By Peter Ricci The housing vacancy rate is among the most important measures of the real estate recovery. After all, excess supply was one of the big side effects of the housing boom, as the preponderance of vacant homes

By Peter Ricci In case you haven’t noticed, it’s hot outside – quite hot, in fact! All throughout the Midwest, temperatures have been raging (they hit 107 in Evansville, Indiana in June), and they’ve made the home searching process

The $25 billion mortgage settlement received quite a bit of press when the documents were signed back in February, and for good reason. Encompassing several states attorneys general and the largest financial institutions in the country, the settlement was

By Peter Ricci In a new strategy to generate buzz among consumers and Realtors, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has launched a wide-ranging email campaign on homeownership. According to a description of the campaign on NAR’s website, the

By Peter Ricci In an effort to better mobilize Realtors for the coming elections in November, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has formed the Realtor Party, a group that aims to forgo party politics in the name of

In its second major technology announcement of the week at Inman San Francisco, real estate website Trulia has announced “Trulia IQ,” a new web platform for brokerages. Operating on a data-driven model similar to its other platforms, such as

By Peter Ricci Mortgage complains reigned supreme in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) semi-annual report to Congress, comprising 43 percent of the 55,300 complaints the agency received from consumers in its first 11 months of existence. The make-up of

By Peter Ricci “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a real estate agent in possession of a good property must be in want of great photography.” – Jane Austen Alright, that may not be the exact opening line

By Peter Ricci A new brokers program for Trulia is building on the company’s previous outreach efforts to real estate professionals. Real estate website Trulia has just announced a new “Trulia Brokers Program,” a program tailored specifically to real

By Peter Ricci The shadow knows – that his inventory is severely down! According to researchers at Morgan Stanley, the shadow inventory has fallen 35 percent from its 2010 peak, yet more evidence of stabilizing inventories in housing. The

By Peter Ricci Chicago led the nation in the latest Case-Shiller Home Price Indices from Standard & Poor’s, with home prices for the city rising by 4.5 percent from April to May and showing the best monthly appreciation of all

By Peter Ricci In the real estate community, there is a fire burning – are green homes all that they’re cracked up to be? And more importantly, do they add anything to a home’s value? Such questions have been

By Ian McKendry In a world where social networking lets people connect from nearly anywhere, one Internet company is trying to connect the people that live right next door to each other. Nextdoor is a young private social network

By Justin T. Hilley Market concern over the strength of the economic recovery took Treasury yields to new depths, causing both 30- and 15-year fixed-rate mortgages to continue tumbling to historic lows. The Freddie Mac survey showed 30-year FRM

By Joel Kotkin While the economy has been miserable for small businesses, and many larger ones as well, the ranks of the self-employed have been growing. According to research by Economic Modeling Specialists International, the number of people who

Of the total number of active agents in the Chicagoland area, 66 percent work in large offices, or offices with 20-plus people, compared to the 8 percent that work in offices of one or two people and the 13