James Clark is a staff reporter for RealtyWire, where he covers residential real estate, home sales, brokerage trends, seller strategy, marketing, home preparation, new construction, renovations, and the practical issues that affect buyers, sellers, agents, brokers, and property owners.
Before joining RealtyWire, James spent 15 years as a residential real estate agent in the Denver, Colorado metro area. During his real estate career, he worked with three different brokerage firms and focused heavily on representing home sellers, giving him firsthand experience with pricing strategy, listing preparation, negotiations, marketing, buyer behavior, and the challenges sellers face in changing market conditions.
James brings a practical, agent-level understanding of the real estate business to his reporting. His background gives him insight into real estate regulation, mortgage issues, sales trends, listing strategy, home staging, new construction, renovations, interior design, and the updates that can help improve a property's marketability and resale value.
His reporting focuses on making real estate news, trends, and market analysis useful for readers who want to better understand how the industry works at the ground level.
James Clark 
Mortgage rates reached a 13-month high, new listings hit their highest level since 2022, construction spending slipped again, and Rocket named a new chief executive at Redfin. Here are the eight stories that shaped the week in real estate.
A house two doors from the Rehoboth Beach Boardwalk sold for $4.67 million, the highest of five reported sales in the Salisbury, Maryland metro area for the week ending August 30, 2026.
Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey put the 30-year fixed-rate average at 6.71% for the week ending Sept. 3, the highest since July 2025, as long-term government bond yields climbed in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
Redfin data published Wednesday shows San Francisco’s median sale price up 6% to $1.6 million with inventory down 18.4%, while Seattle’s price fell 3.6% and listings rose 16.7% β a split the brokerage ties to where AI money is landing.
Construction spending Tuesday, Freddie Mac’s rate survey Thursday and the August jobs report Friday β the last full data week before the Fed’s September meeting.
Velocity Financial will acquire Toorak Capital’s business-purpose lending platform for $63 million in cash while a third-party investor buys Toorak’s $3 billion loan portfolio, in transactions valued at about $3.2 billion.
In his first Jackson Hole keynote as Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh acknowledged housing is showing strains but said financial conditions are not restrictive and the Fed’s focus belongs on 3.7% inflation.
Better Mortgage and Coinbase moved their token-backed conforming mortgage into general availability Wednesday, letting borrowers pledge Bitcoin or USDC to fund a down payment without selling it.
Real REMAX Group closed its acquisition of RE/MAX Holdings on Aug. 24 and began trading on the Nasdaq as REAX on Tuesday, creating a 180,000-agent company backed by a new $550 million term loan.
New single-family home sales fell to a 607,000 annual rate in July, but only the Midwest’s 42.7% collapse and a rise in unsold inventory clear the Census Bureau’s statistical significance test.
The last regulatory approval has landed and the deal is set to close before Tuesday’s market open, taking a publicly traded mortgage servicing rights REIT private inside one of the country’s largest retail lenders.
The hurricane-resistant Punta Gorda community that survived Hurricane Ian without losing power will host a new Southwest Florida Resilience Accelerator launching in October, as new home sales climb nearly 30% this quarter.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Arizona water officials brace for a federal rule reallocating Colorado River water, with economists warning mandated cuts could slow homebuilding in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metros.
JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America have each rolled out major housing-supply initiatives, led by JPMorgan’s $750 billion, decade-long American Dream Initiative.
Florida Realtors’ Board of Directors voted to support Amendment 3, the November ballot measure raising the homestead exemption to $250,000 by 2028 and lowering the non-homestead assessment cap.
RentCafe launched Ren, a conversational AI apartment search agent available nationwide, letting renters describe what they want instead of setting filters. The site says it serves more than 40 million renters.
The FTC’s antitrust trial against Zillow and Redfin opens Monday alongside the Real-RE/MAX closing, Case-Shiller and new-home sales land Tuesday, and the Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium convenes Thursday.
A proposed class action filed Aug. 19 in Manhattan federal court alleges Compass pulled rental listings from StreetEasy in August to funnel renters to its own platform. Compass has not yet responded and the allegations are untested.
U.S. construction starts rose 25.6% in July to a $1.79 trillion annual rate, Dodge Construction Network reported, but nearly $29 billion of the increase came from three data center and semiconductor projects. Residential starts remain down for the year.
Google confirmed it is the end user of a 506-acre data center campus under construction near Owasso in Tulsa County, Okla., developed under the code name Project Clydesdale.
Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers now supports a one-year statewide moratorium on new data centers, reversing his July position as opposition to AI infrastructure crosses party lines.
Indianapolis has finalized a moratorium halting new data center development through the end of 2027, adding Indiana’s largest city to a fast-growing list of communities restricting the industry.
A typical family needed 34% of its income to cover the mortgage on a median-priced new home in the second quarter, up from 32% in the first, as higher mortgage rates and rising costs reversed three straight quarters of improving affordability, according to the NAHB/Wells Fargo Cost of Housing Index.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac completed 15,855 foreclosure prevention actions in May, down from the prior month, while the serious delinquency rate held at a low 0.58%, according to the FHFA.
Knightvest Capital has acquired three apartment communities totaling 1,027 units in Round Rock, Texas, in the Austin metro, saying it bought the value-add portfolio at a steep discount to recent trades and replacement cost.
REDICO and newly formed real assets firm One Orchard have launched InfraMed Properties, a medical outpatient real estate platform starting with a 25-asset portfolio across 16 states and targeting more than $1 billion in investments.
The Eighth Circuit upheld the Sitzer/Burnett settlements, rejecting objectors and cementing the practice changes that transformed how U.S. agents are paid.
California voters will decide in November whether the state should borrow $11.25 billion to attack its affordable housing shortage, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation putting the measure on the ballot as Proposition 1. The bond, created through Senate Bill 417 and formally titled the Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026, would be … Read more
ATLANTA β Comcast is putting a significant chunk of its regional office footprint in metro Atlanta up for sublease, offering roughly seven floors at One Ballpark Center, the tower it anchors inside The Battery Atlanta mixed-use district next to Truist Park, home of the Atlanta Braves, according to CoStar News. The listing covers a large … Read more
San Francisco home prices have hit a median of $1.7 million as AI industry wealth drives bidding wars, with one in three Bay Area sales now all-cash, per a new CNN report.
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