Many economists and analysts expect Houston’s housing market, the nation’s hottest in recent years, to slow markedly this year due to depressed oil prices. The thing is, Houston isn’t cooperating so far.

Several major home builders reported this week that their sales in Houston ran the gamut in the first quarter, from flat in comparison to a year ago, to up sharply, to down a bit. Commerce Department figures show that Houston’s residential construction slowed in the first quarter to a 2.2% year-over-year gain from an 8.6% gain in the previous year. Still, it’s not the outright decline that some were expecting.

Meanwhile, Houston’s existing-home market showed resiliency in March, registering a 3.6% increase in completed sales from a year ago and a 30.6% spike in pending sales. Read More »

Financial-services giant TIAA-CREF is buying the 40% stake in asset manager TIAA Henderson Real Estate it doesn’t already own for £80 million ($122.7 million) as part of its broader move into managing money for sovereign-wealth funds, pension funds and other institutions.

London-based TIAA Henderson has about $26 billion in real-estate assets under management in Europe, Asia and Australia. TIAA-CREF, which separately manages $56 billion in real-estate assets in the Americas, bought its controlling 60% stake about one year ago from Henderson Global Investors for about £114 million. Read More »

Last Thursday, the Department of Justice brought its latest high-profile mortgage-related lawsuit–this time against Quicken Loans Inc., a Detroit-based nonbank that’s risen to become one of the largest mortgage originators in the country.

Quicken Loans had brought its own lawsuit against the government the week before, alleging that the government had tried to get it to settle and admit to fraud charges it didn’t commit.

The lawsuit, and others like it, have implications far beyond any ultimate impact on companies’ balance sheets. Many of the companies that have been targeted by the lawsuits have claimed that the Justice Department is going after them based on immaterial foot falls, rather than major errors.

Some of them say that’s led them to pull back from the mortgage market, especially in lending to borrowers with smaller down payments or worse credit scores.

Here are some questions and answers on how the lawsuits could be impacting the mortgage market. Read More »

In Silicon Valley, it’s getting harder to build new offices, as a story on WSJ.com Monday explores, with cities pushing back against the rapid growth of tech employees flocking to the region.

At its root, the problem is a simple one: Demand is soaring while supply is only growing slowly—and stands grow slower still.

This is best seen in Mountain View, Calif., home of Google Inc. The city was a Silicon Valley also-ran last tech boom, but this time around it is an epicenter, largely because Google and LinkedIn have been gobbling up space. Read More »

Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) on Friday sent a letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenging the method by which HUD Secretary Julián Castro installed a new head of the Federal Housing Administration.

Traditionally, the FHA is led by a commissioner, who is nominated by the White House and confirmed by the Senate. Read More »

With competition heating up in European real estate markets, it’s time for investors to look to the region’s central and eastern fringes, according to a new report from adviser Cushman & Wakefield.

Economies in countries like Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary are improving, and the relative shortage of debt “can open up opportunities for equity investors,” the report said.

Prague and Warsaw are the leading property markets in this region, although there are others “with obvious geopolitical risks to consider but also high potential returns,” it said. Budapest “is perhaps the most notable example.”

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Friday said that it would make a number of changes to its program of selling delinquent mortgages to investors and nonprofits, putting in protections to attempt to prevent foreclosures and help nonprofits buy more of their loans.

Since 2010, the department has sold loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration to investors, a program that’s meant to mitigate the FHA’s losses while giving investors a chance to profit by attempting to get households to start payments again.

Those auctions had come under criticism from some nonprofits, who said that there weren’t enough incentives for investors to prevent foreclosures and that the auctions were too big and geographically-dispersed for them to participate.

Friday’s changes include requiring mortgage servicers to delay foreclosure for a year–up from the prior requirement of six months–and to evaluate borrowers for loan modifications. HUD, which is planning to have its first delinquent loan sale of 2015 in June, says it will also create pools of loans that can only be sold to nonprofits and units of local governments. Read More »

Sales of D.R. Horton Inc.’s entry-level Express Homes have tripled in the brand’s first year, a sign that first-time buyers are returning to the market.

D.R. Horton sold roughly 2,000 Express brand homes in the first three months of 2015, or 18% of its total sales, according to the company’s second quarter fiscal results released Wednesday. That’s big, considering that D.R. Horton is the largest U.S. builder by unit sales.

Overall, D.R. Horton sold a total of 11,135 units across its spectrum of brands, a 30% gain from the first three months of 2014. The Express brand homes sell for an average price of $179,000 compared with D.R. Horton’s overall average selling price of $284,400 last quarter. In comparison, the average price of all newly built U.S. homes sold in February was $341,000, according to the Commerce Department. Read More »

At the beginning of the month, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) sent the U.S. Treasury Department a letter asking a simple question that has been on the lips of shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for years.

“According to news reports,” he wrote, “the initial loan provided to Fannie and Freddie by Treasury is paid off. Will Treasury’s arrangement with FHFA terminate? If so, when? If not, why not?”

In its response to Mr. Grassley on Tuesday, the Treasury Department for the first time clearly laid out its response. In a nutshell, according to the department: The bailout wasn’t a loan, but an investment on which taxpayers are now being compensated. Read More »

Late Friday, mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, unveiled changes to the fees they charge to back mortgages and disclosed finalized capital requirements for private-mortgage insurers who want to do business with the companies.

Both announcements might seem obscure, but they directly affect mortgage costs for thousands of borrowers. Here’s what you need to know. Read More »