NEWS
By Frederick N. Rasmussen | September 7, 2009
Edna J. Wolf, who worked in real estate sales for 30 years, died of cancer Aug. 29 at a daughter's Pikesville home. She was 77. Edna Jacobs was born and raised in Norfolk, Va., and moved to Washington in 1952. She attended Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from George Washington University in the 1970s. Since 1980, Ms. Jacobs had worked in real estate sales for Long & Foster in Washington. She had been honored by the Washington, D.C., Association of Realtors for her work and was an active member of the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors.
NEWS
By Kenneth R. Harney | August 30, 2009
It's one of the biggest unknowns bugging would-be buyers of houses and condos this summer: Will Congress let the $8,000 nonrepayable tax credit for first-time purchasers expire as scheduled about three months from now? Or will the credit get a second life and be extended for six to 12 months, taking pressure off buyers, real estate agents and settlement companies? That's an especially urgent matter if you're a buyer just starting to shop and you see entry-level prices bottoming out or rebounding.
NEWS
By Jamie Smith Hopkins | August 13, 2009
Maryland was posting some of the steepest drops in home sales nationwide not long ago, but now it's among the gainers. Home sales from April to June were up 4.4 percent compared with a year ago, the ninth-biggest increase in the country, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. The trade group said sales increased about 15 percent from the previous three months, topping all but six other states and Washington, D.C. The numbers are adjusted to try to account for typical variations in buying from one season to the next.
NEWS
By New York Times News Service | December 24, 2008
Home sales declined sharply last month, and housing prices posted their deepest decline in four decades as a rapidly slowing economy discouraged many potential buyers from tip-toeing into the market. Sales of existing homes declined 8.6 percent last month, to a seasonally adjusted rate of 4.49 million, according to the National Association of Realtors, a trade association. The median price of a home fell 13 percent in November, to $181,300 from $208,000 a year ago. That was the lowest price since February 2004.
NEWS
By Andrea F. Siegel | August 24, 2008
It is the rare homebuyer who hasn't done preliminary house-hunting online, whether to peruse what's for sale, check out neighborhoods or get an idea of what prices homes have fetched in the past few months. A recent National Association of Realtors survey says that 84 percent of all homebuyers and sellers turned to the Internet. That's up from 71 percent in 2003. "They can sit and surf that Net and come up with a lot of data," said Carol Bliss, branch vice president of Coldwell Banker's Roland Park-Cross Keys office, noting that buyers and sellers tell agents they site-hop.
NEWS
By JAMIE SMITH HOPKINS | July 11, 2008
If you don't absolutely, positively have to sell a home at the moment, how do you figure out if you really, honestly want to? Once you get past the financials - how much do you owe, how much could you get - you might consider how many homes in your neck of the woods are selling and how many are sitting. If you're a would-be buyer, you'll probably want to know that, too. The more homes sitting on the market, the harder it is for homeowners to sell and the easier it is for buyers to make a deal, all else being equal.
NEWS
By Jamie Smith Hopkins | May 14, 2008
Home sales fell faster in Maryland than in any other state in the nation in the first three months of the year, dropping more than even in hard-hit spots of the country such as California, a Realtors group said yesterday. Sales in January through March dropped nearly 39 percent in Maryland compared with the same months last year, the National Association of Realtors said. Close behind were Washington, D.C., where sales were down almost 35 percent; Utah, down almost 34 percent; and California, down about 33 percent.
NEWS
By Jamie Smith Hopkins | August 16, 2007
Maryland's housing market took a beating in the spring selling season, recording one of the biggest drops in sales in the nation. Homeowners in the state sold 21.1 percent fewer homes during the second quarter than they did a year earlier, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday. That was nearly double the 10.8 percent drop for the nation as a whole. The numbers, which track existing homes, are annualized and adjusted for seasonal variations. Despite the steep sales decline, pricing in the Baltimore metropolitan area held up. The median price of a single-family home gained 3 percent in the April-June quarter over the same three months a year earlier, according to the association.
NEWS
By Sumathi Reddy | May 29, 2007
Therese Easley fought off nine other bidders to buy her house in Sandtown last year, the first home for the 40-year-old single woman who grew up in a public housing development in East Baltimore. Ann Anderson, at 26, recently closed on her three-bedroom Federal Hill rowhouse, paying for it with 100 percent financing. And Kelly Mulligan, 29, moved into her one-bedroom condominium in Bolton Hill last month, where her mortgage is no more than the rent on her former apartment in Fells Point.
NEWS
By KEN HARNEY | March 9, 2007
With all the conflicting reports on housing prices and the direction of the market, you might ask: What's really going on out there? If, as the National Association of Realtors reported last month, the median price of an existing home nationwide fell by 3.1 percent in 2006, does that mean that your house lost value as well? Or do you focus instead on the more upbeat numbers released last Friday by the federal agency that tracks value shifts in the country's largest database of existing dwellings?