News

[ad_1] Air strike hits capital of Ethiopia's Tigray region – hospital official [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] These Women’s Lounge Sets look so comfy! Zulily has these Women’s Lounge Sets for just $13.79 today! There are several colors to choose from in sizes S to XL. These look SO comfy! Shipping is free on orders over $89. And if you place one order today, the rest of your orders will ship for FREE through 11:59 p.m. PT tonight! [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] From block to blue ticks: How China became big business for Twitter [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] if(typeof(jQuery)==”function”){(function($){$.fn.fitVids=function(){}})(jQuery)}; jwplayer(‘jwplayer_ZOxIQtL9_2RuqXW7O_div’).setup( {“playlist”:”https://content.jwplatform.com/feeds/ZOxIQtL9.json”,”ph”:2} ); Encompass® eClose ICE Mortgage Technology has created the industry’s only true end-to-end eClosing solution within the industry’s leading LOS. Encompass eClose is connected to the ICE Mortgage Technology network, leveraging the industry’s largest ecosystem of lenders, settlement agents, counties, investors and services through integrations with Simplifile, MERS®, and point of sale platforms. Product Fast Facts #1 Encompass eClose keeps stakeholders in the systems they use today, removing the adoption friction presented by many other platforms #2 Hybrid eClose is now included in Encompass subscriptions, making it the standard workflow for ICE Mortgage Technology Lenders #3 Encompass eClose can integrate with any third-party point-of-sale system that you may be using and our eClose document set has already been incorporated Get More Info The post HousingWire September Demo Day: ICE Mortgage Technology appeared first on HousingWire. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Looking for educational activities for your kids at home? Sign up for this Hooked on Phonics trial for a fun way to help kids with reading. For a limited time only, you can get a Hooked on Phonics trial for just $1 that will give you full access to their program for one month! This is regularly $12.99/month, so it’s a fantastic opportunity to try it out at a steep discount. When you sign up, you’ll get unlimited access to their Learn To Read app which includes games, eBooks, lessons, and more. Plus, you’ll get practice packs to help reinforce the lessons learned and workbooks that direct you through each step of the program. Note: After your first $1 trial month, you’ll be auto-charged at the regular $12.99/month price + $2.99 shipping. If you no longer wish to continue after your first month, no problem! Just go into your account and easily cancel before you get charged! Sign up here to get one-month access for just $1! [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Stocks creep higher as focus turns to U.S. inflation data [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Take a deep dive into these five local housing markets to better understand the trends across the nation. Each city has a unique market and enticing listings to attract new residents. Siesta Key, Florida Remote work flexibility opened up the possibilities of where people could live, so more and more homebuyers have decided to make the move to the beach. Just outside of Sarasota and right on the Gulf of Mexico, Siesta Key is one of the many beachfront locales these buyers have flocked to. “The beach has been a huge draw — it never snows here, you never have to worry about shoveling the driveway or scraping off your car,” Trystan Foglia, a local eXp agent, said. “And with the COVID-19 pandemic, things started opening up in Florida a lot earlier than other places, so some people moved here because of that.” But as interest rates have risen, demand, which was once white hot, has started to cool. “Now we are starting to see houses sit on the market for more than a week when you used to be able to get five offers in under 24 hours,” Kayla Minck, who works with Foglia on The Kameli Team, said. Both Minck and Foglia said that while things are cooling down, it is not quite a buyers’ market, though it may turn that way in the future. “Buyers are active, but not as active as they once were. Prices are high and now rates are high and every time we have spoken to buyers recently, they say they are waiting for the rates to go back down, but at this point, I think they will be waiting a while,” Minck said.  Lido Beach in Siesta Key, Sarasota, Florida Twin Cities, Minnesota The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area, better known as the Twin Cities, is home to everything from professional sports teams to award-winning theater productions, a vibrant craft beer scene, as well as the nation’s largest shopping mall. With all these attractions, it is easy to see why so many people want to call the Twin Cities home. “The Twin Cities is almost always in those ‘top ten places to live’ lists,” Ryan O’Neill, a local RE/MAX agent, said. “There is a strong employment base, four distinct seasons and big city amenities without the crowds of some other major cities.” Like just about everywhere else in the country, the Twin Cities has been dealing with an inventory issue. On the day O’Neill spoke with HW Media, he said there were roughly 5,000 homes on the market in the area, and noted that a balanced market is closer to 18,000 homes. “Interest rates are rising, and we are seeing some cooling, but demand is still strong, just not as strong as it has been the last couple of years.” St Anthony Main; Minneapolis, Minnesota: Third Avenue Bridge Sioux Falls, South Dakota Sioux Falls, the largest city in South Dakota, accounts for roughly 30% of the state’s population and has become quite the destination. Its namesake, the Big Sioux River, runs just north of the downtown area, providing lush landscapes and picturesque waterfalls for locals to enjoy. As with so many metro areas, however, an increase in homebuyer demand has, of course, created some challenges for the local housing markets. “We are still seeing fairly low inventory,” local agent Amy Stockberger, of Amy Stockberger Real Estate, said. “We have seen a little bit more inventory accumulate but it is nothing in the big picture.” As interest rates have risen, Stockberger said she has seen a slight drop off in demand, but conditions have more or less persisted at their current rate. “Anything under the $400,000 price point is still pretty aggressive and getting a lot of offers, then we also have an aggressive market for things above $900,000, which is really interesting,” she said. Stockberger attributes the high level of demand for pricier homes to the influx of out-of-state buyers the area has seen, and while the market may cool due to rising interest rates, she expects the area’s natural beauty and lack of a state income tax to continue attracting buyers in the coming months and years.   Austin, Texas Temperatures in Austin have been in the triple digits for months now, but the metro area’s housing market has finally started to cool off. Austin’s housing market has generated plenty of headlines over the past two years, as major corporations, as well as individuals, have decided to call the capital of the Lone Star State their new home. But, as mortgage rates have risen and home prices in the metro have continued to rise, the market has calmed down.  “Instead of seeing 10 plus offers on something, you are seeing more like five offers. Instead of going in three or four days, homes are now sitting a bit longer,” Jeremy Vandermause, a local Bramlet Residential Real Estate agent, said. Vandermause also noted how much purchase power homebuyers have lost as interest rates have risen. “People are more hesitant,” he said. “I have a client right now whose price range was $400,000 to $420,000 and now it is more in the $360,000 to $390,000 range because her original budget was created when interest rates were at 3% or 4%.” Raleigh, North Carolina Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Raleigh was one of the fastest growing cities in the country. As more and more people flocked to the metro area, Raleigh’s housing market turned scorching hot, according to Redfin. However, local agent Marti Hampton, of Marti Hampton Real Estate, said that rising interest rates have been putting a damper on the previously hot market. “It is still a very strong sellers’ market and there is not enough inventory for the buyers, however, I have seen a shift in the number of offers that we are receiving,” Hampton said. “A few months ago, we were receiving 30 or 40 offers on a single property and that has dropped down some. We

[ad_1] If you’re new here, I practice the Buy Ahead Principle — which means that what we buy each week is often for future weeks. We stock up on the best deals and markdowns each week and that means that we then have a variety of items from previous shopping trips to use to plan a menu from. With the increase in grocery prices, I’ve decided to raise our grocery budget to $100 a week because I’ve not been having enough wiggle room to stock up like I’d want to. This amount will still challenge me to be creative while also giving me enough breathing room to stock up and continue to practice the Buy Ahead Principle. In addition to practicing the Buy Ahead Principle, I Reverse Meal Plan. This means that I plan based upon what we have on hand plus what good sales/markdowns I found at the stores. (Read more about Reverse Meal-Planning here.) {Follow me on Instagram stories for real-time videos on what I’m buying if you don’t want to have to wait for me to get the post written up for the blog!} Here’s what I bought for $99.78 at Kroger this week… I was excited to find so many meat and bread markdowns. I stick these in the freezer to use for future weeks. And I finally found a chicken deal!! It feels like markdowns and sales on chicken have been so few and far between, so I was thrilled to find three big packages marked down! This was a pretty good deal on bacon! I buy it and freeze it to use for breakfast for dinner nights. The kids asked for cereal and I not only picked up the big boxes of Kellogg’s cereal on sale for $1.79/box this week (plus, you can get a free book from Kellogg’s for each box you buy!) and I found Cascadian Farms cereal marked down to $0.99/box! Kierstyn loves grapes, so I always buy some when they are $0.99/pound. Can you believe all of those produce markdowns?? I haven’t seen this many in month and months! Mandarin oranges are on sale for $3.49 for a 3-lb. bag with the digital coupon! My shopping helper! [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Mexican president welcomes U.S. 'tone' on energy dispute as Blinken visits [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] The premise of a mortgage rate lockdown is simple: so many American households have such low mortgage rates that some will never move once rates rise, which then locks up housing inventory. This is something I’ve never believed in because we hadn’t had a period where mortgage rates moved up so quickly and then held higher for an extended period. But now this is a real risk. Typically we have a natural set of new listings each year; inventory rises in the spring and summer and then falls in the fall and winter. We are getting closer to that period where total inventory traditionally falls. However, we have entered a tricky period in housing economics where we might have to take this premise more seriously since mortgage rates recently got as low as 2.5% in 2021 and as high as 6.25% in 2022. It wasn’t the rate move that caught my attention — it was the new listing data. It all started when mortgage rates jumped from 5.25% to 6.25% this year and I saw how home sellers reacted to that move. As you can see below, that sharp move to 6.25% caused new listing data to stall at first. (This is the exact opposite of panic selling, by the way.) However, what caught my eye, even more, is that mortgage rates made a 1.25% move lower, and the new listings data still fell. The fact that this data line fell earlier this year and was sharper made me think that this could be what a mortgage rate lockdown looks like. From Redfin: However, what happens when rates spike sharply can also be temporary, and we are in the seasonal timeframe where new listings and soon total inventory data declines. I will surely keep my eye out for new listings data for the rest of the month before the traditional fall in inventory happens. What I don’t want to see in 2023, if mortgage rates stay high, is we start the year with more negative year-over-year declines in listings. The parts of the U.S. housing market that have 2019 inventory levels or higher are off my savagely unhealthy housing market list; those areas see effective pricing as demand gets weaker. But the rest of the country hasn’t had much inventory growth. My concern is that if mortgage rates fall in the future, it will stall, pause or even reverse the inventory growth we have seen in 2022. Traditionally speaking, post-2012, inventory growth came in years where demand was weaker from mortgage buyers: 2014 and 2022. Those were the only years we have had negative mortgage demand growth in the purchase application data. Adjusting to population, 2014 was the lowest level in the index ever, and in 2022 we have seen a noticeable hit in this index, taking it below 2008 levels. As you can see, even though purchase application is below 2008 levels, total inventory is far from the peak levels we saw in 2007 of over 4 million listings, currently we’re at 1,310,000. Now one thing that could have happened this year to push down new listing data more aggressively is simply that homes are less affordable. We haven’t had to deal with 6% mortgage rates in a long time and we have had massive home-price growth since 2020, continuing nationally in 2022.Case-Shiller Home Price Index This is why 2023 will be key to the mortgage rate lockdown question. The nation’s inventory needs to get back to 2019 levels, and that will only happen with positive year-over-year new listing data going into spring 2023. The healthy parts of the U.S. housing market — where people have choices and buyers have some power again — are those near or above 2019 levels. We just need the entire country to get back there for me to remove the label of a savagely unhealthy housing market. Can you blame home sellers? One of the things that people forget about low mortgage rates is that we have people living in their homes much longer now. The epic wave of refinancing we saw during 2020 and 2021 improved homeowners’ cash flow much more than people think because their wages have risen over the years while their mortgage payment got lower. MBA Refinance Index Wage growth has picked up in America. One of the best hedges against inflation is a fixed mortgage rate. As your wages increase, your cash flow looks great versus your shelter payment. Renters don’t have this luxury, but homeowners do. Atlanta wage growth data Overall unweighted wage growth of 6.7% Usually, Full-time wage growth is 6.6% College Degree 6.0% So, you can understand why some households didn’t want to pull the trigger when rates raced up toward 6.25% and why even 5%-6% mortgage rates on top of massive home-price growth has made them think twice about listing. Homeowners have excellent cash flow, and they are unlikely to make their financial life harder unless there’s a good reason. While I have been skeptical of the mortgage rate lockdown premise over the years, it was more because rates didn’t stay high enough to have the premise genuinely tested. If mortgage rates head back toward 4%, that should entice some sellers to move, but at 6%, it makes sense why some sellers won’t pull the trigger. Always remember, traditional sellers, for the most part, are homebuyers as well. So, to list their homes, they want to feel comfortable with mortgage rates to finance their next home. As someone who didn’t believe in the mortgage rate lockdown premise ever, even I have to acknowledge that we are in a historically unique backdrop where we can finally test this premise out. Mortgage rates, which have been falling since 1981, hit rock bottom at 2.5%, and many Americans have rates between 2.5%-4%. Rates spiking higher has a tone of what we saw in the 1990s, but rates had room to go much lower then, as you can see below. Just the raw speed of the