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Real Estate News and Tips for Buyers, Sellers, Agents and Investors.

Existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – slipped 0.4 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate(1) of 4.89 million units in January from an upwardly revised level of 4.91 million in December, and are 23.4 percent below the 6.44 million-unit pace in January 2007.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said many potential buyers remain on the sidelines. “Subprime loans and other risky mortgage products have virtually disappeared from the marketplace, and over the past five months, this has been reflected in soft but fairly stable home sales,” he said. “As the increased limits for FHA and conventional loans are implemented, more buyers will have access to safer FHA loans and lower interest rate loans in high-cost areas, which could lead to steadily higher home sales later in the year.”

In the film The Holiday, two women on opposite sides of the world decide to trade houses over the Christmas holidays. Trading homes for vacation purposes is not a new idea, but what if the swap was permanent? Investors looking to sell a house could consider a swap if they are interested in purchasing new property while receiving market value for their own.

An estimated 16,000 Americans are in the market to trade their homes, according to ConsumerAffairs.com. That’s not many in the grand scheme of things—there were over four million homes on the market at the end of 2007—but the number is steadily growing as more people get fed up with the lack of buyers.

It’s winter, time to hang the “For Sale” sign.

Homeowners shouldn’t dally if they want to sell their houses in spring, the peak season for real-estate transactions, real-estate agents say.

“If they know they want to move by summer, now is not too early to bring somebody in,” said Barbara Nowak, an agent with Long & Foster in Burke, Va.

Now — not when the tulips are in bloom — is the time to start decluttering, cleaning, making repairs, getting paperwork together and interviewing real-estate agents.

“Of the 7,472 ZIP codes tracked by the LoanPerformance HPI, home prices in 5,691 (76.16 percent) of these ZIP codes have decreased over the last three months,” said Damien Weldon, vice president, collateral and prepayment analytics for First American CoreLogic, “Year-over-year, however, just 4,028 (53.91 percent) of the ZIP codes we track indicate decreasing property values,” added Weldon.

WASHINGTON, February 14, 2008 - Roughly half of metropolitan areas continued to show rising home prices in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to the latest quarterly survey by the National Association of Realtors®.

In the fourth quarter, 73 out of 150 metropolitan statistical areas(1) show increases in median existing single-family home prices from a year earlier, including 11 areas with double-digit annual gains and another 12 metros showing increases of 6 percent or more; 77 had price declines including 16 with double-digit drops.