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After several years of a lean and pricey housing market, real estate agents are starting to see more balance. In the second quarter of the year, 44% of real estate agents surveyed in CNBC’s Housing Market Survey said they were seeing a balanced market between buyer and seller. That share is up from 30% in the third quarter of last year, when CNBC began its quarterly survey. “It certainly feels like, depending on the home, depending on the neighborhood, depending on the condition and the price point, that both the buyer and the seller do have a little bit of...

There is a word for demanding tens of thousands of dollars from a man before you’ll give him back what you took from him. That word is extortion. But in Los Angeles, when the thing taken is a house, the state calls it a landlord-tenant dispute and tells the victim to hire a lawyer. That single act of miscategorization, repeated thousands of times across California, has built an entire criminal industry, and the people who investigate it for a living are now begging the city to admit what everyone already knows. Former LAPD Lt. Moses Castillo and veteran private investigator...

There’s a new trend that will make it even harder to buy or sell a house. There is a highly lucrative theater production playing out across the American landscape, and if it is allowed to go unchallenged, it threatens to paralyze both private commerce and public health under the guise of safety. It is a shell game driven by an institutional ecosystem of specialists who have learned that the easiest way to manage a narrative, extract compliance, and dodge accountability is to invent an invisible, unprovable enemy. The most visible front of this theater is currently emerging in the real...

The housing market was expected to rebound this year, but the Iran war has changed that trajectory... In early June, the average 30-year fixed-rate was 6.52%, according to Freddie Mac. Just before the war began, rates fell below 6% for the first time in years... The rate environment is typically driven by numerous economic and political events, but the war is driving the movement now, Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com, said. “Over the last couple of months, the rate market has been held hostage by this conflict in Iran,” he said. “When it looks like a ceasefire is in...

Key PointsState lawmakers passed a tax on nonprimary residences in New York City in order to help close the city's budget gap.The so-called pied-a-terre tax will be imposed on second homes valued at $1 million or more and will take effect in two different phases. Billionaire and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin became the face of the tax after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video in front of Griffin's penthouse apartment announcing the tax.New York City's new tax on second homes will more than double property taxes owed by many wealthy luxury apartment owners, according to tax experts.State...

President Donald Trump has defended Chinese nationals purchasing U.S. farmland, while conceding he does not “love it,” in comments that underscore a central tension in his China policy: balancing national or food security concerns with economic realities. [ snip ] On the campaign trail, Trump was already warning against Chinese acquisitions in the U.S. At a Smithton farm event in Pennsylvania in September 2024, he said that the U.S. should block Chinese purchases of farmland, adding: “we don’t want you buying our land.”

Nick Sortor @nicksortor JUST IN: The House has OVERWHELMINGLY passed a Trump-backed bill to RESTRICT companies like Blackrock from buying up single family homes LONG overdue! It’ll now head to the Senate, then to POTUS’ desk May 20, 2026

Mortgage rates continued to move higher in the past week as geopolitical turmoil caused the 10-year Treasury yield to soar, although mortgage spreads remain well below their levels of 2024 and 2025. At HousingWire‘s Mortgage Rates Center, rates for 30-year conforming loans were at 6.77%, their highest point of the year. Rates for 30-year loans through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) averaged 6.33% and rates for 30-year jumbo loans averaged 6.89%. HousingWire Data is benchmarked across a base of retail lenders using a standardized borrower scenario with a 75% loan-to-value ratio and a 780 FICO score. Last week, loan officers...

For generations, Americans viewed homes as more than assets. They were the physical foundation of family stability, equity-building, and civic continuity — the bedrock of a middle-class society rooted in dispersed private ownership. Owning a home was analogous to owning a piece of the American Dream itself: a symbol of citizen sovereignty and national agency. That understanding is fading. Recently, while selling a property, I encountered a buyer who presented himself as a flipper. The contract revealed something else: minimal earnest money, aggressive escape clauses, cash-only terms, and assignment language that treated the deal more like a tradable derivative than...

A former New York Supreme Court justice and a Brooklyn real estate developer have been charged in an alleged $6.5 million investment fraud scheme tied to a purported New Jersey commercial real estate deal, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed in the Eastern District of New York. Federal prosecutors said former Kings County Supreme Court Justice Edward Harold King and developer Sam Sprei, also known as Yechiel Sprei, Shimon Sprei and Eli Shapiro, conspired to defraud investors by falsely claiming their money would be securely held in escrow for a bankruptcy-related property auction in Freehold, New Jersey. According to...

Angelina Jolie is saying goodbye to her Los Angeles abode. The Oscar-winning actress has officially listed her California compound, formerly owned by filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, for $29.85 million... The home was first conceived by architect B. Cooper Corbett in 1913 and was later acquired by DeMille in 1916... Jolie sparked rumors that she was considering leaving L.A. after an August 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter in which the actress and director said she is only there “because I have to be here from a divorce.”... However, once her twins turn 18 on July 12, 2026, Jolie said she's...

White House economists estimate the United States has a shortage of 10 million houses, according to a new report out Monday — and say regulatory cuts could lead to more construction to stabilize prices, increase home ownership and fuel faster economic growth. The analysis, part of the Economic Report of the President, outlines both a political risk and a messaging opportunity for President Donald Trump, whose public approval has slumped because of concerns about his tariffs, the Iran war and his unfulfilled promises to slash inflation and unleash stronger growth. Trump signed two executive orders in March directing federal agencies...

San Diego is one of the nation’s hottest housing markets, with average home prices hovering around $1 million and rents for a one-bedroom apartment topping $2,000 a month. Yet city officials estimate that more than 5,000 properties sit empty most of the year, which some advocates argue worsens the city’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. So California’s second-largest city is set to take dramatic action. In a few weeks, San Diego voters will decide whether to become the latest California municipality to tax vacant homes

As a cofounder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, Peter Thiel is widely recognized for his expertise in tech. But for a while now, the billionaire venture capitalist is sounding the alarm on an entirely different sector: real estate.During an interview with Common Wealth Canada in late 2024, Thiel drew upon the insights of 19th-century economist Henry George to underscore the gravity of America’s real estate crisis (1).snip“The dynamic ends up being that you add 10% to the population in a city, and maybe the house prices go up 50%, and maybe people’s salaries go up, but...

Katelin Holloway and Ben Ramirez thought they had found their forever home when they purchased a spacious North Beach property for $4.75 million in 2021 — a four-story residence with five bedrooms, sweeping skyline views and room for their growing family. Instead, the couple is now facing the possibility that the house must be carved back into four separate apartments after city officials determined the building was improperly converted from a multi-unit property years before they bought it, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. SNIP According to city officials and tenant advocates, the building had previously been altered from a...

NEW YORK (AP) — The wealthy Alexander brothers used the same tactics of luring, drugging and humiliation to sexually assault numerous women and girls, bragging about their exploits in blog posts with titles that included “It’s not rape if,” a federal prosecutor told jurors Tuesday. snip... The allegations are corroborated by the “sheer number of victims who testified,” the prosecutor said — women who never have met each other and live different lives, but “have one horrific thing in common: they were raped by these men.” Far from hiding their activity, the brothers bragged about it in text messages, emailed...

STOPPING WALL STREET FROM COMPETING WITH MAIN STREET HOMEBUYERS: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to protect the American Dream by making sure that large institutional investors do not buy single-family homes that could otherwise be purchased by families.The Order directs key agencies to issue guidance preventing relevant Federal programs from approving, insuring, guaranteeing, securitizing, or facilitating sales of single-family homes to institutional investors.The Order instructs key agencies to promote sales to individual owner-occupants through first-look policies (which give individuals and other non-institutional investors the opportunity to buy foreclosed properties before investors do), disclosure requirements, and anti-circumvention...

High home prices, faltering supply and weaker consumer confidence in the economy all continue to weigh on the U.S. housing market. The chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, is calling it “a new housing crisis.” Sales of previously owned homes in January dropped a much wider-than-expected 8.4% from December to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 3.91 million, according to the NAR. Sales were 4.4% lower than January 2025. That is the slowest pace since December 2023 and the biggest monthly drop since February 2022. This count is based on closings, so contracts that were likely...

China has executed 11 members of a notorious Myanmar mafia family that was infamous for duping victims in fake online romances. The Ming crime family was sentenced to death in September by a court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, with the same court also carrying out the executions on Thursday. Residents in the UK and the US have fallen victim to similar, sophisticated schemes, after being lured into romantic relationships that resulted in the loss of large amounts of cash. The clan members were executed for crimes including 'intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention, fraud and casino establishment',...

A homebuyer’s relief at landing a house turned to hesitation after an impromptu pre-closing visit revealed the property was still cluttered with the seller’s belongings. In a post on Reddit, the buyer shared how, the day before their scheduled closing, they stopped by the yard only to find old equipment, tools and what looked like junk still strewn around. The original poster (OP) described a quiet drive-by that turned into an unplanned walk-through once the buyer’s realtor granted early access. They found the property in a far-from-ready state, with one Reddit user responding: “You should do an official walk through...