Month: February 2016

After a long recovery from the financial crisis, it would seem that first time home buyers, who account for about 32% of people looking for a new house, are finally ready to join the real estate market. According to Fox Business, new residential sales increased 10% from November to December of 2015. Existing home sales in January reached their highest annual rates in six months. Data from LendingTree showed that March, April, and May are the most popular months for requesting mortgages, meaning home sales are expected to increase even more in the months to come. The national average for mortgages from last year balanced out to around $220,499. A survey conducted by TD Bank found that nearly 20% of first time buyers would like to purchase during this coming spring. Two-thirds of...

Even though the housing market has seen great improvement since the financial crisis, some new home builders in the U.S. are conflicted after a recent drop in home starts, according to Equipment World. For the second consecutive month, January saw a decrease in home construction rates of about 3.8% to a seasonally adjusted rate of 1.143 million annually. That's only 1.8% above the January rates of 2015 as shown by data from the Commerce Department. Single-family starts fell 3.9% to a rate of 731,000, which was still up 3.5% from the previous year. Apartment starts, on the other hand, were down 3.8% from a year ago, falling 2.5% in January to 354,000. A reliable measure of the trends in the home building industry are building permits, which also fell in January. Permits fell ...

You would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't take some sort of regular medication nowadays, and that number continues to grow. While this has created much demand for employees in the pharmaceutical field, the Pharmacy Times reports that the influx of students attending pharmacy schools hoping for job security may actually over-saturate the industry. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the projected drop in employment from 2014 to 2024 could be up to 3%. Vacancy rates for pharmacist positions peaked in the early 2000s at about 8%. Four years later, that figure dropped to 4%. By 2013, vacancy rates in hospitals and health facilities hit an all-time low of 2.1%. Even with the steady drop in job vacancies, enrollment at pharmacy schools continued to rise. Just fr...

While many children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often see a decrease in symptoms as they reach their teens, WebMD reports that a recent study has shown that overly critical parenting could inhibit this improvement. During the three-year study, researchers followed 388 children diagnosed with ADHD and their families. The levels of criticism and over protectiveness from the parents were assessed twice over that time. In order to measure the extent of criticism and over-protectiveness, researchers interviewed the parents regarding their relationships with their children. Criticism was measured according to how many harsh or negative statements were made by the parents about their child, rather than the child's behavior. Over-protectiveness was deter...

The world is slowly moving to a time when machines build everything, but that time is not here yet. And one Illinois store owner is attracting more customers than ever by offering hand-crafted, made to order Amish furniture. According to the Daily Herald, Gary O'Reilly, owner of O'Reilly's Furniture in Libertyville, IL, was looking for a creative way to reinvent his business about five years ago. To achieve this, he began buying his furniture from Amish craftsmen in Ohio and Indiana. By doing so, O'Reilly was able to achieve two important things: supporting American-made goods while delivering more customization options to his customers. Since making the switch to Amish craftsmen, O'Reilly's Furniture has become wildly successful. The store's customers can now customize ever...

More black Millennials are starting to consider opening up a small business, and there is currently a big shift in the way that this demographic is viewing alternative financing, according to a survey from financial lender Merchant Cash USA. Media Post reported that Millennials have a strong interest in pursuing careers as entrepreneurs, but black Millennials in particular are beginning to dominate the world of startups. Data from the Pew Research Center suggests that there are just over 75 million Millennials in the U.S. today. While 40% of this group identifies as something other than white, 13% identify as black. This means that there are around nine million Millennials in the U.S. who identify as black, and millions more who identify as another mixed race. Even with immense ta...

Online dating sites have been infamous for using shady tactics to attract new members, but the downfall of Ashley Madison revealed one particularly troubling trend: robots posing as attractive, desperate women. According to Rolling Stone, a vast majority of activity from female users on dating sites is computer-generated. In fact, a whopping 59% of all internet traffic, from dating sites to online poker, is generated by bots. This deception was exposed last July when a team of hackers leaked internal memos from dating site Ashley Madison. The hack revealed the company's widespread use of artificial intelligence programs, often known as bots, posing as real women. The hack sent shock waves through the world of online dating, and industry experts say that Ashley Madison was not the only...