purchase indicated they were looking for their first home.
Trump’s swift mortgage move angers real estate industry - “Home buyers in California, who would have saved an average of $860 a year, will be negatively impacted more than any other state by the decision to not reduce the FHA premium,” California of Realtors Association President Geoff McIntosh said in a statement.
These 3 East Bay housing markets are among state’s “healthiest” - A new report throws a different frame around California’s residential real estate picture. It measures the “healthiest” housing markets and concludes that three of the top five in the state are in the East Bay: Castro Valley, in Alameda County, is No. 1 on the list; Benicia, in Solano County, ranks at No. 3; and Pleasant Hill, in Contra Costa County, ranks at No. 5. The rest of the top 10 markets are in Southern California.
Creating Housing That Older Americans Will Need - There’s a huge, scary disparity between the types of homes growing numbers of older Americans will need over the next 20 years and their availability and affordability, according to a recent Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies report.
Reconsidering the Old-Fashioned Vestibule - This classic entry room, sometimes called a mudroom, offers energy-saving and comfort-inducing perks. Some of my favorites:
