Months’ supply of inventory was down 23.5 percent to 1.3 months. A balanced market is about 5-6 months of supply. 1.3 months of supply indicates a pretty extreme sellers’ market.
Mortgage Rates Drop Below Three Percent Again
November 10, 2021
Despite the re-acceleration of economic growth, the recent bond rally drove mortgage rates down for the second consecutive week. These low mortgage rates, combined with the tailwind of first-time homebuyers entering the market, means that purchase demand will remain strong into next year. However, affordability pressures continue to be an ongoing concern for homebuyers.
Information provided by Freddie Mac.
September Monthly Skinny Video
There are some signs of a potential market shift, even though both new and active listings are down compared to last year and sales are up compared to 2019.
August Monthly Skinny Video
In new construction, home builders continue to struggle to meet buyer demand, as housing starts nationwide dropped 7% last month, according to the Commerce Department.
July Monthly Skinny Video
June Monthly Skinny Video
The increase in sales prices comes with a slight decline in existing home sales nationwide, as homebuyers struggle with declining affordability amid a lack of inventory, forcing some buyers to simply wait it out in hopes of more inventory and less competition.
May Monthly Skinny Video
Home prices are still on the increase and that is not likely to change during the summer months. The Median Sales Price increased 16.1 percent to $342,500 for the month.
April Monthly Skinny Video
April was another strong month for home sales. The busy spring market continues to see many multiple offer situations driving sales prices above asking price.
Third Post
WordPress’ growing market share is fueling a continual influx of new users but also a higher level of scrutiny around advertising. Companies with large advertising budgets target this segment of consumers, because many who are new to WordPress need help hosting and creating their websites.
Last week Bluehost pulled an advertisement that misused WordPress’s trademark. The company’s PR department has not responded to our request for comment, but onlookers have noted that this isn’t the first time Bluehost has floated questionable ads. Multiple Facebook campaigns, dating back several years, include trademark abuses, as well as active campaigns on YouTube in various markets.
In another advertising-related matter, Elementor, a popular page builder used by more than five million websites, has caught some attention recently for its Google ads that target “full-site editing.” Birgit Pauli-Haack, the publisher of the Gutenberg Times, pointed out the ads last week in the Post Status Slack community.
Second One
WordPress theme development company Themix released its third free theme to the official directory this week. Churel is described as a theme for organizations and businesses that also works for traditional blogging.
The development team has a keen eye for modern color schemes and font families. The theme has a refreshing design that is rare for the free theme directory, at least at first glance. It is the sort of project with just the right amount of eye candy to pull users in.
If that was everything necessary for great design, the theme would land in my top 10 picks from WordPress.org without a second thought. However, after digging deeper, it was clear the design had some issues. They are fixable. It would not take much nudging of a few CSS rules to make this a much better theme, so let’s just dive right into the problems before getting into the good stuff.
The theme’s most clear-cut flaw is with its typography. Sizing and words-per-line work well enough. The default Open Sans font is rarely a poor choice for readability. However, the line height is far too large for a good flow, and the white space between paragraphs makes it tough to tell where one ends and the other begins. It is almost as if the team got halfway through with fine-tuning the typography and decided to simply stop. It is a glaring issue that makes the theme practically unusable for long-form content, but it could be addressed with two minor style changes.