Finance - Real Estate, Updates, News & Tips

Cities Team Up to Combat Evictions

Ten cities are banding together in a new effort to create a place for city leaders to find solutions for improving affordability and reducing evictions. The effort, launched in late March, is called the PolicyLink All-in Cities Anti-Displacement Policy Network. Mayors, city council members, and senior city staff members from 10 U.S. cities are meeting next week to draft policy ideas and solutions.The cities hope that by teaming up they’ll be a

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San Francisco Prices Surged $100k in 3 Months

San Francisco homeowners and buyers are seeing some of the biggest price jumps in recent months. The median price for a single-family home in the city increased $100,000. Prices have reached an all-time high of $1.6 million, according to the Paragon Real Estate Group in San Francisco. For comparison, the median home price nationwide was $279,900 on March 1, according to realtor.com®.Home prices in San Francisco increased nearly 24 percent in the

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Desperate Buyers Snag Homes Sight Unseen

Some home shoppers are feeling hopeless this spring and making competitive moves in order to get a home. They’re reportedly rushing to making offers without seeing homes first, bidding well above the asking price, or waiving inspections entirely to get sellers to find their offer the most alluring.“For home buyers, this is shaping up to be one of the most difficult years in recent memory,” says Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist of Veritas U

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Is a no-closing-cost mortgage right for you?

A mortgage isn’t free — there are fees associated with getting the loan. Those closing costs usually total thousands of dollars.Besides writing a check to pay those fees at the closing table, there’s another way to pay them when you get a mortgage or refinance your existing one: by adding them to the loan amount. The result is called a no-closing-cost mortgage or no-closing-cost refinance.However, you’ll probably have to accept a higher

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Are Prepaid Property Taxes Deductible?

April 17 is the tax deadline, and tax advisers still can’t agree on whether prepaid 2018 property taxes can be deducted in full. Congress passed a tax reform bill late last year, capping write-offs for state and local taxes at $10,000 per return for single filers and married couples.The move set off a rush of homeowners at the end of the year to prepay their property taxes for 2018 ahead of the tax bill taking effect this year.The overhaul “

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March Listing Prices Surpass 2017 Record

The median list price for homes nationwide this March have now topped a record high set in 2017. The median list price was $280,000, up 8 percent year over year in March, topping last July’s record of $275,000, realtor.com® reports.Not only are home prices higher but homes are also selling faster this year. Days on the market dropped 7 percent compared to last year, reaching a median of 63 days in March. There are also fewer homes for sale, wi

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Higher Property Taxes Hit Homeowners

Many homeowners faced higher property tax bills in 2017. Property taxes levied on single-family homes in 2017 totaled $293.4 billion, up 6 percent from 2016.The average property tax on a single-family home in 2017 was $3,399 per home at an effective tax rate of 1.17 percent, according to ATTOM Data Solutions, a real estate data firm, from its analysis of more than 86 million U.S. single-family homes.But some places saw much higher rates than that

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Shopping Malls Are Getting Emptier

A shift in consumer shopping patterns toward online marketplaces continues to hit the retail sector and its real estate market hard. The vacancy rate for large U.S. shopping malls rose to 8.4 percent in the first quarter of 2018, the highest since the fourth quarter of 2012, according to new study from real estate data firm Reis Inc. For neighborhood and community shopping centers, Reis found that 41 of the 77 areas they examined saw vacancy incr

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Young Adults Feel Crushed by Rate, Price Hikes

The rising cost of purchasing a home is finally sinking in for home buyers and changing their house hunt, particularly for millennials.Seventy-nine percent of all consumer age groups recently surveyed say that rising interest rates will impact their home search, while 83 percent say that increasing home prices will impact theirs, according to a new online survey released by realtor.com® of more than 1,000 active buyers. But those percentages r

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Home Buyers Are Blowing Their Budgets

A recent survey found that buyers are spending more on their home purchase than they intended. A third of homeowners recently surveyed say that they blew through the upper limit of their home purchase budget by an average of $16,510, according to a new survey released by Owners.com of 1,214 Americans who purchased a home in the last four years.A big part of the problem is the increasing costs of buying, particularly for starter homes. “Clearly

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