News

10 Year Battery Life Smoke Detectors Now Required For Older Homes New Smoke Detector Rules Go Into Effect On December 1, 2016 Catching many people by surprise, including me, a new change in Massachusetts smoke detector regulations will take effect Dec. 1. The new rules provide that when homes built before 1975 are sold, the house must be […]

Mortgage Bankers See Increase in Originations The Mortgage Bankers Association predicts that it expects to see $ 1.10 trillion in purchase mortgage originations during 2017, an 11% increase from 2016.  On the flip side, the MBA says that refinance originations will decrease by 40%.  They attribute this to strong household formation, job growth, rising wages,

Top 10 Cities for the Perfect Pub-Crawl Here’s a list you’ll want to see;  National real estate brokerage RedFin set out to discover America’s best cities that were built for the perfect pub crawl.  Using walking score data and locating a lot of bars/pubs, they determined the best route for hitting the most bars in

Old Millennials Are Diving Into Homeownership Last month we learned about the 10 hottest markets for millennials.  Combine that with the NAR’s latest Profile of Home Buyers & Sellers, where the median age of all first-time home buyers is 31 years old and you’ll see that “older” millennials (25-36 years old) are diving head-first into

Is Winter the Best Time to Buy SFR’s? Is winter the best time to buy single-families?  According to a new report from HomeUnion, the winter “off-peak” season is the best time of the year to acquire single-family rentals (SFR’s).  In fact, they found that investors pay 7.2% less per sq. ft. during the winter versus

America’s Most Flipworthy Hotspots Realtor.com says that flipping is back and it’s better than ever!  In fact they report (like many others) that the number of flipped properties is reaching levels not seen in a nearly decade.  So, Realtor.com’s number-crunchers put their pencils to paper and identified the largest 100 markets by ratio of flips

Housing Starts Hit 9-Year High – Jump 25%! The Commerce Department reported that privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits in October were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,229,000. This is 0.3% above September’s rate of 1,225,000 and is 4.6% above October 2015.  Single-family authorizations in October were at a rate of 762k;

The Foreclosure Gender Gap Data powerhouse RealtyTrac recently released an analysis showing that men, on average, had a higher rate of foreclosure than women.  Interestingly they discovered that 73 out of every 10k homes with individual male homeowners were in foreclosure as of the end of Q3 2016 while only 72 out of every 10k

Celebrating Veterans Today is Veterans Day…November 11th.  Here’s a little history about this important day;  In 1918, the armistice of the First World War officially took effect on the 11th day, of the 11th month, at the 11th hour.  The following year President Woodrow Wilson declared November 11th as Armistice Day.   It would later become

Zillow Forecasts Rising Rent in Most Large U.S. Metros According to to the latest Zillow Rent Forecast (covering August 2016 through Aug 2017) rents will rise in 34 of the 35 largest U.S. metros.  Overall, rents are forecasted to rise 1.7% over the next year, the same rate of increase as the past 12 months.