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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%).
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.
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.
Spring is traditionally considered the best season to list a home, but it doesn’t inch out the other seasons by much, according to a new analysis by the real estate brokerage Redfin.
Redfin’s research team analyzed 7 million homes listed from 2010 through 2014 to gauge how important the season is in listing a home. It examined how many of the homes went under contract within 30 days and how often they sold for more than their list price.
Foreclosures are making up a much smaller share of many markets’ housing inventories and slowly falling back in line with historical norms. Completed foreclosures totaled about 39,000 nationwide in December 2014, a 13.7 percent year-over-year decrease and a 66 percent plunge from the peak in September 2010, according to CoreLogic’s December National Foreclosure Report.
What’s more, the 12-month sum of completed foreclosures for 2014 — 563,294 — is at its lowest point since November 2007, according to the report. Completed foreclosures have fallen every month for the past 34 consecutive months. Historically, prior to the housing crisis, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide.
