In traditional housing recoveries, individuals and households provide the bulk of the demand the market needs to rebound. This time, though, a different kind of buyer has been powering the housing recovery: investors looking for valuable rental property. Along with individual investors, institutional investors have poured into the single-family home market, buying enough foreclosed and unsold homes to reduce inventories, drive up prices and encourage new construction. All-cash home purchases – many of which are made by investors – made up about 32.0% of sales nationally in March 2013, a stark rise from about 20.0% in 2009, according to the National Association of REALTORS®.

The top two business issues on the minds of leading real estate executives are thoroughly explored by prominent industry experts in a new 12-page special supplement on "Recruiting and Technology" commissioned by technology firm Imprev for the latest issue of RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine. ...

Pending home sales increased in March and remain above year-ago levels, but contract activity in recent months shows only modest movement, according to the National Association of REALTORS®. ...

CoreLogic®, a leading residential property information, analytics and services provider, announced the acquisition of Case-Shiller® from Fiserv, Inc. in conjunction with first quarter 2013 CoreLogic earnings results on April 24, 2013. The acquisition closed on March 20, 2013. ...

Regional Spotlight—The Mainstreet Organization of REALTORS® (MORe) recently announced a new program that will provide consumers in the Chicago suburbs with a comprehensive system for rating REALTORS®. MORe is the largest local association in the nation and the first in the Midwest to offer such a service. ...

More than two dozen speakers and panelists affiliated with Realogy Holdings Corp., a global leader in real estate franchising and provider of real estate brokerage, relocation and settlement services, presented at the Asian Real Estate Association of America’s (AREAA) Global Summit in Honolulu, where 400 attendees from 13 ...

Bean Group, one of the fastest-growing real estate firms in New England and a proud member of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World (LeadingRE), is now providing financial incentives to military personnel buying or selling a home. ...

Data scraping and misuse of listing data that belongs to brokers are growing concerns. Many scrapers (or others who receive the data legitimately but use it in ways that violates its licenses) are actively reselling listing data for various uses not intended by brokers, such as statistical or financial reporting. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Curt Beardsley, vice president of consumer and industry development at Move, Inc., a leader in online real estate and operator of realtor.com®. Beardsley shared his thoughts on the proliferation of data scraping, the grey market for data, and how brokers can protect their data from unintended uses.

Focusing your energy and attention on a particular real estate niche hasn’t always been an attractive idea. In fact, there are many real estate professionals that believe niche marketing is far too narrow in scope.

Luxury Portfolio International® has expanded its global footprint with the addition of 15 new member firms in the first quarter of the year, with extended coverage throughout Europe, as well as the U.S. and Canada,

Nationally, house prices continued to rise in February, contributing to the overall recovery in U.S. house prices. According to the most recent release  by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, U.S. house prices rose by 0.7 percent

Sales of newly built, single-family homes rose 1.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 417,000 units in March, according to newly released figures from HUD and the U.S. Census Bureau. “This is the second-best sales number we’ve seen since early 2010, and a good sign of the continued, gradual headway that our industry is making toward recovery as more buyers jump off the fence in time to take advantage of today’s low interest rates and prices,” said Rick Judson, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and a home builder from Charlotte, N.C. “The latest sales report is right in line with our forecast for continued, modest increases in home prices and sales through 2013,” said NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe. “At this point, we are about half-way back to what would be considered a ‘normal’ level of sales activity

Marketing mavens have long been saying that when it comes to making personal connections with clients, you shouldn’t be reaching out solely from a business angle. Instead, you should be stimulating regular conversation.

Xerox recently introduced ConnectKey™, a software system embedded in Xerox multifunction printers (MFPs) and a set of solutions that respond to an increasingly mobile workforce and the need for more advanced IT security across connected devices.

First comes love, then comes…mortgage? Times are changing, and a new study from Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC uncovered that about one in four married couples between the ages of 18 to 34 purchased their first home together