Steve Thompson is a staff reporter for RealtyWire, where he covers residential real estate, mortgage trends, home sales, housing market data, real estate finance, industry regulation, and the issues affecting Realtors, buyers, sellers, lenders, and property owners.
Before joining RealtyWire, Steve worked as a mortgage broker, giving him direct experience with the financing side of real estate transactions. His background in the mortgage business gives him valuable insight into how interest rates, lending standards, affordability, buyer demand, and regulatory changes influence the broader real estate market.
Steve brings a practical understanding of home sales, market analysis, real estate trends, financing issues, and the laws and regulations that shape residential real estate. His reporting focuses on making complex market and mortgage-related topics clear and useful for readers across the real estate industry.
He earned a Bachelor of Science in Business from the University of Central Florida and currently lives in Orlando, Florida.
Steve Thompson 
The Kansas City Chiefs and Hunt Midwest have formed a joint venture, Two-Point Development, to serve as master developer for mixed-use districts around the club’s new Kansas City, Kan., stadium and its future Olathe, Kan., headquarters.
Rocket Companies has named Alessio Sanfilippo, most recently a Meta vice president, chief executive of Redfin effective immediately, filling a seat vacant since Glenn Kelman left in January.
A hawkish Jackson Hole debut, sticky PCE inflation, a 10.5% drop in new home sales and the end of RE/MAX as an independent company — the week’s biggest real estate stories in one place.
Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed-rate average rose one basis point to 6.66% this week, a third straight near-flat reading, as the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium opened and new listings hit a four-month high.
The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge held at 3.7% year over year in July with core at 3.3%, BEA said Wednesday. Real consumer spending was flat, the saving rate rose to 3.0%, and mortgage rates stayed in the mid-6% range with the Fed still split over whether to hike.
S&P Cotality Case-Shiller and FHFA both showed home prices accelerating modestly in June, but housing lost ground to inflation for a 13th straight month and the Midwest-West gap kept widening.
The committee formed to respond to the founder’s campaign to replace the board said the decision to move on from him was unanimous among the other directors, and laid out operating results to argue the company is better off without him.
A stipulated order filed the morning trial was set to open requires Redfin to rebuild the rental advertising business it exited in 2025, and strips the restrictions the FTC said Zillow’s $100 million payment bought.
The fire that started Saturday near Verdi remains at zero containment, with damage assessments still pending across neighborhoods on the western edge of the Reno housing market.
Median listing prices fell 2.4% year over year in July as sellers priced more realistically from the start, cutting delistings and pushing contract signings to their highest level since 2022.
Massachusetts House and Senate bills tackle zoning reform through different routes — YIGBY on religious land versus statewide duplexes-by-right — after rent stabilization was knocked off the table by the courts.
Single-family starts plunged, mortgage rates eased for a second week, the $876 million commission settlements survived appeal, and Real and RE/MAX cleared the way for a Monday closing.
The Bluffs, a two-building Class A campus in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, has completed a full repositioning with more than 57,000 square feet leased, including The Honest Company’s headquarters relocation.
Greystone Capital Advisors completed a $369.6 million cross-collateralized bridge facility from PGIM covering five newly built New Jersey multifamily properties totaling 1,340 units for Capodagli Property Company.
A federal bench trial over the FTC’s claim that Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to quit the rental advertising market begins Aug. 24 before Judge Anthony J. Trenga in Alexandria, Va.
Construction payrolls grew by 22,000 in July while total U.S. employment fell 23,000, according to NAHB’s state-level breakdown of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Illinois led monthly gains; Texas posted the largest decline.
Single-family attached starts totaled 42,000 in the second quarter, down 9% year over year, pulling townhouse market share off its 2025 record high while staying well above historical norms.
NVIDIA has made a minority investment in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a developer of powered, shovel-ready data center sites, targeting the power and land bottleneck constraining AI buildout.
Fourteen percent of U.S. home-purchase agreements fell through in July, the highest share since November 2023, as a record-low buyer count and 51% more sellers than buyers shifted negotiating power.
reAlpha Tech Corp. has closed its roughly $8.5 million acquisition of InstaMortgage, bringing in-house mortgage origination, underwriting and funding to the AI-powered brokerage platform across 38 states and Washington, D.C.
New listings of U.S. homes rose 5.8% from a year earlier to their highest level in more than three months in the four weeks ending Aug. 16, even as pending sales slid to their lowest level since March, according to Redfin.
Hovnanian Enterprises reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $705.7 million, down 12% from a year earlier, and a net loss of $4.5 million, as thinner margins and a cooler market weighed on the national homebuilder.
A storied Bel Air estate known as Casa Encantada sold for $130 million in July, the most expensive U.S. home sale of the month and the second-priciest of the year so far, according to Redfin.
Starwood Property Trust and Realterm co-originated a $672 million loan against a 78-property, 830-acre industrial outdoor storage portfolio owned by Stonemont Financial Group and Cerberus Capital Management — the largest financing yet in the fast-growing IOS niche.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners on Aug. 5 released its first nationwide analysis of homeowners insurance market trends, and the numbers confirm what agents and buyers in wildfire- and storm-prone states have been reporting for years: coverage is getting more expensive and harder to keep, at a pace that is now reshaping the cost … Read more
RE/MAX Holdings CEO Erik Carlson plans to step down from the top job once The Real Brokerage’s acquisition of RE/MAX closes, with Real Chief Operating Officer Jenna Rozenblat set to become president of the combined Real REMAX Group, the companies indicated this week as the all-stock merger heads toward completion. The leadership plan comes days … Read more
Newly released minutes of the Fed’s July meeting show a committee divided over raising rates, with officials noting home-purchase mortgage activity ‘remained depressed.’
Cash buyers made up just 3.5% of new-home purchases in the second quarter, the smallest share since the 2007 housing bust, as FHA-backed sales hit a five-year high, NAHB finds.
SoftBank is investing $200 million in Gravis Robotics, valuing the excavator-autonomy startup at $1 billion in the largest Series A on record for construction robotics.
California home sales fell 6% in July as the statewide median price dropped below $900,000 for the first time in four months, with Southern California and San Francisco Bay Area prices moving in opposite directions, C.A.R. reports.
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