Kevin Warren's Blog

After the housing market crashed in 2008, the number of single-family renting households has grown by  leaps and bounds. And it doesn’t appear like that increase is going to slow down any time soon. The National Association of Realtors expects that within the next 10 years, 5 to 6 million new ren...

The past few weeks has seen some major volatility within the stock markets. Some weeks have seen major pullbacks and others we have seen significant bounce-backs. The first ten days of April, the volatility of the markets hit on the downside. One thing which is interesting about this pullback is ...

Vacation home sales rose strongly in 2013, while investment purchases fell below the elevated levels seen in the previous two years, according to the National Association of Realtors®. NAR’s 2014 Investment and Vacation Home Buyers Survey, covering existing- and new-home transactions in 2013, sho...

For years the slow recovery was hampered by the existence of tighter credit. A vicious cycle was created when the recession caused consumer credit to worsen and at the same time banks tightened up on lending standards. For some time we have been predicting that lending standards in the real estat...

You are self-employed and are looking to purchase a home or refinance your mortgage. You have heard  horror stories regarding reams of paperwork and underwriters who wanted two pints of blood in order to approve a loan application. As a matter of fact, you have held off purchasing a home for year...

During the past several years, all the news has been about how much harder it is to purchase a home because lenders have tightened guidelines. However, many have overlooked the fact that the VA Mortgage Program administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs has not tightened at all. The progr...

For years America has traditionally approached the home purchase process backwards. Potential home purchasers scour the earth for just the right home for weeks or months at a time. They then spend more time negotiating the best deal. Then the fun really begins when the purchaser approaches a lend...

Friday’s employment report has given us three things we have been waiting for. First, this jobs report was relatively good after a string of disappointments over the winter. It tells us that at least part of the slowdown was definitely due to the weather — a question everyone has been asking. Sec...