The Zelman Buzz

This week, the Census Bureau reported its estimate for August single-family housing starts and permits. Positively, seasonally-adjusted starts accelerated to an annualized pace of 919,000, representing the strongest level since January and ...

Earlier this week, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data for 2018 was released. The annual dataset is enormous and serves as the primary baseline for most analyses of the mortgage market and its participants. This year also includes numerous ...

Through the first seven months of 2019, residential construction for single-family and multi-family projects has trailed the prior-year period across the board. Specifically, single-family permits and starts are both down 3% while multi-family ...

Late last year, the average mortgage debt accumulated by homebuyers relative to their income was quickly rising, which was attributable to home price appreciation outpacing income growth, spiking mortgage rates and more lenient underwriting ...

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released its quarterly Housing Vacancy Survey (HVS), which is intended to measure the occupancy and ownership status of the nation’s housing stock. Although the second quarter release indicated a sequential decline ...

Last week, The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University (JCHS) released its Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) with a concerning headline: “Steep Slowdown Projected in Home Improvements.” We first wrote about the ...

From 2011-18, national existing home prices and apartment rents have climbed by 50-55% and 35-40%, respectively, easily outpacing 17% income growth for non-supervisory and production employees that represent the vast majority of the employment ...

In a blog post in late June (Don’t Call it a Comeback: Housing Investors Have Been Here for Years), CoreLogic raised some eyebrows with the conclusion that “in 2018, the share of home sales bought by investors reached its highest level in two ...

As detailed last December, national population growth for the year ended July 2018 was just 0.62%, modestly softer than 0.64% in the previous year and the weakest annual expansion since 1945. Contrary ...

Earlier this week, Redfin, the technology-enabled real estate brokerage, published a study on the valuation premium associated with a garage versus a similar property without one. Across its national analysis, the average premium realized for ...