Ruth Simon

As housing sales cool in many markets, a battle for new listings is heating up between traditional real-estate brokers and their discount rivals. Full-service brokers, who generally charge 5 percent...

Some of the nation's largest lenders are cutting back on financing and are tightening standards for condominium projects, a sign that banks, which helped to fuel the run-up in real...

As the housing market's red-hot sales pace shifts to a slow burn, some home builders and developers are beginning to offer buyers a richer array of incentives. Faced with rising...

Potential home buyers increasingly are facing a difficult economic and emotional quandary: Soaring housing prices in many parts of the country have made renting a bargain. In the past, home...

If you thought buying a home would be easier -- and cheaper -- this year, you may be in for a rude awakening. The spring home-buying season is just getting...

The mortgage boom is back -- with a vengeance. Just when you thought everybody in America had refinanced already, falling interest rates have spawned a mad new rush of borrowing....

In a musty basement storeroom of the Nassau County Office Building in Mineola, N.Y., Robert DeFreitas pores over property transactions in one of the thousands of old green books stacked...

Soaring real estate prices are stretching many home buyers to the limit. Despite the lowest interest rates in nearly three decades, mortgages are eating up a record amount of people's...

Isn't any investment safe anymore? Sure, everybody knows those white-hot dot-coms have got to be risky. But the big blue-chip stocks, the companies that dominate the Dow Jones industrial average...