Happy lowest-mortgage-rate-of-the-year day on this Halloween week! Mortgage rates are currently at a yearly low right before the Fed meets so the question is: will Fed Chair Jerome Powell ruin the good news right before Halloween festivities? Whatever Powell says tomorrow, mortgage rates are behaving differently than they did last year at this time. Last […]
Will the Fed ruin the lowest mortgage rates of 2025? Read More »
Americans are moving less than at any point in the past 50 years, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by Point2Homes. In 2024, only 11% of Americans — or roughly 37 million residents — changed their address. That’s down from 14.3% a decade earlier and nearly half the rate of the 1960s, when
Renters are moving more than homeowners, but US mobility is historically low Read More »
Benjamin Franklin famously said that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes. When I saw a recent article by Robert Bork Jr. claiming that the affordability crisis is due to some sort of “Realtor® tax,” I stopped in my tracks. The only Realtor® tax I’m aware of is the 15% self-employment tax I’m
There’s no such thing as a Realtor tax: Here’s what they’re missing Read More »
We had a nice pop in our weekly pending home sales last week, and with mortgage rates near 2025 lows we could ask: Is housing breaking out? Not exactly. One of the themes I really stressed this year is that weekly data can be volatile around holiday weekends. So we always look at the two
Weekly home sales look stronger than normal, but there’s a catch Read More »
The Ohio House of Representatives on Wednesday passed two bills aimed at limiting future property tax increases by tying them to inflation — marking the latest in a series of efforts to curb rising property taxes across the state. Republican House Speaker Matt Huffman said the legislation represents “something significant” for Ohio taxpayers. He estimates
Ohio moves to tie property tax increases to inflation Read More »
After falling slightly in August, existing home sales were back on the rise in September, according to data released Thursday by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Month-over-month, the paces of existing home sales rose 1.5% in September to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 4.06 million. This represents a 4.1% annual increase. “As anticipated,
Existing-home inventory up 14% from a year ago Read More »
A quiet change in Texas law this past spring could ignite a crisis in affordable housing – and send a chilling signal to investors nationwide. House Bill 21 (HB 21), passed in May, drastically rewrites the rules for how affordable housing partnerships in Texas qualify for property tax abatements. For years, those abatements have been
The Texas law threatening to break the affordable housing equation Read More »
The average interest rate on all outstanding mortgages in the U.S. is now 4.3%. You might be surprised to learn that by the end of the year, the average rate will be higher than the levels of Q1 2020, before the pandemic boom. For the average American mortgage holder, the incredible gains of the pandemic
What the latest mortgage data tells us about home sales in 2026 Read More »
Top former U.S. economic leaders, Gary Cohn and Lawrence Summers, raised red flags about the nation’s fiscal trajectory, the challenges of balancing monetary policy and the global context of U.S. debt. However, they Summers says economy is “remarkably resilient.” Speaking at the 2025 Mortgage Bankers Association‘s Annual Convention and Expo, Cohn and Summers also credited
Former economic leaders Cohn and Summers warn on U.S. fiscal path Read More »
Down payments stayed largely unchanged in the third quarter of 2025 as homebuyers balanced high prices with slowing demand, according to Realtor.com’s newest Down Payment Report. The typical down payment was $30,400 — about $500 more than the previous quarter and roughly flat from a year earlier. Buyers continued to put down about 14.4% of
Down payments stay steady even as homebuyers face high prices Read More »