Dishwashers, refrigerators, washers and dryers, and other household appliances are low in stock nationwide, and some consumers are waiting months for their orders to be fulfilled. The backup is yet another problem you can blame on the COVID-19 pandemic.

First, as consumers started hoarding food, there was a rush on freezers. “We sold more freezers in two days than we did all last year,” Steve Sheinkopf of Boston-area Yale Appliance told NPR. “People were storing stuff because we thought this was the end of times. We needed food.”

Factories began scaling back production during the initial stages of the pandemic for employee safety and a belief that rising unemployment would lead to lower consumer demand. But demand for appliances has surged, while shipments of major appliances fell 7% year to date in June, NPR reports.

The surge in demand is due to people sheltering at home and using their appliances more, leading to breakdowns from overuse. Many homeowners also are seeking appliance upgrades. Now that the housing market is recovering quickly, there’s added pressure on appliance demand as consumers move to new homes.

Appliance manufacturers are warning of backlogs on several brands and models through the end of the year—and possibly even into 2021, NPR reports. “I have never experienced a year where there were shortages like we’ve seen this year,” Sandy Tau, owner of Long Island, N.Y.-based AHC Appliances, told NPR. “We have freezers that are on back order since the end of March that have still not come in.”

A new housing report shows 73.9 million Americans reside in a community with a homeowners association or condominium board. That is more Americans than ever, according to the Foundation for Community Association Research.

California now leads the nation with 49,200 associations, followed by Florida, with 48,500; Texas, with 21,000; Illinois, with 18,800; North Carolina, with 14,100; and New York, with 14,000, the report says.

In 2019, there were about 351,000 community associations in the U.S. The Foundation for Community Association Research estimates that the number in 2020 will increase to 354,000.

Most residents say they appreciate the work of their community association in helping to maintain standards in their neighborhood, according to the report. Seventy percent of homeowner and condo association residents rate their overall experience living in a community association as “very good” or “good,” according to the Foundation’s 2020 Homeowner Satisfaction Survey.

The value of homes in a community association is nearly $7.2 trillion. About $96 billion in assessments is collected annually from homeowners to fund essential maintenance in their communities, according to the foundation’s report.

As many local cities face financial challenges, many communities are requiring builders of new developments to create an association to assume many responsibilities that traditionally belonged to local and state governments, such as road maintenance and trash removal. Seventy-seven percent of new housing built for sale now falls in a community association. Homeowners contribute $27.4 billion to association reserve funds for the repair, replacement, and enhancement of common property areas, such as swimming pools and elevators, or resurfacing of streets.

© The Foundation for Community Association Research

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.