With Mother’s Day this weekend, Zillow Blog wanted to create a list of the metros across the country that are the best places for single moms to live. To help them out, we thought about the different aspects of a city that might make it more attractive for a single mother to raise a family and FULL POST
Summary: One silver lining about the current state of the real estate market is that, for homebuyers with good credit and savings for a down payment, homes are more affordable than they’ve been in the past 35 years. However, affordability is not the only factor that impacts homeownership rates—we must also consider a prospective buyer’s access FULL BRIEF
With so much talk about when and where the real estate market will hit bottom it’s easy to forget that the home prices are only one part of determining how much buying a home will actually cost. We get caught up looking at the moving parts independently and often forget that, like airline seats, neighbors FULL BRIEF
Zillow Blog recently posted a list of The Best Places to Buy in 2011. In thinking through the construction of this list, we thought about the factors that make a place an attractive market for prospective home buyers. We settled on four main criteria and each was given equal weight: 1. Affordability 2. Unemployment 3. FULL POST
Zillow’s Chief Economist Stan Humphries was recently on CNBC discussing the best places to invest in 2011. So what type of investor was the focus of his remarks? When discussing “real estate investors,” there are three main categories; each has a different time horizon and source of profiting off of his or her investment: 1. FULL POST
The Zillow Real Estate Research team has made use of our proprietary Zillow Mortgage Marketplace (ZMM) data in a few recent briefs (here and here). A natural question that a reader of these analyses may have is how representative this data is of the overall mortgage market as a whole. With this question in mind, FULL BRIEF
We here at Zillow take our research and our analytics very seriously. When working on the Santa’s Top 10 List, we got to our white boards and brainstormed a list of criteria that would make a given city an ideal environment for Santa to work. While we don’t have first-hand experience with elves, flying reindeer, FULL POST
This analysis uses Zillow Mortgage Marketplace data to compare the rates offered on loans of different sizes (conforming, expanded-conforming, and jumbo), explore how that spread has changed during the 2007-2010 financial crisis, and look at how different events may have impacted the spread. FULL BRIEF
Standard & Poors released the August 2010 S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the most widely used US home price metric, this morning. Both the 10- and 20-city indices show a slight dip from July 2010 levels, but are stronger than the August 2009 rates– up 2.6% for the 10-city index and up 1.7% for the 20-city. Case-Shiller computes individual metro-area FULL POST
The National Association of Realtors released the September figures for existing-home sales this morning, showing a solid 10% jump over the August estimate. September’s sales show a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.53 million sales, up from 4.12 million in August. Regionally, sales in the Midwest and South are leading this growth with respective 14.5% FULL POST