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Americans Again Say Real Estate Is Best Long-Term Investment

Best Long Term Investment

For the second straight year, more Americans name real estate than stocks, gold, savings accounts/CDs or bonds as the best long-term investment. Real estate leads with 31% of Americans choosing it, followed by stocks/mutual funds, at 25%. Meanwhile, gold dropped to third this year, a significant change from 2011 and 2012, when it was the runaway leader.

The percentages of Americans choosing real estate and stocks are steady this year compared with 2014. This follows three years, from 2011 to 2014, of increasing partiality toward both investments as the housing and stock markets recovered and gold’s appeal waned. The public’s preference for gold fell five percentage points in the past year, bringing its overall decline since 2011 to 15 points, the largest shift seen among the five investments tracked.

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The 20 Most Active Housing Markets

United States

Home buyers are turning out in markets across the country for the spring selling season, and some markets are seeing more action than others.

Homes are selling faster too. The median number of days on the market fell to 89 in March – 13 percent lower than a year ago.

Read about the 20 markets that had homes selling at some of the fastest speeds, and see where Seattle is on the list…

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The Top 10 Features for New Homes

Important

The outdoor kitchen and two-story foyers are starting to lose favor among new home shoppers, while energy efficiency and bigger closets are gaining in popularity, according to a new survey from the National Association of Home Builders. NAHB asked builders to rank home features from 1 to 5 on how likely they were to include them this year in single-family homes they build this year.

Read the NAR article…

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Kirkland, Bellevue among nation’s priciest for high-end homes

Front Door 2

If you own a home in Kirkland or Bellevue, you live in one of the nation’s top 10 luxury markets, according to a new report by Redfin. Though the Eastside cities rank high, they are nowhere near Miami Beach, where the average luxury home sold for $8.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Read the Seattle Times article…

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Millennial Buyers May Need Parents’ Help

More millennials are finally leaving their parents’ homes to form their own households, but they may need financial help to do it.

A new report by consumer lender loanDepot shows that about two-thirds of parents – or 67 percent – will use savings to help their children buy a home. loanDepot surveyed 1,000 parents and 1,000 millennials (those between 18 and 38 years old) to find out about parents’ financial assistance in a home purchase.

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Why Age 61 Is Important to Real Estate

United States

By age 61, the majority of people feel free to choose where they most want to live, according to a new study by Merrill Lynch, “Home in Retirement: More Freedom, New Choices.”

“Throughout most of people’s lives, where they live is determined by their responsibilities,” according to the report. “Most careers demand that people live within a reasonable commuting distance from where they and/or their spouse work. However, as people enter their 50s and 60s, they begin to cross what this study reveals to be the ‘Freedom Threshold.'” That’s the age when people say they can finally choose where they want to live, according to the survey of more than 3,600 retirees.

Read the article…

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Gen Y Shaping Housing Trends

Front Door 2

Gen Y — those 34 and younger — make up 32% of home buyers. That’s a larger share than any other segment of buyers, according to NAR’s latest “Generational Trends” report. The percentage would be even higher if four factors weren’t working against younger buyers, says NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. See highlights here. Dig into details on attitudes and incomes of each generation of buyers here.

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Top Reasons People Want to Move

House with BHHS Sign

One in three U.S. households say they plan to move in the next five years, according to a survey conducted by the Demand Institute of 10,000 households’ current living situations. And it’s the location of the home that will be driving most of those moving decisions — more so than the physical home itself.

Seventy-five percent of the households surveyed cited one or more location-related reasons for why they were moving. The top reasons were the desire for a safer neighborhood (30%); being closer to family (27%); a change of climate (26%); being closer to work (25%), and moving for a new job (23%).

Read the details…

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Property Tax Rates Highest for Homeowners Who Have Owned Between 5 – 15 Years

Prices Rising

RealtyTrac®, the nation’s leading source for comprehensive housing data, recently released its first-ever U.S. Property Tax Rates Report for 2014, which provides average property taxes and effective property tax rates for single family homes in more than 1,000 counties nationwide as well as by state and metropolitan statistical area.

The report also provides a breakdown of average property taxes in 2014 and effective property tax rates — which is the average property taxes for single family homes in 2014 divided by the average estimated value of single family homes as of the end of 2014 — by number of years owned and by property value range.

Read the article…

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Seniors May Face Increasing Foreclosure Risk

Neighborhood

Debt levels among Americans age 55 and older continues to rise, which could put millions of baby boomers’ homes at risk, according to a new report,  “Debt of the Elderly and Near Elderly, 1992-2013,” from the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington, D.C.

The average debt among this age group is $73,211. The percentage of Americans age 55 and older with debt payments greater than 40 percent of their income rose to 9.2 percent in 2013, from 8.5 percent in 2010. What’s more, the percentages of families whose debt payments are excessive relative to their incomes is at — or near – the highest levels since 1992, according to the report.

Read the article…