A new analysis finds prospective homebuyers have seen their purchasing power rise in the last year due to higher incomes and lower mortgage rates.

Zillow published a report on Monday that found a median-income U.S. household can now comfortably afford a $331,483 home with a 20% down payment. It found that the typical mortgage payment is 8.4% lower than it was a year ago when excluding taxes, insurance and assuming a 20% downpayment. 

Mortgage rates have fallen from an average of 6.96% in January 2025 to 6.1% last month, while incomes have ticked higher to give a median-income household an extra $30,302 in buying power compared with a year ago due to shifts in mortgage rates and household incomes.

“A more than $30,000 gain in buying power is meaningful for households that have been stretched thin by high rates. It can mean the difference between settling and choosing,” said Kara Ng, senior economist at Zillow.

RENT BECOMING MORE AFFORDABLE FOR MANY AMERICANS AS MARKET STABILIZES

A median-income U.S. household can now comfortably afford a $331,483 home with a 20% down payment, a new Zillow analysis found. (Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

“That doesn’t suddenly make this market affordable for everyone, but it does crack open doors that had firmly shut when rates peaked,” Ng added.

Zillow’s report noted that with the recent changes in household income and mortgage rates, the purchasing power of homebuyers is now at its highest level since March 2022, when mortgage rates were still below 5%.

The most recent low point for affordability was October 2023, when the median household could afford a $272,224 home as mortgage rates averaged 7.62% that month – the highest average for any month since 2000. 

OHIO GOVERNOR SAYS ENDING PROPERTY TAXES COULD PUSH STATE’S SALES TAX TO 20%

The most recent low point for affordability was October 2023, when the median household could afford a $272,224 home. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The latest dip in mortgage rates provided the biggest boost to homebuyers’ purchasing power in the nation’s most expensive housing markets.

Zillow noted that a median-income household in San Jose, Californina, has gained nearly $74,000 in buying power from a year ago – the largest gain among major metropolitan areas.

San Francisco buyers saw a boost of $56,115, and they were followed by peers in Washington, D.C. ($48,881), San Diego ($46,505) and Boston ($46,390). 

The number of homes that are affordable for a median-income household has also increased from a year ago by about 82,300 homes, Zillow found, with about 447,000 homes listed in January.

US HOME PRICES ARE RISING – BUT THESE FAST-GROWING MARKETS REMAIN AFFORDABLE

The latest dip in mortgage rates provided the biggest boost to homebuyers’ purchasing power in the nation’s most expensive housing markets. (Loren Elliott/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The 447,000 affordable home listings represent about 40.3% of total listings, an increase from 34.8% last year. 

Markets where home values have declined over the last year make even more homes available to median-income buyers, boosting purchasing power alongside the lower mortgage rates.

Houston led the country in the growth of affordable home inventory, with nearly 4,000 more homes listed for sale that are within reach for median-income buyers when compared with last year.

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Other metros with significant jumps in affordable home inventory are Phoenix with 3,434 more than last year, Dallas with 3,267, Miami with 2,981 and Atlanta’s gain of 2,279, Zillow found. Each of those markets has seen home values decline from last year.

Volvo Cars is recalling over 40,000 of its flagship electric EX30 SUVs because of a risk of battery packs overheating and catching fire.

The recall involves replacing modules in the high-voltage battery packs in the SUV, which is a crucial model in Volvo’s push to compete with cheaper Chinese brands. The news was first reported by Reuters.

The recall covers a total of 40,323 model year 2024-2026 EX30 Single-Motor Extended Range and Twin-Motor Performance cars that have the high-voltage cells. Volvo is a Sweden-based automaker that is majority-owned by China’s Geely.

VOLVO RECALLS MORE THAN 450,000 VEHICLES OVER BACKUP CAMERA ISSUE

Over 40,000 Volvo Car EX30 all-electric SUVs will be recalled by Volvo due to a battery fire risk. (Francesca Volpi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Volvo said it plans to replace affected units free of charge and is urging owners to continue limiting their charging to 70% until repairs can occur to eliminate the fire risk.

“Our investigations have identified that in very rare cases, the affected vehicles can overheat when charged to a high level. In a worst-case scenario this could lead to a fire starting in the battery,” Volvo told FOX Business in a statement.

The automaker said, in total, 40,323 cars are affected globally; of those, it has “identified 189 in the U.S. that will be inspected and fixed if necessary.”

VOLVO REVERSES GOAL TO MAKE ONLY EVS IN 2030

Volvo said that car owners will get their EX30 electric SUV batteries repaired free of charge. (Claudia Greco/Reuters)

The automaker first told EX30 owners in over a dozen countries – including the U.S., Australia and Brazil – in December to park their vehicles away from buildings and cap charging at 70%, according to regulatory filings and the company.

Volvo may face a high cost for replacing the battery packs, as a Reuters analysis based on what a Chinese battery maker might charge resulted in an estimate of $195 million, excluding logistics and repair costs. Volvo said the calculations were “speculative in nature” and that it’s in discussions with the supplier.

The automaker is pursuing deeper integration with its parent company, Geely, while the batteries were made by a Geely-backed joint venture known as Shandong Geely Sunwoda Power Battery Co. Volvo indicated the supplier has fixed the problem and will supply the new battery cells.

NISSAN RECALLS OVER 640,000 VEHICLES FOR ENGINE AND GEAR ISSUES

Volvo said it’s working with the supplier to address the issue. (Yves Herman/File Photo)

Andy Palmer, an auto industry veteran who oversaw the launch of Nissan Motor’s Leaf EV in 2010, said that Volvo has less room for missteps than its rivals because its safety reputation is a central part of its identity as a company.

“Volvo can’t afford a safety issue because that strikes at the heart of their brand,” Palmer said.

Volvo said it is contacting the owners of affected cars to advise them about the next steps in the recall.

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Reuters contributed to this report.

In an era where artificial intelligence dominates boardroom conversations and quantum computing looms on the horizon, a sobering reality check has arrived. KPMG’s newly released Global Tech Report 2026, drawing insights from 2,500 technology executives across 27 countries, paints a picture of an enterprise landscape caught between transformative ambition and operational paralysis.

Key Points

• Rapid AI Integration : 88% of organizations are already embedding AI agents into their workflows, signaling a significant global shift from pilot programs to operational scaling.
• Adaptive Strategic Planning : Because the fast pace of innovation can make tech plans obsolete before implementation, organizations are moving toward flexible, agile strategies that prioritize speed and enterprise-wide coordination.
• Workforce Evolution : High-performing organizations project that by 2027, tech teams will likely consist of a small permanent human core orchestrating expansive, AI-augmented ecosystems.
• Redefining ROI : Realizing value from tech investments remains a challenge due to varying organizational readiness; executives are encouraged to update KPIs to better capture the indirect and unique business value generated by AI.

The central thesis is unambiguous: organizations stand at the threshold of what KPMG terms the “Intelligence Age,” yet most remain fundamentally unprepared for what this transition demands.

The Maturity Paradox: Plans Without Progress

The report’s most striking revelation concerns what analysts describe as the “maturity paradox.” Despite unprecedented investment in emerging technologies, most organizations find themselves trapped in perpetual experimentation mode. The journey from pilot programs to scaled implementation remains frustratingly elusive for the majority.

• Barriers to Maturity : Despite bold ambitions, many organizations are hindered by the “intensifying challenges” of tech debt, rising cost pressures, and a lack of specialized talent.
• Future Tech Horizons : Beyond current AI, leaders are urged to prepare for the disruptive potential of quantum computing—which demands superior security—as well as the unpredictable implications of AGI and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).
• Data-Driven Insights : The report’s findings are based on a comprehensive survey of 2,500 senior tech executives across 27 countries and eight major industries, reflecting a global consensus on the need for digital maturity.

This is not a failure of vision. Technology executives understand the stakes. What they are grappling with is something far more insidious: the intensifying challenges of technical debt, relentless cost pressures, and acute talent shortages that collectively function as gravitational forces, pulling organizations back toward the status quo even as they strain toward innovation.

The data is particularly revealing. While organizations have bold plans to “uplift maturity in 2026,” the obstacles preventing them from realizing their tech goals suggest that aspiration and achievement exist in parallel universes for many enterprises.

The ROI Reckoning: Beyond the Vanity Metrics

Perhaps no finding demands more critical attention than the report’s examination of return on investment. The technology sector has long suffered from measurement myopia, an obsession with deployment metrics, user adoption rates, and feature releases that obscure the fundamental question: Are organizations actually creating value?

KPMG’s research suggests that ROI on tech investments varies dramatically based on factors including readiness, diligence, organizational agility, and most crucially, organizational courage. The report explicitly challenges executives to move beyond conventional ROI measurements, particularly for AI tools, where traditional metrics often fail to capture the complexity of value generation.

This represents a mature acknowledgment of an uncomfortable truth: the typical pattern of ROI for AI initiatives frequently involves being based on indirect and often misleading benefits rather than demonstrable business outcomes. For an industry that prides itself on data-driven decision-making, this admission of measurement inadequacy is both refreshing and alarming.

The Agentic Revolution: From Pilot to Permanence

The most forward-looking element of KPMG’s analysis centers on what Zack Kass, former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI, describes as a “sharp move from pilots to ROI in the next year.” According to the research, 88 percent of organizations are already embedding AI agents into workflows, products, and value streams.

But here is where the analysis becomes genuinely provocative: Kass predicts that by 2027, high-performing organizations expect approximately half of their tech teams to consist of permanent human staff, with the remainder orchestrated through small, durable human cores managing large AI-augmented ecosystems.

This is not an incremental change. It represents a fundamental reimagining of how technology organizations function. Yet the report stops short of addressing the profound ethical, cultural, and practical implications of this transition. Questions remain about workforce reskilling, career progression in hybrid ecosystems, and who bears the social cost of this transformation.

Strategic Agility in an Age of Constant Obsolescence

The report correctly identifies that with the fast pace of innovation, tech plans are often obsolete before implementation. This observation points to a strategic crisis that transcends technology: how can organizations plan for a future that refuses to remain fixed long enough to be planned for?

KPMG’s prescription of coordinating investment priorities across the enterprise, building clarity around strategic decision-making, creating cultures that leverage the best of technology, and ensuring the foundations of data and resilience are sound, but may prove insufficient. These recommendations assume a stable enough environment for coordination and planning to remain meaningful activities.

What may be required instead is a more radical reimagining: organizations that treat strategy as a continuous adaptive process rather than an annual planning ritual. Technology leadership must become less about selecting the right technologies and more about building organizational systems capable of rapid experimentation, learning, and adaptation.

The Quantum and AGI Horizon

The report’s discussion of emerging technologies beyond current AI capabilities, particularly quantum computing and artificial general intelligence, highlights an essential but often overlooked leadership responsibility: preparing for discontinuities.

As KPMG notes, agentic AI commands attention while quantum provides immense computing power with security implications. Meanwhile, AGI and artificial superintelligence represent possibilities that are simultaneously distant and potentially transformative. The challenge for technology leaders is maintaining focus on near-term execution while building organizational flexibility for technological shifts that remain fundamentally unpredictable.

Conclusion: Leadership Beyond Technology

What emerges from KPMG’s comprehensive research is a portrait of technology leadership that transcends technical competence. Success in the Intelligence Age demands the ability to balance ambition with pragmatism, to measure value with sophistication, to build adaptive strategies in unstable environments, and to prepare organizations for futures that may look radically different from the present.

The executives surveyed for this report understand these challenges intellectually. The question that will define the next several years is whether they can translate that understanding into organizational reality, moving from plans on paper to sustained competitive advantage in practice.

For those waiting for certainty before acting, KPMG’s research offers a clear message: the time for tentative experimentation has passed. The Intelligence Age is not approaching. It has arrived. The only question remaining is whether organizations will lead, follow, or become obsolete.

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The nation’s largest retailer of used cars, CarMax, will pay at least $420,000 to resolve allegations that it repossessed vehicles from U.S. service members without court orders, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday.

In addition to compensating affected service members, the company will pay a $79,380 civil penalty to the U.S., according to the DOJ.

Federal officials accused CarMax of violating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) by seizing vehicles owned by members of the armed forces without first obtaining court approval.

“Federal law prohibits businesses from repossessing service members’ vehicles without a court order,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said. “The Department of Justice is proud to defend the rights of those who serve in our military and will continue to vigorously enforce the laws that protect them.”

TRUMP DEFENDS TARIFFS, SAYS US HAS BEEN ‘THE KING OF BEING SCREWED’ BY TRADE IMBALANCE

 Ford Mustangs and other used vehicles for sale are parked in a lot at a CarMax dealership on April 24, 2025 in San Diego, California.  (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images / Getty Images)

The violations allegedly occurred between March 1, 2018, and at least Oct. 24, 2023, affecting at least 28 service members. Each is entitled to a minimum payment of $15,000, plus lost equity in the vehicle and interest on that amount.

SUPREME COURT DEALS BLOW TO TRUMP’S TRADE AGENDA IN LANDMARK TARIFF CASE

CarMax will pay at least $420,000 and a civil penalty after the DOJ accused the retailer of illegally repossessing vehicles from U.S. servicemembers. (John Moore/Getty Images / Getty Images)

As part of the settlement, CarMax – which did not admit or deny the allegations – agreed to revise its policies and procedures to better protect the rights of U.S. service members. FOX Business has reached out to CarMax for comment.

The SCRA is a federal statute designed to safeguard the legal and financial interests of U.S. service members and their families while they are on active duty.

US TARIFF REVENUE UP 300% UNDER TRUMP AS SUPREME COURT BATTLE LOOMS

It bars auto lenders and leasing companies from repossessing a service member’s vehicle without a court order if the borrower made at least one payment before entering military service.

For reservists, those protections begin when they receive official orders to report for active duty.

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Service members or their dependents who believe their rights were violated are encouraged to contact their nearest Armed Forces Legal Assistance Program office.

A broad selloff sent all three major U.S. stock indexes more than 1% lower by the closing bell, as risk appetite was dampened by a combination of persistent fears over potential disruption due to emergent artificial intelligence technology and Trump’s erratic statements on trade ‌policy, which fueled much ⁠of the market ⁠volatility during the first year of the president’s second term.

Financial stocks were off 3.3%, while software-related firms slid 4.3% amid ongoing AI disruption fears.

“The question about AI is twofold: How much is it going to cost, and who all is going to be disrupted?” said Tom Hainlin, national investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Minneapolis. “You’ve seen the market react to headlines, it’s ‘sell first, assess later.’”

He added: “It’s a perspective of what may happen as opposed to what has happened.”

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On Friday, the top court in the nation issued a 6-3 ruling that Trump overstepped his presidential authority by enacting reciprocal tariffs under an economic emergency law, a ruling that provoked condemnation from the president, who threatened a 15% temporary tariff on all imports, despite having reached trade agreements with many U.S. ⁠trading partners.
Gold ‌prices, benefiting from a flight to safety, surged 2.6%. “The Supreme Court decision wasn’t unexpected,” Hainlin said. “But you put these uncertainties on top of each other, the heightened geopolitical situation in the Middle East, tariff uncertainty, and potential AI displacement and that’s leading investors to a broad ⁠risk reassessment.”

A powerful winter storm buried much of the U.S. under more than 15 inches of snow and paralyzed travel in the Northeast. At airports in the New York City area, 89% to 98% of flights were canceled, according to Flightaware.com. Airlines and travel/leisure-related stocks tumbled 3.8% and 3.7%, respectively. Dow Transports dropped 2.9%.

With only 77 of the companies in the S&P 500 yet to post results, fourth-quarter earnings season has neared the finish line, a smattering of high-profile companies are expected to report this week, most notably vanguard artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia due on Wednesday. Home improvement rivals Home Depot and Lowe’s are also on the docket, which is rounded out by Salesforce and Universal Health Services.

Of the companies that have reported, 73% have beaten expectations, and analysts now expect aggregate year-on-year S&P 500 earnings growth of 13.9%, significantly ‌higher than the 8.9% forecast as of January 1, according to LSEG data. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 821.91 points, or 1.66%, to 48,804.06, the S&P 500 lost 71.76 points, or 1.04%, to 6,837.75 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 258.80 points, or 1.13%, to 22,627.27.

Among the 11 major sectors of the S&P 500, ⁠financials suffered the biggest percentage, while consumer staples led the gainers. The healthcare index advanced 1.2%, boosted by a 4.9% gain in Eli Lilly after rival Novo Nordisk’s obesity drug CagriSema underperformed Eli Lilly’s drug Zepbound in a head-to-head trial. Among other movers, Domino’s Pizza climbed 4.1% after the fast-food chain’s fourth-quarter same-store sales beat Wall Street estimates. PayPal jumped 5.8% after Bloomberg News reported that the payments firm is attracting takeover interest. Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 2.2-to-1 ratio on the NYSE. There were 390 new highs and 204 new lows on the NYSE. On the Nasdaq, 1,432 stocks rose and 3,277 fell as declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 2.29-to-1 ratio. The S&P 500 posted 41 new 52-week highs and 18 new lows while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 67 new highs and 264 new lows. Volume on U.S. exchanges was 18.39 billion shares, compared with the 20.62 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.

The Heart of England Co-Op group, which runs 38 stores in the West Midlands, Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, told the BBC chocolate theft cost it £250,000 last year. It was the group’s most stolen product in 2024 and topped only by alcohol in 2025, it said.