New Canaan apparently has a “hot” housing market.
Brokerage firm ZipRealty reported this week that homes in the upscale town sold for an average of 105.5 percent of list price in last year’s fourth quarter.
There were no other Connecticut towns in ZipRealty’s analysis where homes were selling above the list price. 
The median home price in New [...]

One of the biggest challenges for real estate agents, especially in a down market, is getting home sellers to price their property to accurately reflect market value.
That’s why a recent article in the Hartford Courant about underpricing homes caught my attention. The article highlights a home seller and agent who priced a property slightly [...]

As if home sellers didn’t have enough to worry about, now they have to beware of one more thing: scam artists who post their home as a rental on Craigslist.
A couple  who was trying to sell their Massachusetts home had a few would-be tenants show up at their front door saying they saw their home [...]

Connecticut’s condominium market has been in a major slump for at least three years.
There hasn’t been an increase in monthly condo sales year-over-year statewide in over three years.
That changed in October.
The Warren Group will release a report tomorrow morning showing that sales of condos climbed in October compared to the same month in [...]

The Obama administration is putting the pressure on lenders to provide permanent loan modifications for homeowners in danger of foreclosure.
So far, the federal government’s efforts to prevent foreclosures by getting mortgage companies and banks to rewrite loans have fallen short.
More than 650,000 trial loan modifications have been issued but that’s only helped about [...]

If you’re looking for one bright spot in Connecticut’s sluggish housing market it may very well be sales of lower-priced homes.
Sales of single-family homes priced $299,000 and lower have actually climbed this year.
A total of 10,972 homes in that price range sold in the first three quarters, up 2.1 percent from 10,748 during the [...]

 
By now, most real estate industry professionals have already heard about the rosy forecast that the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors has made.
Lawrence Yun, NAR’s head economist, predicts that home prices will increase between 3 percent and 5 percent next year while existing-home sales will jump nearly 14 percent to 5.7 million.
Yun [...]

Homeowners with two mortgages or those who used 100 percent financing to purchase their residences and are now trying to negotiate a short sale may be facing even more trouble in the future.
Short sales, when a property is sold for less than what is owed on the mortgage, have become more common because properties [...]

President Obama and Congress delivered an early Christmas gift to real estate agents with the extension and expansion of the homebuyer tax credit.
The expansion comes at a time when the real estate industry is entering what is traditionally one of the slowest seasons for home sales.
Selling and buying usually slow down right around November and [...]

Single-family home sales in Fairfield County have plunged to the lowest level in over two decades.
There were 3,756 home sales in the first three quarters of 2009. That’s 18 percent lower than a year earlier and 61 percent below the 9,659 homes that traded during the same months a decade ago, according to The [...]