If you’ve been around the real estate block for a while, you already know that the term “short sale” is laughable. While it might sound like a super-fast transaction, short sales are infamous for their delays!
In the words of Aretha Franklin, sisters are doing it for themselves. For two years running, single women have purchased homes more often than single men. According to the National Association of Realtors, in 2011 almost twice as many single women (20% of all home purchases) bought homes as their single male peers (12%). And in 2010, that ratio was 21:10.
We just released the latest version of our Android mobile app for finding homes for sale on-the-go. Some of the features, such as Boundary Search and driving directions, were requested by you! Your feedback helps us figure out what features you need for your real estate search, so we can develop them and help you find the home meant for you even faster (and make the process fun, too!).
With inventory and interest rates so low, we shouldn’t be surprised when low-priced property markets suddenly gain value. More people can suddenly afford to borrow money and buy a home, and when the number of buyers exceeds the number of available homes for sale, prices naturally inflate. But what might surprise us is that high priced markets—those already well above the national average in terms of median prices—are also on the rise, showing decisively that in some parts of the country, wealth and high demand for property can keep real estate expensive, even in a sluggish economy.
Picture my husband and I, long time renters, neither of us even ever having had a car loan, sitting with a mortgage broker, discussing our options for financing a home. We thought we were educated, but nothing made us feel clueless faster than the mortgage process, with its acronyms and obscure terminology. That feeling is what this series of “lessons in loan lingo” blogs is meant to save you from.
This week, we continued pinning jewel tones with majestic and rich eggplant purple (following on the heels of mustard yellow, teal, gold, and olive green).
Check out some of our most popular eggplant pins!
With the inventory shortage and home prices going up (but still way down from their pre-recession levels), there has been a huge influx of all-cash offers in the housing market. Cash offers are infamous for winning bidding wars and swaying sellers, because as we all know: money talks.
Last week, Sarah Green reported on the national uptick in median home prices. Today we look closer at that trend—specifically at the three markets showing the greatest improvement year-over-year: Phoenix, AZ; the San Francisco Bay Area’s East Bay in CA; and Denver, CO.
We have some terrific mobile apps here at ZipRealty that work with the iPhone, iPad, and Android. Our customers love our apps, because they’re easy to use and make searching for a home that much more convenient. Check out this video on our iPhone and iPad apps:
My first experience with PITI was in a meeting with a mortgage broker. She said the word a few times; but it was new to me (like everything else about mortgages) and she was throwing around a lot of lending lingo. I couldn’t grasp the context and had almost no idea what she meant. I kept thinking of a small pit bull, aptly named “Piti.”
In realty, PITI is an acronym, standing for