Real Estate | featured news

If you save money by putting cash under your mattress, then inflation does indeed rob you of purchasing power. But if, like most of us, you hold your nest egg in a savings account, a money market fund, real estate, or a 401(k) plan then what you care about is your real rate of return, not the inflation rate per se.

Shares of real-estate website Zillow more than doubled on its first day of trading, giving the unprofitable Internet company a valuation of more than $1 billion.

Countrywide Home Loans agreed to pay borrowers $108 million for charging excessive fees when they fell behind on their mortgages.

Sales of previously owned homes unexpectedly fell in June to touch a seven-month low as cancellations of pending contracts surged, an industry group said on Wednesday.

Applications for home mortgages surged last week, racking up the biggest increase in four months on a flood of refinancing demand as interest rates remained low, an industry group said on Wednesday.

Builders broke ground on more single-family homes and apartments in June, helping the battered construction industry gain a little life after a dismal spring.

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven't read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.

The Commerce Department's report on new home construction is likely to show that multifamily properties is the bright spot in the beleaguered market.

Investors pile into Internet IPOs and start-ups, making overnight millionaires. House prices and salaries soar. Another dot-com bubble? Maybe, but with differences. As she unloaded groceries in the driveway of her Palo Alto home, Lisen Stromberg was approached by a real estate broker who asked whether she'd be willing to sell her five-bedroom house to a senior Facebook executive.

Foreclosure marketplace Web site RealtyTrac estimates that 1.17 million homes received foreclosure notices in the first half of 2011. That’s down 25 percent from the previous six months, but the group said that no one should take this as a sign that foreclosures are on the decline. Instead, the report indicates that paperwork and other processing delays have simply delayed foreclosures that otherwise would have gone through.