First time home buyers

A strong spring home purchase season is likely to further increase mortgage loan application defect risk, which already spiked in the past two months, according to First American.

Slower home price growth and cooled mortgage rates could bring buyers out in droves in 2019, according to NerdWallet.

House listings in the Twin Cities are on the rise, but first-time buyers are snapping them up as quickly as they hit the market, setting the stage for another competitive spring market.

From the gateway to the West to just below the Mason-Dixon Line, here's a look at the 12 housing markets with the highest percentage of homes affordable to millennial purchasers with median incomes.

Millennials are unfazed by the short supply of starter homes in a competitive market based on the rising share of December's purchase mortgages, according to Ellie Mae.

King County's cooling housing market has turned downright chilly as prices have dropped to their lowest point in two years — with the median home now selling for $116,000 less than last spring.

The number of homeowners participating in an expanding down payment assistance program offered by Wells Fargo and NeighborWorks could top 20,000 this year.

Affordability remains a challenge for homebuyers, but barely any mortgage lenders attribute last year's sluggish home sales to insufficient consumer income or lack of loan products for new buyers, according to Fannie Mae.

Independent mortgage banks have been instrumental in filling the void left by banks that have retreated from the home lending market since the Great Recession.

More than one-third of millennials said saving for a down payment is the biggest hurdle to buying a house, but few seem to realize they don't need to put 20% down to get a mortgage, a recent survey found.

Home sales plunged in the Orlando, Fla., area in December as 2018 finished with fewer sales than the year before, and real estate agents warned that 2019 could be slower as well.

With the promise of jobs and fledgling tech scenes, five of the top 10 hottest housing markets for 2019 all reside in the South, according to Zillow.

Being a homeowner may not be the most cost efficient move in some areas.

Rising mortgage rates don't have as severe an impact on the first-time homebuyer market as they do for property values, according to a Zillow survey.

Residential lender and Warburg Pincus portfolio company Newfi Lending is helping tackle upfront costs for homebuyers with the launch of its 2-1 Buydown Program.

The standards for mortgage lending constrained in December, as a drop in conventional credit brought availability to its lowest point since February 2017, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

First-time homebuyers earn $30,000 more than their peers who didn't buy a house, and nearly $12,000 more than the country's overall median household income, highlighting affordability issues in current housing conditions, according to Zillow.

Older millennials and younger Generation Xers still feel the aftershock of the housing crisis, as more would rather invest in the stock market than real estate, according to Redfin.

Millennials comprise the largest cohort of homebuyers as most have entered their prime purchasing years, and they just might shake up migration patterns in 2019, according to First American Financial Corp.

Builder Taylor Morrison Home Corp. has launched a program that lowers the rate on its lending subsidiary's mortgages for two years through a new buydown program.