The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has renewed a waiver for an anti-flipping regulation through 2012, according to a press release just issued by the agency. Originally passed to limit home flipping – the housing strategy of buying cheap properties

The National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) Pending Home Sales Index, a measure of housing contracts for pending sales, rose 7.3 percent in November to its highest level in 19 months, according to a new press release from the association.

We cover quite a few stories here at Chicago Agent, always with our finger on the pulse of what matters in real estate. Whether it’s a new study out by Federal Reserve analyzing the financial crisis, new statistics from the

Every year, Chicago Agent magazine publishes Real Data, a residential reference book that provides realty professionals with important stats about the previous year and helps with planning business for the current year. Our most recent book included information gathered

Our 2011 Offices to Watch issue invited brokerages all across Chicagoland to tell us why they’re an “office to watch.” We featured a roundup of several city and suburban offices and allowed the managing brokers, owners and directors to

Standard & Poor’s released the latest results of its influential Case-Shiller Home Price Indices just moments ago for the month of October, and like the previous collection of data, it shows both monthly and year-over-year declines for housing values

Who is making headway in the real estate industry in 2011? Who are the people whose names you should know, because they are making names for themselves this year? Earlier this year, we published our “Who’s Who” issue, which featured

Throughout the year, we published cover stories on a wide range of topics, but what issues proved most popular with our online audience? Was it our profile of spring’s new construction? Our field guide to fixing the industry? Or

Standard & Poor’s will release the latest batch of Case-Shiller Home Price Indices next Tuesday, and several of the other competing price indices have some analysts projecting the second negative month in a row for the Case-Shiller, which remains

It’s been quite a year in real estate, and as we approach 2012, we want to use our final week of production to commemorate some of the most popular content on our website in

Unprecedented, historic, monumental – lots of big adjectives are thrown around about housing today, but a new piece by John Gittelsohn in Business Week highlights a couple of the unique opportunities in today’s market. Affordability is a main feature of today’s market,

New single-family home sales in November rose 1.6 percent from October, a seven-month high that still continues a 19-month trend of mostly sideways growth at a low level. According to new data jointly released by the U.S. Census Bureau and

After a nearly three-point jump in October, the Architecture Billings Index, a forward-thinking measure of future construction activity, increased by 2.6 in November to 52.0, the first positive level for the index since August. Additionally, the new projects inquiry, a

Multifamily housing has been in the news quite a bit the last couple months, as analysts have pointed to the sector as one of the few bright spots in construction, if not the entire housing market, in recent months.

As promised, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released its revised totals yesterday on existing-home sales, and the “meaningful” changes the association had foretold came out to a 14.6 percent downward revision for 2010’s existing-home sales and a 14.3

One of the key provisions to the HARP 2.0 revisions was eliminating the LTV ratio limits that restricted a huge swath of underwater homeowners from refinancing their mortgages; it would appear that Fannie Mae has taken it one step