Brokers increasingly see a need to carve out a place for themselves on the portals, and are shifting their ad dollars and marketing focus toward luring consumers from portals to their own sites. But if the big brokers make their peace with the Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, will that leave smaller brokers out in the cold?
Millennium Tower, the 685-foot, 442-unit skyscraper being built by Millennium Partners at Downtown Crossing, opens its sales office to the public Thursday morning. But a third of the units already have purchase and sales agreements in place, developers claim.
Boston’s burgeoning growth makes today an exciting era for the city – but judging by a panel discussion among housing experts this morning, it’s not at all clear how the city can tackle longstanding obstacles to accomplish its lofty housing goals.
In a sluggish real estate market, where everyone and their brother seems to have refi’d, twice, back when rates were 3 percent, most lenders have been struggling to add more purchase volume to their originations. Has their quest finally led them to resurrect one of the old ghosts of the housing crash – the subprime loan?
The recovery from the housing crash has been spread unevenly among Massachusetts’ cities and towns, but metro Boston cities like Cambridge and Somerville have received a double helping of price growth – and, in the past few years, a wave of new supply, with millions of square feet of new construction currently in the pipeline. But a look beneath the numbers suggests that underneath the sunshine, the squeeze is on, and it’s middle-class families who are the lemons.
Jon Ufland loves his adopted hometown of Brookline – and he’s excited about the challenge of making his brokerage, Unlimited Sotheby’s International Realty, the premier destination for home shoppers there and in nearby Jamaica Plain. A former Prudential brokerage, the firm has recently shifted to Sotheby’s luxury flag.
This may be about as good as it’s going to get for the housing recovery, suggested Paul Willen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank, in a speech this morning. But that may not be as bad as people think.
Whenever a huge new player enters a market, it’s sure to shake up the existing competition. That’s never been more true in the real estate world than it was this week, following the news that Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp will buy Move Inc., the independent corporation that runs Realtor.com.
Prudential Unlimited Realty has joined Sotheby’s International Realty, operating as Unlimited Sotheby’s International Realty.
The restless minds of Silicon Valley are always on the lookout for new industries to destroy – or, as they prefer to say, disrupt – and it seems they have once more turned their baleful glare to the world of real estate.
Academics are often accused of pronouncing on things without real-life experience, but that’s definitely not the case with Jenn Molinsky, who worked in both the private sector and with the city of Newton as an chief planner before bringing her boots-on-the-ground experience to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
After a slow 2014, the housing market should be looking up next year, Freddie Mac’s Chief Economist Frank Nothaft told attendees at the New England Mortgage Banking Conference in Newport, R.I.
Real estate moves in mysterious ways, and in recent months a slight mystery has begun to emerge: All this summer, the Massachusetts market was breaking new records for pending sales – that is, homes for a which a purchase offer has been accepted but for which the deal has not yet been done.
Superlatives seem to cling to Hans Brings – he’s been Coldwell Banker’s most productive sales agent in New England for the past four years, as well as making the Wall Street Journal/RealTrends list of the top 250 real estate agents in the country.
Niki Charalambous started her career in banking before taking time out to raise her children. Nine years ago she returned to the working world and joined Community Credit Union (CCU), quickly warming to credit union life.
Trecia Marchand got an early start on her path to being a Credit Union Hero. She’s been a credit union member “since I was a little kid,” she said.
In the skies of Boston, urban bird watchers – of a sort – have been given a plethora of opportunities recently to spot what former Mayor Thomas Menino used to call his favorite bird – the crane.
The lingering effects of the foreclosure crisis have no entirely burned away – but out of the ashes, the state’s Gateway Communities are already rising, a new look at foreclosure data reveals.
Havas, a multinational French communications firm and parent company of Boston advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, became the first major tenant of the Burham Building in Downtown Crossing, former home of Filene’s.
More than eight months after the new regulations defining a “qualified mortgage†(QM) kicked in – and despite some recent flutters of interest in non-QM lending from Wall Street – local lenders say they still feel bound to stick to the new rules.
