Many real estate professionals have become keenly aware of targeted wire fraud scams that include email impersonation tactics. A growing avenue cyber criminals are using to get highly sensitive financial data is known as spear phishing, according to Asaf Cidon, vice president of content security for Barracuda Networks, a data protection company.Spear phishing is a highly targeted and researched personal attack that is difficult to detect. Ha
Mortgage rates reached their highest averages since July this week.“The 10-year Treasury yield surged this week, jumping 12 basis points,” says Sean Becketti, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “The 30-year mortgage rate followed suit, increasing 6 basis points to 3.94 percent. Today's survey rate is the highest rate in three months.”Freddie Mac reports the following national averages with mortgage rates for the week ending Oct. 26: 30-year
About 20 percent of renters couldn’t pay their rents in full for at least one of the past three months, according to a new report from Apartment List, based on 41,000 respondents.As a result, about 3.3 percent of renter respondents say they had experienced an eviction. Researchers extrapolated the findings to estimate about 3.7 million of 118 million American renters have faced an eviction. Another 7 percent of respondents say they’ve been t
More house hunters are looking for a home, but they’re having trouble finding one. Demand continues to exceed housing supplies in many markets, which is restraining contract signings this fall, the National Association of REALTORS® reported Thursday.NAR’s Pending Home Sales Index—a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings—posted a reading of 106 in September, its lowest reading since January 2015. The index is also 3.5 perce
New Zealand officials say they are banning foreigners from buying existing homes in the country in response to growing affordability problems in its residential housing sector.“Our goal and commitment is to ban foreign buyers from the existing housing market,” Prime Minister–elect Jacinda Ardern told local media this week. The ban only applies to nonresidents.New Zealand officials are blaming its “affordability crisis” on low interest r
More than 41 million children in the U.S. go trick-or-treating every Halloween, bopping from door to door collecting candy. Some real estate pros are seizing the day for their marketing. Realtor.com® recently featured a few ideas of how real estate professionals are using Halloween to drum up more business.Some agents are throwing a Halloween-themed open house, complete with kid-friendly activities like bobbing for apples and pumpkin painting
Improved educational performance, higher civic participation, lower crime rates, and improved health remain the biggest social benefits linked to homeownership, according to a new research paper by NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun and research economist Nadia Evangelou, which appears in The Journal of the Center for Real Estate Studies. Some findings from the latest research cited in the paper include:Health. Children of homeowners tend to b
Let’s say it costs $3,000 to make old hardwood floors look new again. That’s a lot of money, especially if your client is just getting the house ready to list. But of all the remodeling projects homeowners can do to increase the resale value of their property, refinishing the floors is at the top.Of course, no one can predict with certainty whether the investment will pay off, but recent research suggests it will have a big ROI—most likely
Vinyl is the most common primary exterior wall material on single-family homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction data from 2016.Vinyl tops the list at 27 percent, followed by stucco at 24 percent, brick or brick veneer at nearly 22 percent, and fiber cement siding at 20 percent. Wood or wood products comprised just 4 percent, and stone, rock, or other stone materials make up only 1 percent of exteriors nationwide. Ho
Mortgage applications reversed course last week after a brief rebound the week before. Total volume for refinancings and home purchases plunged 4.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted week-over-week basis, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported Wednesday. The index is now 19 percent lower than the same week a year ago.Home purchase applications faced the biggest drops last week, falling 6 percent week over week, the MBA reports. Economists say t
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