Following last year's Experian data breach, many people froze their accounts to safeguard them from potential identity thefts. But with the spring homebuying season on the horizon, don’t forget to remind potential home shoppers that they may face some hassles getting approved for a mortgage if they don’t remember to unfreeze their credit first.Lenders tend to pull reports from the three main credit bureaus—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion
The renter population is outpacing homeowners in many of the nation’s largest cities. The most recent data shows a slowing rental market as homeownership rates continue to gradually recover from the recession.RentCafe, an apartment and house rental listing company, recently analyzed U.S. Census data to study the change in the number of people living in renter- and owner-occupied housing units over a decade. They compared data from the years 200
As more states legalize marijuana for recreational and medical purposes, the housing industry is increasingly looking to embrace it as a building material too, The New York Times reports.North Carolina boasts the first modern U.S. hemp house, which was constructed in 2010. About 50 homes in the country have since popped up with hemp built in.Hemp structures date back to Roman times. But now, some builders want to bring it back to their markets
Higher prices are behind the land boom. The U.S. dollar volume of land sales increased at a stronger pace of 4 percent from October 2016 to September 2017 compared to the prior 12-month period, according to the 2017 Land Market Survey, produced by the REALTORS® Land Institute and the National Association of REALTORS®. Sales on all types of land posted an uptick; residential and commercial land sales grew by the highest amounts.Higher prices d
How long does it take your website to load on a mobile device? Google recently announced that starting in July, page speed from mobile devices will be a factor in its search rankings.Google says the update will likely only impact the slowest sites on the web. About 70 percent of websites take about 7 seconds to load on a mobile device, according to Google’s research from 2017. But users often expect it to load within 2 or 3 seconds.Use Goo
Cash sales accounted for 8 percent of new-home sales in the fourth quarter of 2017, matching a high that has not been seen since 2014, the National Association of Home Builders reports on its Eye on Housing blog. Cash sales make up an even larger share of existing-home sales—about 20 percent in December, according to the National Association of REALTORS®.Cash hardly makes up the bulk of financing options for buyers, however. The share of new h
The average credit score in the U.S. was 675 last year—the highest since 2012, according to Experian’s State of Credit: 2017 survey. More Americans fall on the higher end of the credit score spectrum, with 22 percent having “super-high” credit scores between 781 to 850 and 21 percent having “deep subprime” or very low credit scores below 600. Minnesota has the highest credit scores in the country, averaging 709.Mortgage debt was up
Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were granted a three-month moratorium on their mortgage payments following Hurricane Maria’s destruction last fall. But many of those agreements expire this month, and thousands of homeowners are scrambling to get extensions.Further, some Puerto Ricans who may have stopped making their mortgage payments are now learning that the moratorium was not automatic. They believed their mortgages were frozen, but t
Millennials make up a quarter of the nation’s population and are expected to have huge influence over real estate in the coming years. But though the millennial population increased 4.7 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to Census data, the growth has not occurred evenly across geographic areas. The cities with the highest share of millennials as of 2015 are: Provo-Orem, Utah: 30.4 percent Austin, Texas: 27.2 percent San Diego: 27 percent
The Super Bowl attracts hundreds of millions of dollars in local tourism and retail business for the city that hosts football’s annual mega-event, but does it have a long-term impact on home sales?Realtor.com® researchers discovered that in host cities, there tends to be at least a 50 percent jump in the number of listings near the stadium where the game is held leading up to the Super Bowl. However, the longer-term impact varied and was more
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