Author: Brad Beckett

How would you feel about purchasing a house that has been hit by six cars in nine years? That’s the question a family in Raleigh, NC is asking after their house was hit for the 6th time last month (some of them fatal). According to a recent article in Fast Company, the house sits on the corner of a divided road and the entrance to a subdivision – near a sharp curve in the road – and is the victim of bad street design. The current owners purchased the home in 2004 (aware of at least one prior crash) and…

Here’s The Scoop On How Pet DNA Testing Could Fix Your Apartment Poop Problem by John Triplett, National REIA Pets are a way of life in rental housing and if you want your rentals fully leased, pet owners are a key tenant demographic you want to keep. Look just at Millennials: 76 percent are pet owners and a majority are renters. You might have laughed at first at this headline on how pet DNA testing could fix your apartment property’s pet poop problem, but here is the reality. Your tenants may be leaving pet poop lying around for you and…

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, nearly one third of millennials lived at home in 2014 making it the most common living arrangement among this age group.  While there are many reasons for this trend, lingering effects of the last recession, student debt, lack of affordable housing options, the bottom line is that more and more young people are choosing to live at home.  And, when you see the top 5 states they happen to coincide with some of the highest rental rates. “Housing is like a ladder — when there are blockages, it backs up…

The law of supply & demand is one of the most fundamentals of Economics.   Buy low, sell high….We’ve heard it time and time again.  The folks over at Keeping Current Matters recently assembled this handy chart (using data from the NAR) showing how Supply & Demand impact the real estate market.  Happy Friday! Hat tip to Keeping Current Matters.

This week data powerhouse RealtyTrac released their Q3 2016 U.S. Residential Property Vacancy and Zombie Foreclosure Report, showing close to 1.4 million residential properties (1 to 4 units) representing 1.6% of all residential properties were vacant as of the end of the third quarter.  This  number is 3% less than the previous quarter and down 9% from one year ago.  The report shows that over 18k residential properties that were actively in the foreclosure process were zombies – representing 4.7% of all residential properties in foreclosure.  There were over 46k vacant REO’s representing an increase of 7% from the previous…

Last month we reported that despite a shortage of workers, construction employment continues to rise.  Now Reuters is reporting that homebuilders are experiencing a shortage of workers at all levels.  Citing data from the NAHB and the DOL, they report that there are over 200k unfilled construction jobs nationwide – an 81% increase in the past two years and the highest level of unfilled jobs since 2007.  The labor shortage is contributing to rising costs and possibly slowing down construction. “The labor shortage is getting worse as demand is getting stronger,” said John Courson, chief executive of the Home Builders…

Rental information site Zumper recently released their National Rent Report for September which shows that the median one-bedroom rent price decreased in all but one of the top ten U.S. rental markets.  For the first time this year to date, the national median price of both one and two bedroom units decreased.  One bedrooms dropped -0.8% to a national median price of $1,146, while the two bedrooms dropped -1.0% to a median price of $1,358.  Zumper’s National Rent Report analyzes rental data from over 1 million active listings across the U.S. to calculate median asking rents for the top 100…

What do more than 1 million Craigslist rental listings tell us about the housing market?  That’s the question of a recent Washington Post article about the online classified site that reportedly “has become the single largest information exchange about the rental housing market in the United States.”  Citing research from University of California at Berkeley that looked at over 1.5 millions listings, they show how Craigslist is becoming a virtual market barometer – covering both the high & the low ends of the market in all corners of the country. “Craigslist has the potential to detect patterns other data sets can’t, such…

Corelogic released their Home Price Index and HPI Forecast for July 2016 showing that home prices are up 6%, year over year (which includes distressed sales) as well as increasing 1.1% month over month.  In addition,  CoreLogic’s HPI Forecast predicts that home prices will increase by 5.4% on a year-over-year basis from July 2016 to July 2017, and on a month-over-month basis by 0.4%. Click here to download the full report on CoreLogic.com

Student housing with 50-inch flat-screen televisions, hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances, en suite bathrooms and an in-unit washer/dryers?  Yes indeed, student housing has come a long way over the past few years and luxury amenities are no exception.  A recent article on Yahoo Finance discusses recent upgrades in student housing and how these are becoming standard fare at large public universities across the country.  In fact, according to Axiometrics, 47k new beds were coming online in privately owned student housing this Fall. “Privately owned student housing is quickly becoming an integral sector in real estate, and performance metrics demonstrate its…