Jeff Ostrowski

Talk about branching out. SouthState Bank grabbed headlines earlier this year when it agreed to a sale-leaseback of 165 of its branches across the Southeast for $467 million, and it’s not alone. In a structure typically more common for industrial and logistics properties, banks are increasingly offloading their branches to third parties, and Florida-based SouthState executed a deal to become a tenant in its spaces.

Fast-fashion mogul Amancio Ortega built his fortune by selling bargain-priced shirts, jeans and dresses. Now, the Spanish billionaire is paying a premium for some of the Miami area’s most prominent properties.

His latest big-ticket deal came this fall. Ortega’s family office, Pontegadea, paid $274.4 million in October for the 1111 Brickell tower in Miami.

Car prices keep soaring — the average price of a new vehicle topped $50,000 for the first time last year, and the share of Americans taking on $1,000 monthly car payments passed 1 in 5, also a record.

If you’re considering a new car loan while also hoping to buy a home, you might want to think again: A hefty car payment can hinder your ability to qualify for a mortgage. “Higher car payments eat directly into the residual income available for a mortgage payment,” says Anthony O. Kellum.

Before she landed an affordable apartment in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, Lorena Gonzalez was crashing at a relative’s house, where she shared a bedroom with her 18-year-old son. And before that, Gonzalez rented an apartment so far from her job that the commute could take three hours.

“I work in the city, and the commute was really killing me,” says Gonzalez, who works at a San Francisco hospital as a radiology technologist assistant. That changed when Gonzalez landed a unit in an affordable housing development.

Prospective homebuyers in Texas are demanding thousands of dollars in price cuts as once-hot real estate markets cool off. It’s the same in Southwest Florida, where owners are offering to repaint their homes in hopes of enticing buyers.

The 2026 spring homebuying season was supposed to mark the end of the doldrums for the U.S. housing market. Instead, American homebuyers are still sitting on their hands.

Home sales dropped over the first third of the year, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), falling nearly every month so far in 2026 when compared with the same period last year. In January, home sales fell 4.4% versus January 2025. In February, sales fell by 1.4% compared to a year ago.

More institutional money is flowing into South Florida car washes. West Palm Beach real estate firm Vybe Investments said it has raised $100 million from a Dallas investor and plans to open 15 locations under the newly launched Pink Bird brand.

The first Pink Bird car wash location is set to open in September at 1510 Belvedere Road in West Palm Beach. The company last year paid $1.5 million for that 1.1-acre site, according to property records. A second Pink Bird car wash is under construction in West Palm Beach.

The Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates sharply this week, a move that seems to portend higher mortgage rates.

Don’t be too sure, though. The mortgage market has delivered no shortage of surprises over the past two years, and the path of mortgage rates remains unpredictable.
The wild card in this week’s meeting is that another aggressive move by the Fed could tip the economy into recession. That could lead to mortgage rates flattening or even falling.

For two years, the number of homebuyers has far outstripped the number of sellers. As a result of that mismatch between supply and demand, bidding wars erupted, home prices soared to record levels and affordability got squeezed. Now, though, the housing market is finally showing signs of slowing. Home price appreciation has cooled, and inventories are on the rise.

In the COVID-fueled real estate boom, home prices continue hitting new highs. Soaring values are a windfall for homeowners but a headache for first-time homebuyers, who can be forgiven for feeling as though homeownership moves further out of reach by the week.
For frustrated home shoppers, moving to a cheaper housing market offers one solution to the affordability conundrum.

The crypto craze of 2021 yielded no shortage of breathless headlines about homes being bought and sold in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin believers see cryptocurrency as the future of money. As for the present, though, the U.S. dollar’s dominant position in the real estate market is clear: Millions of U.S. homes will change hands this year, and nearly every transaction will be denominated in good old greenbacks.

The fate of the housing boom is on the minds of both homeowners and homebuyers these days. Will record home values lead to a crash reminiscent of the one that made the Great Recession so painful? Or will prices simply take a breather from their torrid pace of appreciation?

Mortgage rates are climbing fast. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage rose to 5.11 percent this week, surging from just 3 percent in August 2021, according to Bankrate’s national survey of lenders.

The last time mortgage rates rose so swiftly was 1994. In late 1993, rates were less than 7 percent. By December 1994, they had surged to 9.11 percent, a jump of more than 2 full percentage points in less than 12 months.

Mortgage rates have been volatile in recent months, but the roster of the most active mortgage lenders has stayed stable in the past year.

Rocket Mortgage and United Shore Financial remained first and second by volume of loans originated in 2021, unchanged from 2019 and 2020. Most of the other names in the top 10 stayed the same, too.

There was some maneuvering on the list. In one big move, LoanDepot jumped into third place, up from fifth place a year ago.

For millions of American renters and homebuyers, the pandemic-era real estate boom has served up a harsh firsthand lesson in Economics 101. The supply of homes lags the demand for homes from a growing population. As a result, home prices have soared to one record after another, and rental rates have rocketed upward.