Real Estate | featured news

The cost to buy a home varies considerably across the country. Working with online real estate listing database Realtor.com, 24/7 Wall St. identified the housing markets with the highest and lowest prices per square foot.

Single-family home prices rose for the first time in 10 months, in an encouraging sign the battered sector is starting to stabilize, a closely watched survey said on Tuesday.

The relentless decline in home prices is nearing an end and prices should rise for the first time in seven years in 2013, but a possible new wave of foreclosures could threaten the recovery, according a Reuters poll of economists.

Mortgage rates are sharply lower on news of a weakening job market, with the 30-year fixed loan averaging 3.88% this week and the 15-year fixed at a record low of 3.11%, according to Freddie Mac.

A leader of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang was sentenced this week to a year in prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution to SunTrust Mortgage for spearheading a mortgage fraud scheme.

Half a decade into the deepest U.S. housing crisis since the 1930s, many Americans are hoping the crisis is finally nearing its end. House sales are picking up across most of the country, the plunge in prices is slowing and attempts by lenders to claim back properties from struggling borrowers dropped by more than a third in 2011, hitting a four-year low.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday that the United States was far behind on reforming the country's housing finance system where the government's mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provide funding for the bulk of U.S. home loans.

Ben Yonge stole away from a business conference last month to make a killing in real estate. As his colleagues broke for lunch, the Orlando broker closed on a nearby four-unit apartment building that in better times had fetched $120,000.

Edward J. DeMarco, who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has infuriated many by refusing to tell the home loan giants to reduce the amounts owed by distressed homeowners.

An anti-corruption regulator said it had arrested Raymond and Thomas Kwok, billionaire brothers who run the biggest real estate company in the city, accusing them of suspected corruption.