One week after facing a class-action lawsuit over its home-price tool, Zillow is looking to improve it with a contest. The real estate website is offering a $1 million award to the “person or team” who can improve its Zestimate, an online tool meant to help people estimate the value of their property. Zillow officials say the contest has been in the works for more than a year and was not motivated by the lawsuit.Last week, Zillow faced a clas
Buying a home can be stressful on couples. Sixty-percent of millennial and Gen X couples say they disagreed occasionally, frequently, or “a lot” when buying a house with their partner or spouse, according to a new survey released by LendingHome. They surveyed 514 adults ages 25 to 45 who were in a relationship (engaged, married, or domestic partnerships) and purchasing a home within the past year.Couples who have been together a longer time t
Sales of newly built single-family homes plunged 11.4 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 569,000 units, the first time such sales have decreased this year, the Commerce Department reported this week. Still, builders are writing off the dip as a minor setback, instead focusing on the bigger picture."Despite some slowness this month, total new-home sales in 2017 are up more than 11 percent from this time last year, and builder
Trading up from a starter home to a larger home has proven to be increasingly difficult for a growing group of homeowners across the country. Sure, owners may be able to snag a record-high price for their current home, but high prices and the low inventory are making it tough for them to buy something better in a tight market, realtor.com® notes.“In today’s competitive landscape, moving up from [starter homes] to the white picket fence has b
For the fifth consecutive week, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage remained around 4 percent."The 30-year mortgage rate fell 3 basis points this week to 4.02 percent,” says Sean Becketti, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “However, this week's survey closed prior to Wednesday's flight to quality. The delayed impact of the associated decline in Treasury yields may push mortgage rates lower in next week's survey."Freddie Mac reports the following
Mortgage refinance activity may have been the true hidden culprit behind the housing crisis, according to a new report by the Urban Institute written by Laurie Goodman, codirector of UI’s Housing Finance Policy Center.Mortgage refinances were more likely to default than mortgages taken out to purchase a home “mostly because many people were treating their homes as ATMs through cash-out refinances,” Goodman notes.Eighty-four percent of gover
Household debt is topping its 2008 peak prior to the housing crash. Total household debt has risen to $12.73 trillion in the first quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported Wednesday.However, Americans are handling their debt—mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and other forms of borrowing—much better, the report shows.Americans were delinquent on 4.8 percent of total debt in the first quarter. For comparison, at the end of 2009
Just how widely can the cost of living vary from state to state? Financial website GoBankingRates.com culled 2016 data from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, examining six categories of living expenses: housing, groceries, utilities, transportation, health care, and miscellaneous items. The site used the data to calculate each state's overall cost of living index.Hawaii is the priciest state to live in, where cost-of-living e
The median amount of time homeowners live in their home rose to about eight and a half years in 2016, the longest tenure since Moody's Analytics and First American Financial Corporation began tracking such data in 2000. Mortgage rates may be the reason owners refuse to move, which is keeping inventory stubbornly low. And economists predict homeowners will continue to lengthen their stay in a home through the next decade, The New York Times report
Home sales reached their highest pace in a decade in the first quarter of 2017 as property prices continue to escalate, according to the National Association of REALTORS®' latest quarterly report.The median price of an existing single-family home nationally was $232,100 in the first quarter, up 6.9 percent from the same time period a year ago. Home prices rose year over year in 85 percent of the 178 metro areas analyzed.The continued inventory s
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