Chinese nationals are the biggest foreign buyers of American homes, purchasing homes valued at $93 billion in the past five years, including $28.6 billion in 2015 alone according a new report released today by Asia Society and the Rosen Consulting Group. Chinese buyers spent at least $93 billion on residential real estate between 2010 and 2015. Spending rose at an … Read More »

Last year investor purchases rose for the first time in four years despite soaring prices paid by investors to acquire properties for flipping or converting into single family rentals. Investment-home sales in 2015 jumped 7.0 percent to an estimated 1.09 million from 1.02 million in 2014. The median investment-home sales price was $143,500, up 15.3 percent from $124,500 a year … Read More »

Without a return to a robust private label securitization market for pristine borrowers, securitization of riskier loans won’t occur and without a vehicle to finance them, origination of these loans to be fairly limited. That’s the conclusion of “The Rebirth of Securitization,” a white paper by the Urban Institute’s Laurie Goodman published September 10.  Just seven days later CoreLogic’s Faith … Read More »

For the business of residential real estate investing, these are not the best of times.  Bargains on attractive properties to flip or to hold and convert to rentals are tough to find.  Foreclosures and short sales have fallen to ten percent of home sales, the lowest level in four years, according to RealtyTrac.  Moreover, NAR reports the foreclosure discount has shrunk … Read More »

Sales to foreign investors interested in single family rentals are down, largely to a strengthening dollar, but foreign nationals living in the US are participating in the spring boomlet. The National Association of Realtors reports that the number of U.S. homebuyers who identified as international dropped to 2.0 percent during the first four months of 2015 from 2.5 percent a … Read More »

  Only one out of four single family home and condo sales in May-24.6 percent-were all-cash purchases, down from 30.4 percent a year ago to the lowest level since November 2009. Distress sales also fell to a new low of 10.5 percent of all sales in May, down from 18.3 percent a year ago to the lowest level since January … Read More »

he average gross profit — the difference between the purchase price and the flipped price — for completed flips in the first quarter was $72,450, up from $65,290 in the previous quarter and up from $61,684 in the first quarter of 2014 to the highest level going back to the first quarter of 2011, the earliest where data is available, … Read More »

  Vacation Home Sales Soar to Record High in 2014, Investment Purchases Fall or Homes Sold to Owner-Occupants Drops to New Low in First Quarter, Smaller Investors Picking Up Slack Time for a quiz.  Which headline do YOU think is right?  The first, the second, both or neither? The right answer is that you should never believe a real estate … Read More »

Don’t tell the HGTV producers who find audiences for their endless stream of shows devoted to house flipping, but it’s looking like flipping is losing popularity. RealtyTrac® reports that last year flips fell to their lowest market share since 2011.  Some 136,269 U.S. single family homes were flipped in 2014, 5.4 percent of all single family home sales during the … Read More »

A number of familiar former foreclosure hotbeds top RealtyTrac’s list of best markets to buy a rental property in the first quarter of 2015.  They’ve got the right mix of employment, growth, prices and potential return. The report also looks at which markets are seeing the biggest increases in rental rates in 2015 compared to 2014, and provides rankings of … Read More »