Mortgage rates below 3% have brought homeowners stampeding back to the refinance market. A sharp rise in refi demand is driving an increase in overall mortgage applications, a new report shows. Refinancing to take advantage of mortgage rates that remain far below historical averages can be a smart play. Because with the economy recovering and over 116…

A decade after the housing market emerged from a deep downturn, housing is hot again. Indeed, home values are soaring to new highs. With its double-digit appreciation and rampant bidding wars, the latest real estate party has some eerie similarities to the last one. “It’s clearly the strongest housing market that we’ve seen since the global…

Zillow, Seattle, said incremental increases in homeownership rates and home values among Black households would help shrink the current $3 trillion racial wealth gap by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. Today’s typical Black household has only about 23 percent of the wealth of a typical white household, down from 34.6 percent…

Following an incredible year for refinances that mostly benefited wealthier borrowers, the Federal House Finance Agency announced it is implementing a new refi product that targets low-income borrowers with single-family mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to the regulatory agency, this new product will assist borrowers who were less likely to take advantage of 2020’s historically low rates. Under the…

The words “spring home buying season” carry a very different meaning this year than they did last year. Normally spring is the hottest time of year for home sales — more buyers surface when the warmer weather emerges and families prefer to move before the next school year begins. Last year’s spring market, though, was…

More than four in 10 millennials refinanced their mortgage in the past year, according to a report from LendingTree. Record-low mortgage rates fueled the number of refinances which nearly doubled the overall average. During the pandemic, 26% of homeowners refinanced their mortgage, according to the report. Additionally, LendingTree reported that millennials were more likely than any other…