Free Republic

...Republicans have spent years warning that China should not be allowed to buy American farmland. But some Republican insiders are getting paid by the Chinese-controlled company sitting squarely in the middle of that fight.... ...Among them are former aides to Republican Sens. John Warner and Susan Collins, a former House Republican Conference official, and a former U.S. Department of Agriculture official.... ...disclosure lists DeLacy, Ross, Joel Roberson, and former USDA official Peter Tabor lobbying more broadly on “issues related to foreign ownership of agricultural land.”..

Big brother is watching your open house. Homeowners associations across the country are quietly signing up for Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, and the backlash is now strong enough to blow up home sales, kill signed contracts and land cities in court, with New York at the center of the fight. Nowhere is the backlash more raw than in the Adirondacks, where the fight has already toppled a signed contract and sparked open revolt inside a gated community. In Saranac Lake, a resident living behind a gate who protested the cameras in his own neighborhood said the issue isn’t security...

A senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence official is the new owner of a historic building overlooking the White House Complex, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation discovered. Located approximately 650 feet northeast of the White House grounds, the 100-year-old Securities Building on 15th Street was purchased on July 21, 2026 for $8.4 million by the Philip Qiu and Family Foundation, filings show. The building’s new owner, Philip Qiu, has held numerous positions within Chinese intelligence and state security arms, according to university records and DCNF translations of Chinese government announcements. Qiu did not respond to multiple requests for comment....

Foreign buyers pulled back from the U.S. housing market over the past year, buying $45.3 billion worth of existing homes, the second-lowest level on record, according to a new report. Foreigners bought those homes from April 2025 through March 2026, according to the National Association of Realtors 2026 International Transactions in U.S. Residential Real Estate report. That's a 19.1% decrease in dollar value and a 14% drop in the number of properties purchased from the previous 12-month period. International buyers purchased 67,100 properties, the second-lowest level since NAR began tracking foreign buyer activity in 2009. The median purchase price was...

The doom feed says home affordability locked a generation out. The math on the payment you actually write says something the headlines won’t.Here are the “facts” that the media tells you about home affordability.Let’s start with a recent survey. Two out of three Americans now say it’s a bad time to buy a house, the most negative reading Gallup has ever recorded. Another study showed that a record 25.2 million adults under 35 are living with their parents. Scroll any feed, and you’ll hear that home affordability has priced an entire generation out for good. Those are the “facts” according...

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...