property

When the Federal Reserve set out to cool the economy and slow inflation in the past, it counted on the housing market to do much of the work. By raising interest rates, the central bank made mortgages more expensive and trimmed the number of buyers.This time, America’s red-hot housing market threatens to make the Fed’s job tougher. With so many buyers competing for so few available properties, home prices in the U.S. rose 18.8% last year, according to a home-price index maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indices and…

Investors who bid up apartment-building prices to record levels over the past year are starting to come under pressure as rapidly rising interest rates squeeze their profits.Steeper borrowing rates make it harder for apartment landlords to pay back their loans. That could also be bad news for tenants, if it encourages building owners to raise rents higher than they might otherwise because that is their primary tool for generating more income. Sales of apartment buildings have been strong for years, but they broke records…

Soon after Lizbeth Martinez set out to buy a house near her hometown of Cactus, Texas, she encountered a situation familiar to millions of Zillow-browsing Americans: few decent options.“There is nothing for sale,” Ms. Martinez said. “And, if it is, it is way out of my price range.” After months of searching, Ms. Martinez found an unlikely partner—her employer. The 21-year-old is an accounting clerk at a beef-processing plant in Cactus run by JBS USA Holdings Inc. She expects to close this summer on the…

U.S. home prices climbed to a record of $391,200 in April, but the number of sales fell as high prices and rising interest rates pushed more buyers out of the market.The U.S. housing market has started to slow after a two-year frenzy spurred by record-low mortgage interest rates and a desire for more space during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mortgage rates have climbed sharply in recent months, making home-buying less affordable. Existing-home sales fell 2.4% in April from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate…

Atlanta’s top-performing residential real-estate agent lives in Florida. He didn’t set foot in Georgia for two years, and he sees no reason why he should. A.J. Steigman runs his own real-estate brokerage firm from his house in Parkland, Fla. From 600 miles away, he bought or leased more than 300 homes at a total value of more than $86 million, according to the Atlanta Realtors Association. That was the most combined sales and leases in the Atlanta metro area for any broker last year, the…

The former Hamptons home of the late Johnson & Johnson chief executive James Burke has sold for close to its $48 million asking price, according to people familiar with the situation. The roughly 4-acre oceanfront estate in Sagaponack, N.Y., includes two distinct parcels, according to listing agent Christopher Covert of Compass. One is an oversize oceanfront lot with two 1980s-era houses connected by a breezeway, as…

People who agreed to buy homes under construction but haven’t yet closed are facing mortgage-interest rates that could be nearly double what they anticipated when they paid their deposits.New-home buyers are confronting multiple obstacles this year, from surging mortgage rates to home construction that is taking longer than usual due to supply-chain and labor constraints. Many home buyers who signed contracts for new homes in 2021 or early this year calculated monthly payments based on near-record-low mortgage rates of…

PIGEON FORGE, Tenn.—Tom and Barb Hansen’s search for a retirement spot reads like the script to a road movie. California’s Lake Tahoe. Sedona and Scottsdale in Arizona. The Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Myrtle Beach, S.C.Over a decade or so, the couple traveled the country to imagine life after Mr. Hansen retired as president of a community bank in the suburbs west of Chicago. In 2018, the Hansens, ages 61 and 60, picked rural Sevier County, Tenn. A lot of other people had the…

A camera recognizes employees’ faces and hails an elevator programmed to bring them to their floor. Sensors on the walls measure particles and CO2 levels in meeting rooms, pumping in fresh air when levels rise too high. Higher levels of certain particles mean it is more likely that viruses could be present. In a control room, big screens show every floor in the 23-story building. The headquarters, completed in 2021, is at the forefront of a quiet revolution sweeping through commercial buildings across the U.S. Office…