Marin County Real Estate trends, information, schools, legal, events & fun
Home buyers have waited for years but perhaps the agony is over. It is
official; the National Association of Realtors has confirmed that we are
now in a buyers’ market.
According to the NAR June
report on existing home sales issued last week there is now a 6.8 month
supply of existing homes on the market. One year ago the
supply was 4.4 months. The joint report of the Department of Commerce and
the Department of Housing and Urban Development on new home sales
contained…
It was nice while it lasted - one full week to be exact - but, according
to Freddie Mac the mortgage market last week took back most of the rate
decreases that were so welcome the week before. The Mortgage Bankers
Association, however, recorded rate drops stretching into a second week.
Freddie Mac’s chief economist Frank Nothaft indicated that rate
increases reflected a market that was still spooked by the specter of
increasing inflation. “However, Fed Chief Bernanke, in his semi-annual
speech to Congress, hinted that another hike in overnight
lending rates…
The brutal murder of Sarah Ann Walker in McKinney, Texas early this
month has again spotlighted a perennial topic - violence against real
estate agents and real estate safety tips.
Law enforcement officials, real estate boards, real estate trainers, and
others routinely advise agents to observe some common sense safety
precautions. Among them…
As the recent report, Buying For Themselves: An Analysis of
Unmarried Female Home Buyers by Rachel Bogardus Drew for the Joint
Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University points out, single female
homebuyers as a group have several characteristics that differentiate them
from their unmarried male counterparts and married couples. Among those
that we mentioned earlier are that they are older, have lower incomes, and
a higher percentage of minorities in their ranks.
Resourceful real estate agents and mortgage brokers as well as builders
will doubtlessly see a lot of possibilities for developing a
marketing niche among single women home buyers.