Call it the boom within the boom: Financings of second homes more than doubled since the beginning of this decade -- a growth rate far exceeding financings and sales of primary homes. What's behind the unprecedented surge in the second home sector, which includes both investor units and vacation
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04/23/2007
It's great news for the airlines. A large percentage of second home buyers would as soon fly as drive to reach their vacation homes, says a new survey by HomePages.com, a division of HouseValues that allows consumers to see aerial views and neighborhood-centric information of homes. While most se
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04/23/2007
Society is rapidly changing. For the first time ever, married households are outnumbered by non-family, nontraditional households including a burgeoning number of single heads of households. Already single women are 20 percent of homebuyers, which raises the question how the nation's largest gene
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04/23/2007
The rental market's rebound continued in the third quarter this year and some housing market experts say some of it is due to younger consumers deferring the American Dream. The National Multihousing Council (NMHC) said the third quarter rental market was "firing on all cylinders" with improvemen
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04/23/2007
In 2004 and 2005 I wrote a few articles about the insane Washington, D.C. real estate market. There were multiple buyers for every house on the market. Prices were skyrocketing and buyers were stripping themselves of every protection by eliminating such common contract contingencies such as a hom
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04/23/2007
I asked a veteran real estate agent, someone who had been selling houses since the mid-1980s, to find me a happy seller among his many clients. Here's what I want, I told him. I want someone who sold a house within a couple of weeks of listing and for about what they were asking. The agent promis
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04/23/2007
Leverage is a key concept in real estate - buying a lot with a little, but among recent home buyers it has reached extraordinary levels. New survey research using a representative sample of purchasers found that at least among first-time buyers, downpayments have withered to the point of virtual
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04/23/2007
Question: I am almost at the point of making an offer on a home with a ten percent down payment. My offering price will be $360,000 and I want an 80-10-10 mortgage program to avoid private mortgage insurance. When I spoke with the loan officer, he was vague in giving me some rate quotes. I don't
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04/23/2007
Some people consider those who take advantage of other people's troubles, mercenaries... But the reality of the situation is that in many cases, the real mercenaries were the lenders who made loans to consumers who either could not afford them or did not understand the terms and conditions of the
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04/23/2007
Once you finally go to settlement it would be wonderful if all the loose strings were neatly tucked in and all the checks were written to make all parties happy. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Especially when it comes to the exchange of moneys between buyers and sellers to wrap up a
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04/18/2007
