Posts made by author 'Dickerson Nieman'
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- 2026 | 5 Posts
- 2025 | 24 Posts
- 2024 | 24 Posts
- 2023 | 24 Posts
- 2022 | 24 Posts
- 2021 | 9 Posts
- 2020 | 26 Posts
- 2019 | 30 Posts
- 2018 | 43 Posts
- 2017 | 55 Posts
- 2016 | 64 Posts
- 2015 | 100 Posts
- 2014 | 108 Posts
- 2013 | 97 Posts
25
On Doing Everything Right and Still Making the Wrong Decision
My husband and I are a supposedly elusive breed: the Millennial Homeowner. However, this is not something we are celebrating. Three years ago, newly engaged and living in a new area, we started looking for houses. It was a kind of mania with me, some programming that we needed the house and the big yard and the mortgage to be real adults, to be successful. We had been very careful financially. Both of us are teachers, and we had spent years limiting our spending and living in cheap apartments, squirreling away money for the house of our dreams. My soon-to-be-husband especially was a big saver, quietly amassing over $20,000 dollars in his bank account over two years, while I was not far behind with my own savings. When we moved to a new place, a beautiful, rural area of Virginia that bordered the Chesapeake Bay, our suburbia-raised selves rejoiced. Everywhere we looked were wide-open fields, desolate beaches, roads lined with wildflowers. We went for bike...
15
Existing Home Sales Rise
With a bailout deal in place, the situation in Greece had little influence on mortgage rates over the past week, and the level of daily volatility declined significantly. The economic data released over the past week also did not have much impact and mortgage rates ended a little lower. The housing data released this week was encouraging. June existing home sales increased 3% from May to the highest level since Feb 2007 and they were 10% higher than a year ago. Strong demand and limited inventory continued to push prices higher and the median existing home price reached an all-time high. Total housing inventory did increase slightly in June, but it remains low by historical standards. Existing home sales account for roughly 90% of all single-family home purchases. The most recent reading for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) showed that core inflation continued to hold steady. June Core CPI, which excludes the volatile food and energy components, was 1.8% hig...
27
45% of Homes Sold in Less Than a Month
In the monthly REALTORS® Confidence Index Survey, NAR asks REALTORS® "For the last house that you closed in the past month, how long was it on the market from listing time to the time the seller accepted the buyer's offer?" . The map below shows the median days on market of respondents about their sales from March-May 2015. Properties typically sold within 30 days in Colorado, the District of Columbia, California, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas (red). On the other hand, properties were typically on the market for more than 90 days in Maine, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas (green). All real estate is local. State-level data is provided for REALTORS® who may want to compare local markets against the state and national summa...
18
6.5M borrowers stand to benefit from refi
23
New Single-Family Home Size Increases
The typical size of newly built single-family homes increased at the start of the year. The trend of increasing new home size leveled off in 2014, but new home size increased during the first quarter of 2015 with a decline in the volume of construction. As first-time buyers return to the market, typical home size is expected to trend lower. According to first quarter 2015 data from the Census Quarterly Starts and Completions by Purpose and Design and NAHB analysis, median single-family square floor area increased from 2,445 in the fourth quarter of last year to 2,521 square feet. Average (mean) square footage for new single-family homes increased from 2,677 to 2,736 for the first three months of the year. On a less volatile one-year moving average, the recent trend of leveling home size can be see on the graph above, although current sizes remain elevated. Since cycle lows...