Housing Market, Real Estate | featured news

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.

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.

Inma Rodriguez lost her job, and now that she's defaulted on her mortgage, she's about to lose her home. But the nightmare doesn't end there: Once creditors kick her out, she'll still need to pay back the money she borrowed to buy her house....

An initiative from the Obama administration is meant to allow eligible homeowners to postpone all or part of their mortgage payments for a year or more.

Apartment landlords continue to have the best of all worlds as rents go higher and vacancies fall.

Bank of America Corp and JPMorgan Chase & Co have started modifying tens of thousands of mortgages where the banks deem the loans especially risky, even if the borrowers have not asked, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

Home prices in major U.S. cities have risen for the first time in eight months, boosted by an annual flurry of spring buyers.