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 
Ventas is boosting its 2026 senior housing investment target to $4.5 billion, up 50% from its prior $3 billion goal, after closing $2.2 billion in deals during the second quarter.
EMCOR Group’s Q2 2026 revenue hit a record $5.15 billion and backlog jumped 44% to $17.14 billion, as the electrical and mechanical contractor raised full-year guidance on strength in data center and AI-infrastructure construction.
Manhattan residential sales volume exceeded $8.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 19.4% year over year, according to figures attributed to Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel in market reporting on the quarterly Douglas Elliman market reports. The gain was led by higher-end transactions, and it indicates that Manhattan’s closed-sales market held up through … Read more
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.66% this week, its highest level in a year, as Freddie Mac’s weekly survey showed borrowing costs extending a multi-week climb.
Redwood Trust finalized a joint venture giving its Aspire mortgage banking platform up to $8 billion in purchasing power, as the company’s overall mortgage production topped $8 billion for a second straight quarter.
BXP closed a $1.2 billion construction loan for its 46-story, 930,000-square-foot office tower at 343 Madison Avenue near Grand Central Terminal, already about half pre-leased ahead of a 2029 delivery.
Mid-America Apartment Communities lowered its full-year revenue guidance after second-quarter same-store results slipped, as new supply continues to pressure rents across the Sunbelt REIT’s Southeast and Southwest markets.
Equinix posted 16% revenue growth and record interconnection additions in the second quarter, prompting the data center giant to raise both its full-year 2026 guidance and its long-term outlook through 2029.
Turner Construction’s benchmark building cost index climbed 5.15% year over year in the second quarter, as data center, semiconductor and advanced manufacturing projects continue to drive nationwide construction demand.
The Energy Department named Utah, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Idaho and Louisiana as finalists to host nuclear ‘innovation campuses’ that could draw $50 billion in investment and, potentially, adjacent data center development.
Canada-based users searching for U.S. homes on Redfin fell 15.3% year over year in June, extending a two-year decline of roughly 37%, with San Antonio and Austin posting the steepest metro-level drops.
PulteGroup CEO Ryan Marshall called the housing market ‘pretty good’ on CNBC, even as the homebuilder’s Q2 revenue fell 11% and closings dropped 8%, offset by a 6% rise in new orders.
The median single-family lot value fell to $59,000 in 2025 from $60,000 in 2024, NAHB’s analysis of Census data shows, ending six straight years of record highs even as some regions kept climbing.
The Census Bureau’s Q2 2026 Housing Vacancy Survey shows the national homeownership rate flat at 65.0%, while homeownership among adults under 35 fell to 35.2%.
Sun Communities reported second-quarter Core FFO of $1.84 per share, up 4.5% year over year, and agreed to sell its UK Park Holidays operations for roughly $1.04 billion as the manufactured-housing and RV community REIT narrows its focus to North America.
The National Fair Housing Alliance and Massachusetts Fair Housing Center sued HUD and Secretary Scott Turner in federal court, alleging a restructured funding program would cut off enforcement grants to more than 100 nonprofit fair housing organizations nationwide.
Redfin reports vacation-home mortgages rose 4.1% in 2025, the first increase since the pandemic peak, with 85.2% of loans going to high earners and West Palm Beach, Fla., leading the nation.
U.S. nonresidential construction starts jumped to a one-month record of $100.3 billion in June, powered by a surge in office and data center projects, according to ConstructConnect.
New York City halted construction at GFP Real Estate’s 222 Broadway office-to-residential conversion for unreported structural cracks, the second such stop-work order in a month.
Strada Investment Group paid $103 million, about $814 per square foot, for a 126,537-square-foot office building in San Francisco’s Design District.
San Francisco’s apartment vacancy rate has dropped to roughly 2.9%, its lowest level in about 25 years, according to CBRE data, as AI-driven tech hiring collides with one of the tightest new-construction pipelines in the country.
Bayview Asset Management and Springmont Capital, the Morgan family’s investment office, are acquiring a majority stake in commercial mortgage bank BWE, with CEO DJ Effler staying on and the deal expected to close this fall.
A Development of Regional Impact filing for a data center project surfaced this week in Troup County, Georgia, home to Google’s $8 billion Project Pegasus campus in LaGrange, though the applicant has not been publicly named.
National home prices rose 0.9 percent year over year in June 2026, the fastest annual pace since August 2025, according to First American Data & Analytics’ latest Home Price Index report.
Seniors housing and care M&A activity totaled nearly $3.9 billion in the second quarter of 2026, with assisted living properties accounting for the largest share of deals, according to LevinPro LTC data.
Hut 8 Corp. says it has fully leased its 1-gigawatt Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, after a second $9.8 billion lease brought total contracted value to $19.6 billion.
Colliers’ Q2 2026 Phoenix industrial market report shows vacancy falling to 8.7% as net absorption outpaces new supply, though the Southeast Valley submarket remains the metro’s weak spot.
OpenAI said it will invest $20 billion in a 3.2-gigawatt data center campus in Effingham County, Georgia, its first self-designed, self-built data center project.
Only 3,400 multifamily units are expected to be added to the Las Vegas Valley’s apartment stock in 2026, the lowest annual total since 2021, as tighter lending cools a pandemic-era building boom.
Manhattan’s median rent hit a record $5,295 in June 2026, up 8% year-over-year, according to The Corcoran Group’s June market report, as listings fell to a three-year low.
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