Real estate professionals in the trenches of America's current real estate doldrums say that Congress' extension of the homebuyer's tax credit to include current homeowners probably wasn't enough to motivate them. Last fall, there was an extension of the popular first-time homebuyer's tax credit, and Congress expanded it to include current homeowners. Those who wanted to trade up and buy a larger home...

Some welcome news appeared recently that could indicate that the nation's struggling housing market is beginning to recover. The National Association of Realtors reported that February home sales rose an unexpected 8.2 percent during a period when many real estate analysts predicted home sales to remain flat. Many cited the impending expiration of the homebuyer's tax credit program as the driving factor...

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said recently that overall, conditions in and around Louisville are slowly improving, but employment has lagged behind thus far. They issued their report in their quarterly assessment. They said that manufacturing, housing markets and auto sales are improving in Louisville and nearby areas such as Southern Indiana, Elizabethtown, Bowling Green, Owensboro and...

Despite growing losses on their commercial real estate investments and against conventional investing wisdom, stock shares of banks heavily invested in commercial real estate have been rallying recently. While many investors remain justifiably wary of investing in such banks, others are betting that the predictable hits from commercial real estate losses will not be as severe as expected. Goldman Sachs is...

TheNational Association of Realtors Local Market Report indicates that home sales in Kentucky and construction growth are much higher in 2010 than the previous year. The report claims that growth for the fourth quarter of 2009 increased 37 percent above the same quarter in 2008 and outpaced the national average. The report also shows that the Kentucky real estate market exceeds the national average in...

A sad fact of life is that some people will take advantage of others who are going through a difficult period in their lives. The nation's housing and unemployment problems have created a situation where scam artists are resurrecting an old scam and defrauding people who are already suffering financial duress. The trick involves a "landlord" accepting a deposit from prospective tenants to hold a rental...

In a survey released by the National Association of Realtors in 2009, 46 percent of homebuyers said that they used open houses as part of their research, but only 12 percent reported buying a home because they saw it during an open house. With the virtual tours and all the other home-selling marketing tools the Internet provides, the impact of open houses may have dimmed somewhat, but there's still no...

Louisville real estate analysts predict that Louisville housing prices have not reached bottom and probably won't until the end of 2010. They also believe that prices won't regain their highs of spring 2008 until sometime in 2012 according to a report recently released by technology company Fiserv. Although they expected Louisville home prices to continue their slow decline, they tempered this news with...

The Fair Housing Act was signed into law 42 years ago this month and is a powerful reminder of the past as well as the challenges of the present and future. President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act in April 1968 after a heated debate in Congress. The law came into effect shortly after the Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated. It protects anyone in the United States from...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has recently issued a ruling that any charges in addition to a real estate agent's commission are illegal if no extra services are provided. In recent years, some real estate agents and brokers have been adding extra fees to their commissions to generate more revenue. In most cases, no extra work or services were provided, and these fees were called a...