By Peter Ricci June was a great month in real estate for the nine-county Chicago Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area, with sales rising 22.4 percent year-over-year and median price increasing 1.7 percent, the second month in a row for positive prices

Existing-home sale price for all housing types rose 7.9 percent year-over-year in June in the National Association of Realtors’ latest housing report. It’s the fourth straight month of yearly price increases, a streak that has not occurred since 2006.

By Peter Ricci Nearly six in 10 respondents to the latest Real Estate Buyer’s Agent Council (REBAC) survey reported higher buyer interest in 2012, a 34 percent increase from 2011 and one of the strongest signifiers yet of greater

By Stephanie Sims If it’s in a highly ranked school district or near top-notch public schools, your clients have just added about $1 million to their home’s value. Private schools are expensive, and in today’s times, people would rather

By Peter Ricci The presidential campaign season is one rife with rumors and myths, and during 2008, President Obama was the center of quite a few of them – that he was a Muslim, that he was sworn in

By Peter Ricci The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) posted notable gains in July, rising six points to its highest level since March of 2007. The six-point increase is the largest one-month gain for

By Stephanie Sims How fast agents sell homes depends on a number of things – location, condition of the property, foreclosure/short sale status and the state of the market. But a hugely important indicator is how many days a

By Peter Ricci A bold, informative and fun Internet presence is practically a give-in for agents in today’s IT-driven economy, and WordPress offers a fun, relatively simple way for agents to set up their own personal websites or blogs. However,

By Peter Ricci Libor, or the London interbank offered rate, has been a constant fixture in the news cycles the last couple of weeks, with each story weighing more importance on the oddly-named term. Very little has been said,

By Peter Ricci You know the message is good when even the Wall Street Journal reports it – real estate in the U.S. has been doing pretty good in 2012. Recent government reports were notable for their optimistic tone, home values

By Ian McKendry HomeFinder.com, a real estate search site that uses numerous search filters to allow real estate agents, prospective homebuyers and renters to quickly narrow their search, is now available as an Android app. “We understand that home

By Lani Rosales for AGBeat Visual social media has been the big hit of 2012, with visual bookmarking site Pinterest leading the way alongside photo sharing tool Instagram. New data from Shareaholic reveals that referral traffic from Pinterest still

By Tara Steele for AGBeat In the recent American Dream Survey by real estate search giant Trulia, Chief Economist Dr. Jed Kolko notes that renewed optimism about housing is not without reason, but the pendulum may have swung too

By AGBeat It is well known that Google constantly grooms its algorithm to provide what it deems the most relevant search results possible in its endless quest to think like a human brain. In February 2011, a batch of

For this week’s By The Numbers, LeapRE looked at the market transaction percentages for two emerging brokerages, @properties and

By Kathleen Cosner for AGBeat We have a new “industry standard” making an appearance for both appraisers and Realtors. Those of us who do work with appraisal management companies and complete Broker Price Opinions are being asked to submit