Mark A Fuller's Blog

If Congress approves a plan President Obama outlined in his State of the Union Address, many troubled Texas homeowners will save thousands of dollars annually. The idea to allow responsible homeowners to refinance their mortgages at historically low rates would save each about $3,000 a year, acco...

The start of 2010 has many investors looking for bargain properties, sometimes in bunches.  The ways of funding the purchases also have become more creative as buyers rethink the role of real estate not only for their portfolios but also for their residences. In a recent example, an older couple ...

Texas' unemployment rat - 7.8% - is the lowest it's been since July 2009, when the recession was just heating up, according to employment statistics released by the Texas Workforce commission today. "Texas continues to see signs of improvement in the labor market," said Tom Pauken, chairman of th...

The Texas economy is outperforming the nation as a whole mostly on Houston's coattails, a longtime observer of the city's economy said Thursday. "Texas is doing well because Houston is doing well," Barton Smith, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Houston, said in a luncheon addr...

After several months in which home sales figures were skewed by the effects of the 2010 homebuyer tax credit, the Houston real estate market concluded 2011 solidy in the black.  December marked the seventh straight month of increased homes sales and the month contained a host of indicators sugges...

Replace kitchen cabinet hardware for an inexpensive update!! You can slam cabinet and bedroom doors only so many times before you have to repair and replace hardware that is loose, broken or just plain old and tired.  It doesn't take a lot of time or money to tighten loose hardware, clean globs o...

According to the most recent "Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers" released by the National Association of Realtors, single home buyers comprised 32% of home purchases in 2010. Single female buyers averaged 41 in age (32 for first-time buyers and 52 for repeat buyers), and single male buyers avera...

The Texas economy, which has been adding jobs each month for almost a year, stumbled a bit last month, the Texas Workforce Commission reported mid-September.  Texas lost 1,300 jobs in August on a seasonally adjusted basis, the first time since September 2010 that the state reported a monthly dip ...

The mercury wasn't the only thing that soared in the month of August and into September in the Houston area.  Single Family home sales rose up more than 30% when compared to this time last year. However, as has been the case for the past few months, the rosy performance took on added luster as a ...

According to data from CoreLogic covering the 2nd quarter of 2001, in Texas, only 10% of all residential properties were upside down in the 2nd quarter, according to the data. Texas percentages fell well below the national average of 22.5%, or 10.9 million residential properties experiencing nega...