FHA Loans Are About to Get More Costly
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) just announced changes to its loan insurance, which is popular among home buyers who don’t qualify for conventional financing. FHA loans are common among first-time buyers because they require just 3.5% down and allow more leniency for individuals with lower credit scores and higher debt-to-income ratios, but FHA borrowers pay… Read More
The Fiscal Cliff and the Cap on Mortgage Interest Deductions: Real Home-Buyers React
The National Association of Realtors is working in deadly earnest to kill the cap on mortgage interest deductions, though it is widely favored by economists of all stripes. We asked 1,084 active home-buyers how the uncertainty over the deduction was affecting their decision-making process… Read More
In Home Search, Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus… Sometimes
The conventional wisdom in real estate is that women are the decision-makers when buying a home, leaving the hapless man with the task of selling the old place. But that’s just a stereotype. What do the numbers tell us about how women and men search for shelter? Read More
How to See 20% More Listings, One Week Faster (October Roundup)
Here is Redfin’s monthly email newsletter, with a little about Redfin and a lot about what’s happening in the real estate market. Howdy Redfinnians! Welcome to another action-packed newsletter filled with facts, figures and bold predictions about the U.S. real estate market! First, the Facts First, the blatantly self-serving but absolutely true facts. Redfin commissioned… Read More
One day more than half a century ago, Stalin stopped sending food trains to Siberia, leaving prisoners and guards alike to slowly realize they had to starve or walk a thousand miles for food. This is how it can feel to be a real estate broker. Other times, it’s like being Augustus Gloop at Willy… Read More
It’s a jungle out there. In California last month, 74% of the offers submitted by Redfin agents on a property met with competition. In Washington DC, 51% of offers faced a bidding war. The problem is inventory, with the number of homes for sale down 43% in California and 27% nationwide compared to last year,… Read More
We’ve written about feisty buyers, shown data on multiple offers and told the story of Mid-Peninsula Madness. That opened up the floodgates, and now we’re hearing from our agents across the country: Buyers are frustrated with the lack of homes on the market, and the few sellers out there are using scarcity to their advantage…. Read More
Redfin real estate analyst Tim Ellis just collected information from offers that Redfin agents have prepared since January 1, 2012, to gauge just how often our customers are bidding on listings that have competing offers. In major California markets, more than half of our offers faced competition. Here are the Redfin markets where competition is… Read More
The first month of every year for Redfin is like the first five minutes of a blind date: it doesn’t take long to figure out how the whole thing will go. We track every customer activity in a big database so it’s easy for us to see whether demand is strong right out of the… Read More
While some housing pundits are talking about demand being “overwhelmed by supply” and others are throwing out estimates of an “excess supply” of over 3 million homes, buyers that we are serving across the country keep telling us the same thing over and over this spring: “Selection stinks!” Worse yet, when they do finally find… Read More