Scarcity buoyed March new home sales; builder pressures mount

New home sales at the onset of the spring selling season were higher than a year ago, but homebuilders continued to ramp up incentives and price discounts to maintain sales activity. As a result, new home prices fell to their lowest point in nearly five years during March.  There were countless head

New Jersey real estate teams merge and join eXp Realty

Sharif Hatab moved his Team Sharif Sells operation to eXp Realty from Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices FOX & ROACH, Realtors and merged with Peter Boutros’ Stunning NJ Homes to launch the Unify Real Estate Team in New Jersey, the company announced on Tuesday. eXp Realty, the cloud-based brokerage sub

Zillow, Realtor.com team up to broaden pre-market home access

Zillow and Realtor.com are joining forces to display Zillow’s pre-market Preview listings on both portals, extending early access to for-sale homes to buyers across the two largest U.S. real estate search sites, according to an announcement on Tuesday. Beginning this summer, homes entered as Zillow

Independents aren’t on an island: FirstTeam, Brown Harris Stevens bet on collaboration

As large national brokerages and franchisors consolidate, two regional independent firms, the West Coast-based FirstTeam Real Estate and the East Coast-based Brown Harris Stevens, are teaming up to show that there is a way for independents to compete more aggressively while maintaining their indepen

Generic AI won’t fix mortgage lending. Intelligent AI will.

Mortgage lenders are rushing to adopt AI, but many are repeating a familiar mistake: using new technology to accelerate old processes. Faster paper-pushing isn’t transformation. AI presents an opportunity to go further—but only if lenders approach it correctly.  In mortgage lending, intelligent AI m

Inside the 2026 housing market outlook: Key trends shaping homebuilders, capital and strategy

The 2026 housing market is entering a new phase, shaped less by structural constraints and more by external forces influencing buyer confidence. At this year’s annual Forum for Housing Executives, hosted by Builder Advisor Group and Avila Real Estate Capital, more than 80 C-level leaders gathered to

UWM challenges Two Harbors board over rejection of $12 per share bid

UWM Holdings Corp. is challenging Two Harbors Investment Corp.’s board after it rejected a $12 per share acquisition proposal in favor of an $11.30 per share deal with CrossCountry Mortgage LLC, issuing a lengthy response that questioned the board’s analysis and process. In a statement on Monday, UW

Real-REMAX deal: complementary models or culture clash?

“Where’s the upside here?” That’s the question Steve Murray, the co-founder of RealTrends Consulting, keeps coming back to as the industry digests The Real Brokerage’s acquisition of REMAX — and it’s the same question investors appeared to answer swiftly. On the day of the announcement, Real’s stock

The Gathering takeaway: how Olivia Clarke Homes wins in DFW

The story of American homebuilding is mostly one of bootstrapped businesses. They mostly get forged in hard circumstances, with a single, almost instantaneous reckoning that there are no shortcuts to success … or even to being around in five years, fighting to achieve it. It requires leaders willing

Green Brick leverages industry-leading margins to drive optionality

In an all-important way, Green Brick Partners operates as an anomaly. The Texas-based homebuilder continues to deliver the highest gross profit margin among public homebuilding peers, and plans to use this margin cushion to its advantage over the quarters ahead. While public homebuilding peers strug

eXp’s Wendy Forsythe on how women can break into the C-suite

Photo by AJ Canaria/HousingWire’s The Gathering Even as as real estate talent pipelines overflow with qualified women, data shows little has changed in female representation at the highest executive levels over the last several decades, Wendy Forsythe told attendees at HousingWire’s The Gathering la

Iowa just reset property taxes to assist first-time homebuyers

Home builders now have a sharper incentive to pitch to prospective first-time homebuyers in Iowa after lawmakers passed a sweeping property tax overhaul on Sunday, the final day of the legislative session. A provision in the bill replaces a nearly decade-old first-time homebuyer savings program with

How real estate agent Deba Douglas turned buyer education into a 100-transaction business

After 16 years in education, Deba Douglas walked away from the classroom because she saw a different kind of learning gap. Today, the former high school and middle school principal runs Dallas-based Deba Douglas Realty Group and teaches a course called Roadmap to Real Estate Investing. The program h

Century 21’s Mike Miedler: Recruiting Latino talent is a growth strategy, not a diversity talking point

Photo by AJ Canaria for HousingWire The Gathering Right now, the real estate industry is consumed by consolidation, capital and the next big brokerage model. Century 21 CEO Mike Miedler is focused on a more grounded question: Who will be sitting across the kitchen table from tomorrow’s homebuyer? Fo

When sentiment breaks: What consumer confidence is telling us about recession risk and fiscal reality

Nerds are people too Since 1946, economists and others who find themselves alone on Friday nights have studied the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers for indications of consumer attitudes toward the U.S. economy. At its core, the survey measures current conditions and future expectations —

Preserve manufactured housing communities by strengthening models that sustain them

Congress stands at the crossroads of enacting the “21st Century Road to Housing Act.”  A key priority of this bill is manufactured housing – and manufactured housing communities – with the objective of expanding our nation’s affordable housing supply.     As part of this effort, Section 304 of the l

KB Home CFO Robert Dillard to resign this month

KB Home Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Robert R. “Rob” Dillard will step down from his role effective May 8, 2026, the Los Angeles-based homebuilder disclosed in a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29. Dillard’s departure is “not related to any

Mortgage spreads are the only thing keeping rates under 7%

Mortgage spreads are once again the unsung hero for housing in 2026 because they are the sole reason why mortgage rates have been under 6.65% the entire year! Last week, the benefits of mortgage spreads being close to normal were very evident: if we currently had the highest levels of mortgage sprea

North Carolina Let Them Build Act targets environmental reviews

As North Carolina House Democrats take another swing at sweeping housing reform, a Democratic senator is seeking to streamline environmental reviews to accelerate construction. Sen. Woodson Bradley filed the “Let Them Build Act” on Thursday afternoon, days after House colleagues filed a bill titled

With the Hill in limbo on ROAD Act, the toll on BTR projects climbs

Last week, 76 members of Congress, specifically the Real Estate Caucus and the Build America Caucus, signed a bipartisan letter “expressing serious concerns” over section 901 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The letter, signed by 38 democrats and 38 republicans, urged House leadership to rem