realtor.comFarmhouse chic is all the rage in home decor these days, thanks largely to Chip and Joanna Gaines from "Fixer Upper," who play up this style in many of the homes on their show (Hello, "barndominium"). The recent news that "Fixer Upper" will soon be ending for good provides all the more reason to embrace this trend. Soon, it'll be all we'll have left of Chip and Jo! (Sniff.)But before you go all Beverly hillbillies on us, reme
This Halloween, you may be less spooked as fewer “zombies” are out in real estate. The number of zombie preforeclosure properties has plunged 22 percent from a year ago.A zombie home is a property that is in foreclosure limbo. The foreclosure process has begun for the home, but it has not yet been repossessed by the foreclosing lender. About 14,312 properties at the end of the third quarter are considered zombies, according to ATTOM Data
A home insurance policy won’t cover every thing that could possibly go wrong with a home. The details are all in the fine print within the policy.“Insurance policies are like snowflakes; no two are exactly the same,” Ashleigh Cloud Trent, an insurance adviser with Swingle Collins and Associates in Dallas, told realtor.com®.Many standard policies do not include a few things that homeowners may assume they cover. Homeowners may need to inves
Many real estate professionals have become keenly aware of targeted wire fraud scams that include email impersonation tactics. A growing avenue cyber criminals are using to get highly sensitive financial data is known as spear phishing, according to Asaf Cidon, vice president of content security for Barracuda Networks, a data protection company.Spear phishing is a highly targeted and researched personal attack that is difficult to detect. Ha
Mortgage rates reached their highest averages since July this week.“The 10-year Treasury yield surged this week, jumping 12 basis points,” says Sean Becketti, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “The 30-year mortgage rate followed suit, increasing 6 basis points to 3.94 percent. Today's survey rate is the highest rate in three months.”Freddie Mac reports the following national averages with mortgage rates for the week ending Oct. 26: 30-year
About 20 percent of renters couldn’t pay their rents in full for at least one of the past three months, according to a new report from Apartment List, based on 41,000 respondents.As a result, about 3.3 percent of renter respondents say they had experienced an eviction. Researchers extrapolated the findings to estimate about 3.7 million of 118 million American renters have faced an eviction. Another 7 percent of respondents say they’ve been t
More house hunters are looking for a home, but they’re having trouble finding one. Demand continues to exceed housing supplies in many markets, which is restraining contract signings this fall, the National Association of REALTORS® reported Thursday.NAR’s Pending Home Sales Index—a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings—posted a reading of 106 in September, its lowest reading since January 2015. The index is also 3.5 perce
New Zealand officials say they are banning foreigners from buying existing homes in the country in response to growing affordability problems in its residential housing sector.“Our goal and commitment is to ban foreign buyers from the existing housing market,” Prime Minister–elect Jacinda Ardern told local media this week. The ban only applies to nonresidents.New Zealand officials are blaming its “affordability crisis” on low interest r
More than 41 million children in the U.S. go trick-or-treating every Halloween, bopping from door to door collecting candy. Some real estate pros are seizing the day for their marketing. Realtor.com® recently featured a few ideas of how real estate professionals are using Halloween to drum up more business.Some agents are throwing a Halloween-themed open house, complete with kid-friendly activities like bobbing for apples and pumpkin painting
Improved educational performance, higher civic participation, lower crime rates, and improved health remain the biggest social benefits linked to homeownership, according to a new research paper by NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun and research economist Nadia Evangelou, which appears in The Journal of the Center for Real Estate Studies. Some findings from the latest research cited in the paper include:Health. Children of homeowners tend to b
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