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Housing starts move 3.3% higher in Nov. Construction of new homes increased 3.3 percent in November with the gain largely coming from single-family houses being built at the strongest pace in more than a decade. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that builders broke ground on homes last month at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.3 million units. The increase marks a key moment in the recovery from the Great Recession: Builders started work on single-family houses at the fastest pace since September 2007, which was just a few months before the start of that economic downturn. Driving the rebound in home construction has been a shortage of existing properties being listed for sale. Fewer people are putting their property on the market, despite healthy demand from buyers because the unemployment rate is at a 17 year-low and mortgage rates remain at attractive levels. New construction has filled some of this gap with starts on single-family houses rising 8.7 perc...
Study: FSBOs net ‘significantly’ lower profits Aug. 21, 2017 – For-sale-by-owners (FSBOs) tend to sell their homes for lower prices than homes sold through traditional agents via the MLS, and in many cases below the average differential represented by the prevailing commission rate, according to a new study by Collateral Analytics . The study examined the price differences between homes sold through traditional agents versus those sold by FSBOs from 2016 to the first half of 2017. Some homeowners attempting to avoid commission costs attempt to sell their home on their own – but that can backfire and turn into a much lower sales price, the study found. Even successful FSBO sellers achieve prices "significantly below" those from similar properties sold more traditionally via Realtors ® , the study found. A FSBO sale, on average, nets nearly a 6 percent lower price than an MLS sale for a similar property, the study found. Overall, the authors found that th...
LOW APPRAISALS HELP CASH BUYERS After Dallas-area real estate pro Laura Barnett put a listing on the market three weeks ago, it quickly received 22 offers. But Barnett didn't take the highest bid. Instead, she took a cash offer because she wanted to ensure that there were no hang-ups along the way toward closing. Appraisals, she says, aren't keeping up with sales prices, and if the appraisal doesn't match the contracted price, buyers often can't get a mortgage and never make it to settlement. "They're kind of putting a glass ceiling where we can't raise our prices any higher than we have comps to support it, so we're definitely going with more cash offers than we used to," Barnett, a real estate professional with RE/MAX DFW Associates, told CNBC. Younger, first-time buyers are feeling the brunt of the competition because they tend to be more mortgage-dependent and use low downpayment loans, which have stricter underwriting standards. ...