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"Compass shares soar 90% around earnings report"

TheRealDeal writes, "Compass shares climbed to a nearly three-month high Friday after an earnings report revealed mounting losses but gains in market share and progress in its cost-cutting efforts.

The run-up began Thursday, before earnings were released at the market close. The share price gained 32 percent that day, then another 73 percent in the first hour of trading Friday before retreating a bit.

The brokerage’s stock was hovering around $3.50 at midday, up nearly 50 percent since markets opened Friday morning and 90 percent from Wednesday afternoon, when it fell to an all-time low of $1.85.

The iShares U.S. Real Estate ETF, an index that tracks the broader real estate sector, stood at $88.04 per share, up 7.2 percent from Wednesday…

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"Housing markets with highest share of equity-rich households undergo biggest corrections"

Austin Business Journal reports, "even with a rapidly cooling housing market, homeowners across the U.S. are sitting on near-record levels of equity.

A recent analysis by Irvine, California-based Attom Data Solutions LLC found 48.5% of mortgaged residential properties nationally were considered equity-rich in the third quarter. A property is considered equity-rich when the amount of loan balances secured by it is no more than 50% of its estimated market value.

With the housing market downturn that began this summer, though, $1.3 trillion in recently added equity vanished from the market in Q3, according to Black Knight Inc. (NYSE: BKI), a mortgage software and analytics company.

By Attom's measurement, Q3 2022 continued to see gains in…

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"Home Builders Struggle To Find Buyers as Cancellations by Developers Rise"

Realtor.com writes, "it’s a tough time to be selling a home. That’s also true for home builders, who are seeing canceled orders and dwindling interest among would-be buyers.

“Mortgage applications have been running down close to 40% year over year. People are clearly in sort of a wait-and-see or pause mode,” John Lovallo, a UBS analyst who covers home builders, told MarketWatch on an episode of Barron’s Live.

Confidence among home builders dropped for the 10th month in a row in October to a 10-year low (with the exception of the start of the pandemic), according to the National Association of Home Builders. Traffic among prospective buyers, one of the components that measures confidence, fell significantly, the association said, as buyers look…

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"Home Prices Would Need To Fall This Much for Buyers To Get a Break"

Realtor.com writes, "since home prices shot into the stratosphere, many first-time buyers have prayed for them to fall so that they could afford to become homeowners. Their wishes appear to have been granted—and yet, they’re caught in a paradox: Even as prices have begun to dip, the cost of purchasing a home has risen. A lot.

The reason for the contradiction: soaring mortgage interest rates.

Most folks are still laser-focused on a property’s price tag. In fact, this kind of list price obsession is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. But, of course, purchasing a home is very different from buying products from a brick-and-mortar store or shopping online. Unless home shoppers are buying with all cash, they will be taking out a long-term loan…

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"International homebuyers still flock to Austin but are spending less than pre-pandemic"

Austin Business Journal reports, "Austin's international homebuyer market is still down in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

That’s according to the Austin Board of Realtors' 2022 Central Texas International Homebuyers Report. From April 2021 to March 2022, international buyers purchased $613 million worth of residential properties in Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell counties — representing 3% of total home sales.

That number was relatively flat compared with the $634 million figure from the 2021 report, but is a steep drop from the $800 million reported in 2020, the first year the report was compiled.

Though international buyers contributed less to the housing market, Realtors say Covid-19 is less of a concern to clients now.

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"Austin is a millennial magnet, with tens of thousands moving here last year"

Austin Business Journal writes, "Austin's millennial population grew more than any other city in the nation last year, according to data collected by personal finance website SmartAsset.

The findings, released Oct. 27, suggest that the city’s strong economy and standard of living continue to attract huge numbers of people at the height of working age.

However, other studies indicate the dramatic rise in the cost of living in the city and its shortage of housing continue to impede first-time homebuyers, many of whom are millennials.

Nearly 24,000 millennials — those born from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s — moved to Austin in 2021, according to SmartAsset.

That compared with the more than 13,400 that left, according to SmartAsset's…

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"Why is the real estate boom in Austin slowing down?"

KVUE Austin reports, "more than two years ago now, 2020 saw what many real estate agents and developers called a gold rush in Austin, with homes being sold in a matter of hours. Now, the market appears to be slowing down.

"It's brought a lot of people here and it was just a perfect storm," said Chester Wilson, one of the owners of Greater Austin Builders.

Two years ago, many set their sights on Austin.

"Gold rush is a perfect term for it. I've been doing this for 25 years. It was unlike anything we've ever seen," said Cord Shiflet, the president of the Austin Board of Realtors.

However, Shiflet said Austin's real estate boom isn't going anywhere but that it's just slowing down.

He noted that rather than…

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"Decline in U.S. Pending Home Sales Gathers Steam in September"

Realtor.com writes, "the numbers: U.S. pending-home sales fell 10.2% in September, which is the fourth straight monthly drop, according to the monthly index released Friday by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

The decline was much larger that forecast. Analysts polled by the Wall Street Journal had forecast the pending home sales index to drop by 4%.

Outside of the pandemic, the drop in pending home sales is the largest year-over-year decline since 2001. Sales dropped by 33.1% in April 2020.

Contract signings fell by double-digits in all regions across the country.

Pending home sales reflect transactions where the contract has been signed for an existing-home sale, but the sale has not yet closed.

Economists view it as an…

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"Mortgage Bankers Expect Rates To Drop to 5.4% in 2023. Here’s What That Means for Home Prices."

Realtor.com reports, "high mortgage rates and recession fears are hurting home prices, so expect growth to be flat this year, one expert says.

“Our forecast is for home-price growth moderation to continue,” Joel Kan, vice president and deputy chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said Sunday during the organization’s annual conference in Nashville, Tenn.

Home prices have already begun moderating. According to Case-Shiller, home prices fell month-over-month from June to July for the first time in 20 years. The latest numbers, which will be for August, will be reported on Tuesday morning.

With a recession likely in the cards, on top of mortgage rates near or above 7%, “we’ve already seen a pretty dramatic pullback in housing…

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"Austin homebuyers regain power as active listings reach decade-plus high"

Austin Business Journal reports, "there's more evidence that Austin's housing market is correcting itself after years of overheating.

The Austin Board of Realtors'latest housing market datafound that September saw 9,671 active listings on the market — the most since 9,909 in July 2011 — and total inventory hit 3.1 months for the first time since July 2017. Median home sales prices also dropped more than $25,000 from August, helping the city push back on what's widely considered the biggest threat to the economy: affordability.

Though 3.1 months of inventory isn’t enough to transform Austin into a buyer’s market, there are winds of change.

“Homebuyers have not had this much leverage and this many options in over a decade,” ABOR President Cord…

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