Homeowners are gaining wealth in the pandemic. The average homeowner gained about $9,800 in equity year over year in the second quarter, according to a new report from CoreLogic, a real estate data firm.

“Homeowners’ balance sheets continue to be bolstered by home price appreciation, which in turn mitigated foreclosure pressures,” says Frank Martell, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “Although the exact contours of the economic recovery remain uncertain, we expect current equity gains, fueled by strong demand for available homes, will continue to support homeowners in the near term.”

Montana had the highest year-over-year average increase of $28,900 in the second quarter. Idaho, Washington, and Arizona followed with $21,000 and $20,000 in equity, respectively.

© CoreLogic

The housing market remained strong in the second quarter as buyers rushed to take advantage of record-low mortgage rates. Limited housing inventories mixed with strong buyer demand has helped fuel the increases in home prices. That, in turn, has helped to add to borrower equity through June, CoreLogic reports.

As wildfires rage in the West, scorching millions of acres and burning homes and businesses, researchers are investigating what more can be done to better protect homes against blazes.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety first determined what causes homes to ignite during a wildfire. They found that about 90% of homes and buildings were ignited by embers, not the actual wildfires. Embers can disperse for miles from their source and start a new fire when they land. Embers can enter a home through vents or dead landscaping, dry wood, or common homebuilding materials, BUILDER reports.

Some items around a home may pose a higher risk from these flying embers, particularly bark mulch, researchers note. “Wood mulch is a pretty common landscaping material, and I understand the use of it, but the problem is it’s combustible,” Daniel Gorham, research engineer at IBHS, told BUILDER. “It has lots of little crevices for those fire embers to land in, sit there, and smolder.”

A better ground cover would be gravel, which was shown to prevent embers from igniting a flame during an IBHS experiment.

Fire-resistant building materials can help provide better protection against wildfires, too, IBHS researchers found. They suggested creating zones of protection, such as the five-foot space around the perimeter of the home’s exterior walls, making sure it is clear of combustible materials, including dead leaves, twigs, bushes, or plants. Materials like gravel, brick, and concrete should be used instead.

IBHS researchers also urged builders to consider their product choices to better protect against wildfires, such as with the use of Class A fire rating for roofing, siding, window, and door products. They also recommended the use of multipane windows with tempered glass, providing a six-inch ground-to-siding clearance, and using 1/8-inch mesh to cover vents. Also, fiber cement board siding is shown to provide greater protection than wood shingles, the IBHS study shows.

The hot housing market is prompting an increase in waived home inspections. But while in the past it has been an option for buyer concessions, it’s now not always being done to make an offer more enticing in a bidding war.

Home inspectors in some areas of the country are in such high demand that they are reportedly booked weeks in advance. Buyers may have a contract in place that gives them only seven days to get an inspection completed. The tight deadlines are prompting some buyers to waive the inspection—a potentially costly mistake, real estate professionals warn.

The issue of overbooked inspectors is a growing problem, realtor.com® notes in a recent article. From March through May, many states were not allowing home inspections to occur due to stay-at-home restrictions from the COVID-19 outbreak. While home inspections have mostly resumed since then, pent-up demand and hot housing markets have resulted in a backlog that’s slowing down real estate deals in some parts of the country, realtor.com® reports.

Some home buyers in very active housing markets are also being tempted to waive the inspection in multiple offer situations to try to make their offer more appealing to a seller. In June, nearly 20% of successful offers submitted by Redfin real estate agents in large U.S. markets waived the inspection contingency, according to a report from the brokerage.

But a home inspection “is a few hundred dollars for your peace of mind,” Jean Rosalia, a residential and commercial real estate professional based in Virginia Beach, Va., told realtor.com®. “As opposed to maybe tens of thousands of dollars down the road for something that you could not detect on your own.”

Homeowners who have failed to take advantage of pandemic-related mortgage assistance may be at risk of losing their properties. A little more than a million owners nationwide are at least 30 days past due on their monthly payments and haven’t entered a forbearance program or engaged their lender about some other financial solution, according to an analysis from Black Knight, a mortgage data firm.

About 680,000 of those homeowners have federally guaranteed mortgages and are eligible for a forbearance program to put their monthly payments on hold for up to a year without facing a penalty. (They would have to pay back the funds at a later date.) Many lenders also are offering such help to borrowers who don’t have a federally guaranteed mortgage. But borrowers must initiate outreach for the help, for which they aren’t required to prove hardship under federal rules.

Homeowners may not be reaching out to lenders because they’re confused, surveys show. More than half of borrowers surveyed by the National Housing Resource Center in July say they were not aware of the forbearance program or didn’t know how it works. Of consumers confused about their options, nearly 70% say they fear being required to make a large lump-sum payment at the end of their forbearance period—which isn’t true. “Some borrowers are falling through the cracks that we’re not picking up,” Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s just a really sad series of events.”

Further, housing groups warn that the number of homeowners with past-due mortgage payments could swell even more as people who are currently in forbearance reach the end of their program terms in October. Those homeowners will need to request an extension from their lender if they need more time. “Borrowers who are eligible to be in forbearance will preserve their options to avoid foreclosure versus those who became delinquent and have accumulated penalties and interest in a march toward foreclosure,” Faith Schwartz, president of advisory firm Housing Finance Strategies, told the Journal.

Empty nest no more? The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted millions of young adults to move back in with their parents since the spring. The majority of 18-to-29-year-olds now live with their parents, surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression, the Pew Research Center reports.

In July, 52% of 18-to-29-year-olds lived with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February, according to the analysis. That places the number of young adults living with their parents at 26.6 million.

The number of young adults moving back home is evident across genders, racial and ethnic groups, and both metro and rural areas, researchers found. However, increases were most pronounced among the youngest adults (18 to 24 years old) and for young white adults.

Prior to 2020, the highest number of young adults living at home was recorded in 1940, at the end of the Great Depression, when 48% of young adults lived with their parents. There is no data prior to that reflecting the worst of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

“Young adults have been particularly hard-hit by this year’s pandemic and economic downturn, and have been more likely to move than other age groups,” the Pew Research Center notes, citing other surveys. Nine percent of young adults say they relocated temporarily or permanently due to the coronavirus outbreak. About 23% said they moved back home due to college campuses being closed, and 18% said they moved back due to job loss or other financial reasons.

The number of young adults moving back home was a trend even prior to the pandemic, which has been having an influence on the housing market. Because of it, the growth in new households has trailed population growth.

Between February and July, the number of households headed by an individual between 18 and 29 years old fell by 1.9 million or 12%—dropping from 15.8 million to 13.9 million.

A separate survey conducted by MagnifyMoney over this summer found that the metros where young adults are most likely to live with their parents are Riverside, Calif.; Miami; Los Angeles; San Antonio, Texas; New York; and Memphis, Tenn.