Category: Buying/Selling/Renting

A house bought decades ago for a modest price, then sold today near the top of an inflated housing market, can hand its owner a tax bill they never expected. The federal tax code shields a large slice of that profit from capital-gains tax, but the shield has a ceiling, and a growing number of…

Two Ohio defendants pleaded guilty in June to filing false government records in a scheme to claim and sell the home of an older man who had moved to a nursing facility. The original forgery and protected-class theft charges were dismissed under the pleas, so the precise admitted offense matters. The case still exposes the…

Nassau County police have charged a Baldwin woman in an alleged deed-theft and rental-fraud scheme involving the paid-off West Hempstead home of a 75-year-old man. Police say forged documents transferred the deed into the defendant’s name. The allegation puts a retiree’s largest asset at the center of the case: owning a home free of a…

Tenant-screening company RentGrow agreed to a proposed order that includes a $2.25 million civil penalty over federal allegations about inaccurate or incomplete background reports. The order awaits judicial approval and does not create a consumer refund fund, but the case matters because an extra eviction or criminal entry can change a housing decision even when…

More than 444,000 renters who paid hidden fees to the nation’s largest single-family landlord are getting money back. The Federal Trade Commission has begun mailing 444,131 checks totaling more than $47.2 million to consumers who were charged undisclosed fees by Invitation Homes between January 2021 and September 2024, according to an FTC announcement. Recipients who…

Evictions in New York City have risen to their highest level in years, a stark measure of how far the city’s affordability crisis has spread as rents hover near record highs. The pace has quickened enough that housing advocates now warn the recovery from the pandemic-era eviction pause has tipped into something harsher for the…

The share of income the typical American renter spends on rent has edged down to its lowest level in years, a rare piece of encouraging news in a housing market that has delivered mostly bad headlines. The improvement is modest, and it does not undo the affordability strains that built up during the pandemic, but…

Renters searching for a one-bedroom apartment in New York City now face a median asking price above $4,000 a month, a threshold the city had never hit before. The milestone, recorded in lease data compiled by Miller Samuel for Douglas Elliman, lands at a moment when vacancy rates remain near historic lows and new housing…

A record 22.7 million renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs in 2024, the highest total ever recorded by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The figure landed even as some rental markets showed signs of softening, with vacancy rates ticking upward and asking rents flattening in several…

Prospective homeowners trying to break into the market face a measurement problem that shapes the policies and programs designed to help them. The widely cited figure that first-time buyers accounted for 35% of recent home sales comes from industry survey data, but a separate federal framework for tracking these buyers produces a different picture. The…