Jeff Ostrowski

The federal government is taking a closer look at mortgage fees, including discount points borrowers pay upfront to buy down their interest rate. These costs have increased in recent years, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, raising concerns of overpriced "junk" fees.

The mortgage industry asserts these fees are standard practice. Borrowers can see them itemized on the loan's required disclosures.

For decades, high-speed rail in the U.S. has been a distant, impossible dream. Not even the most promising plans could break through the financial obstacles and political minefields blocking the tracks.

Now, though, a bullet-train future is inching closer to reality. The Biden administration in December awarded a combined $6 billion to two high-speed projects on the West Coast.

Soaring interest rates have created turmoil for a flavor of financing favored by owners of Class B apartments and other types of speculative assets.

In recent months, commercial real estate collateralized loan obligations, or CRE CLOs, have flashed warning signs. In one example, Moody’s Investors Service reports that CLO loan impairments soared from just 0.3 percent in the second quarter of 2023 to 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2024.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) agreed to new rules around real estate commissions as part of a lawsuit settlement in March. Now, consumers face a deluge of conflicting predictions.

One narrative predicts a coming utopia for homebuyers: A price war will erupt, and commissions will plunge amid a new wave of competition among buyers’ agents. A competing narrative goes in the opposite direction: Under the new commission structure, buyers will realize they’re on the hook for thousands.

After a long hibernation, home equity lending is back in a big way.
Home equity loans and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) are suddenly hot among people seeking five and six-figure financing. In response, lenders have begun catering to new types of borrowers by letting business owners and property investors tap their home ownership stakes. They’re also getting creative with product features, such as draw periods, and even loosening criteria, like credit scores.

Real estate commissions have survived the rise of the Internet and decades of attacks from disruption-minded discounters. But a flood of legal challenges to the existing brokerage model poses a new threat to the status quo.
An industry-shaking lawsuit making its way through the federal court system could upend the long-established way of paying commissions — namely, the custom of home sellers footing the bill for both their own agent and their buyer’s. This typically totals 5 to 6 percent of ...

For borrowers in a still-hot housing market, getting approved for a mortgage can be a challenge. Mortgage rates have soared from pandemic-era lows, home values are near record highs and home price appreciation is outpacing wage growth.

All of that means there’s no guarantee a lender will approve your mortgage application. Here’s a look at how lenders decide to extend credit, and some common obstacles borrowers face.

Members of Congress are weighing proposed new laws on a slate of high-stakes housing issues.

One proposal, to curb credit bureaus’ sale of mortgage borrower information, has support from mortgage lenders and from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Another measure, which would block corporate investors from snapping up single-family homes, is getting love only from Democrats.

Mortgage rates took homebuyers on a roller-coaster ride in 2023. In 2024, the journey should prove less jarring — and mostly downhill.

Greg McBride, Bankrate’s chief financial analyst, expects rates to fall gradually throughout the year, reaching 5.75 percent by the end of 2024. “Mortgage rates will spend the bulk of the year in the 6s, with movement below 6 percent confined to the back half of the year,” he says.

Hoping to replace noisy, smelly diesel-powered buses with clean, quiet electric ones, transit systems in Florida’s two largest counties have invested $126 million to buy more than 100 of the shiny new buses.

But the e-bus program is off to a sputtering start, both in South Florida and nationally.
A major manufacturer of e-buses, Proterra of Burlingame, Calif., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Home equity lending is having a moment. American homeowners seeking cash have turned to tapping their residences for financing, via home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and home equity loans.

The pandemic-fueled real estate boom has led to a large appreciation in the worth of their ownership stakes: the average mortgage-holding homeowner has about $200,000 in tappable equity.

Home prices remain near record levels. Mortgage rates have eased but aren’t far off from 23-year highs. Fully 85 percent of respondents to Fannie Mae’s most recent survey of consumer sentiment believe it’s a bad time to buy a home.

Yet Emily and Michael Druchniak recently bought a newly built house in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Then there’s Andrew and Emily Kissel, who were well aware of the disadvantages facing buyers, but decided to buy, too.

Bucking the national trend of an office market in crisis, South Florida office rents keep rising.

Asking rental rates in Miami-Dade County soared to $59.46 per square foot in the third quarter, up 16.5 percent from a year earlier and setting another record, commercial real estate firm JLL reported. Wynwood and Brickell remain the county’s most desirable office submarkets, with annual asking rents topping $90 a square foot.

A year after Fannie Mae began reporting renters’ payments to credit bureaus, the mortgage giant says its pilot program has made thousands of tenants more creditworthy.

Monthly rent payments aren’t usually reported to credit bureaus — a hole in the system that Fannie Mae’s initiative, launched in September 2022, aims to close.

After plummeting to historical lows during the pandemic, mortgage rates have shot up faster than just about anyone anticipated.

As of Oct. 18, Bankrate's weekly average on a 30-year mortgage rose to 7.99 percent, its loftiest level since August 2000. Bankrate's overnight average was even higher, hitting 8 percent on Oct. 19.

The sharp rise in rates raises a new question: How much higher could they go? "We don't think it's going to go much higher," says Priscilla Almodovar, CEO of mortgage giant Fannie Mae.