(Photo credit: Thinkstock)If you’re looking to buy a home right now, you'd better find some cash and you'd better find it fast.

Right now homebuyers across the country, already in frenzied bidding wars for homes, are increasingly losing out to the almighty all-cash buyer.

“I had one couple, that was very well-qualified but would require a mortgage, put offers on four properties that were all sold to somebody else who paid cash,” says Bruce Taylor, president of ERA Key Realty Services in Boston. “It’s a very tight market. Until prices escalate further, we won’t have much relief.”

Taylor’s story isn’t uncommon. Across the country, the number of homes bought with cash has rapidly increased over the past few years. More than 30 percent of homes in California are bought with cash, twice the 15 percent the state has been averaging since the early '90s, according to real estate data firm DataQuick. In Las Vegas, more than half are bought with cash, while hundreds of miles away in Minneapolis, 25 percent of homes are

Dan Brown's New Hampshire home. (All images from NBC video)This painting hides a door ...... that leads to this office.A bookcase conceals another passage beyond.You know how sometimes you form a mental image of something, based on no real knowledge, and it turns out that you were absolutely right?

This.

NBC's "Today" show recently interviewed "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown at his New Hampshire home about Brown's new novel, "Inferno."

Host Matt Lauer introduces the home tour this way: "When Brown returns home, it's to a place a lot like his novels.

"We got a rare glimpse into the colorful private world of Dan Brown."

"Colorful" hardly scrapes the surface. With "secret doors and passageways at every turn," it's no wonder that, as Brown admits, "our architect thought we were crazy."

The office in which he writes is hidden behind a painting. Several secret passages can be found in just the library (or the Fortress of Gratitude, as Brown calls it; it holds editions of his books in more than 50 languages) has several secret passages.

See for yourself in the video below, then let us know in the comments: What kind of house would you build for

JLo bought this Hamptons home, listed at $9,995,000. Click a photo to go to a slideshow.Jennifer LopezYahoo! Homes can confirm the latest JLo rumor floating around: Celebrity force of nature Jennifer Lopez has indeed just purchased this lovely home in the Hamptons, just off Mecox Bay in Water Mill, N.Y.

Listed at $9,995,000 by Susan Breitenbach of the Corcoran Group, the home is by no means the most expensive in Water Mill; in fact, a source told the New York Post (which first broke the story) that the price was "a steal." She reportedly visited the home several times with her boyfriend, Casper Smart, and her 5-year-old twins, Emme and Max. (Maybe she and her boyfriend were out celebrating their new house the other day when Smart was caught "out-diva-ing" JLo in New York?)

Along with the requisite pool and pool house, the 3-acre estate has a theater, a sauna and steam room, and "room for guest house and tennis court, adding approximately $4 to $5 million in extra value," according to the listing. The property has eight bedrooms and eight bathrooms in 8,500 square feet.

Click here or on

A chandelier made of Bijan perfume bottles. Click a photo to see many more images.Hundreds of flowerpots lined the property, their contents changing with the seasons. Click a photo to see many more images.The Beverly Hills home that was an incubator for the so-called "most expensive store in the world" recently sold for $9.8 million, about $2 million under its asking price, according to the Los Angeles Times. Click here or on a photo to see a slideshow of the home.

Bijan Pakzad -- or simply Bijan, as he preferred to be called -- owned the eponymous by-appointment-only Rodeo Drive boutique where President Obama, both Bushes and Clinton bought suits. His devil-may-care luxury aesthetic was so distinctively over the top that when he died in 2011, the New York Times' T Magazine declared: "The '80s are officially over."

He poured a great deal of care into his home, which the Bijan boutique website cites as the wellspring of much of his "best creative expression and inspiration." Neighbors and passersby recognized the mansion at 100 Copley Place by the hundreds of flowerpots lining the property; the pots' contents changed with the seasons. The grounds also contained orange trees,

The controversial treehouse on Anna Maria Island in Florida. Click a photo to go to a slideshow. (Photos via the owners' website, CoolTreeHouse.com)Click a photo to go to a slideshow. (Via CoolTreeHouse.com)"The story below could happen to you or anybody."

That's how Lynn Tran starts the tale of her oceanfront treehouse, a "childhood dream" that has soured into a "headache, heartache." She and her husband, Richard Hazen, have been told that if they don't dismantle the treehouse, they're going to have to pay fines of $500 a day.

She and Hazen built the treehouse -- "really just a dressed-up, glorified two-story deck," reports Fox 13 of Tampa Bay -- on their property on Anna Maria Island in Florida, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. They spent about $20,000 on it and, they say, had Holmes Beach's permission.

But they didn't get it in writing.

According to the account on the couple's website, CoolTreeHouse.com, Hazen did go to the city building department in 2011 seeking a permit, but the building official there -- after consulting colleagues in front of Hazen -- told him a permit wasn't necessary. So they went ahead and built.

That official is no longer with the department, and the new

Gallup polled America's 50 biggest metro areas, asking residents whether they feel safe walking at night. Click the photo to go to a slideshow of the securest-feeling areas. (Photo credit: Thinkstock)

Do you feel safe walking alone at night?

That's what Gallup recently asked people who live in America's 50 biggest metro areas.

Perhaps surprisingly, residents of the biggest metro areas feel scarcely less secure than the national average: 71 percent of big-city residents and their suburban neighbors, vs. 72 percent for the nation as a whole.

The variation was wide -- a 25-percentage-point difference -- between the least and most secure-feeling city dwellers.

Certainly there's a strong correlation between the FBI violent crime rate and how residents actually feel, Gallup says. In the Memphis area, the smallest proportion of residents feel safe walking alone at night out of the 50 big metro areas surveyed -- and indeed, Memphis is one of the most dangerous cities in America, according to a report published on Yahoo! Homes last year.

Yet residents of some of the most notoriously dangerous metro areas, like Detroit and St. Louis, aren't especially nervous about walking alone at night. In fact,

Click on a photo to go to a slideshow. (Photo credit: Target)"Dollhouse" blueprints. Click the photo to go to a slideshow. (Photo credit: Target)This week, Target built a life-size Cape Cod-style dollhouse smack in the middle of Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal -- furnished not with toy furniture but with more than 3,000 items showcasing its real-life Threshold collection. About 40,000 people stopped by, free to wander around inside and even shop for items in the house from their mobile devices.

[Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow.]

I love this whimsical idea of playing with scale, essentially turning visitors into props themselves: dolls. At least that's how they look to me in the pictures, wandering through the 1,500-square-foot, seven-room "house." It reminds me a little of those tilt-shift photos that make the normal-size world look miniature.

People who are more practical-minded might not quite see the appeal. Isn't a life-size dollhouse just, you know, a house?

What sets this apart, though, are some optical illusions and glaring omissions. The most prominent omission, of course, is the fourth wall. The faux

$1,200 a month in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Click the photo to go to a slideshow.West Village in Manhattan, $1,900. Click the photo to go to a slideshow.A week ago, The Worst Room launched on Tumblr with these unassuming words: "This is a blog created for me to share the craigslist postings I sift through on a daily basis trying to find decent, affordable housing in New York City."

Now, it's pretty well known by now that New York is an expensive place to live -- in fact, the most expensive U.S. city. In Manhattan, the cost of living is double the national average.

But Ryan Nethery's New York housing blog is going viral (even across the pond) because it puts visuals to those statistics, showing just what kind of living space you can expect on a modest budget. For those who live outside the city, it's pretty shocking.

[Click here to see a slideshow of some of his most appalling discoveries.]

Nethery's circumstances are compelling in their own right. A 25-year-old freelance cinematographer from Kentucky (see his work on Vimeo), he has lived in the city for five years -- and he's currently homeless. He keeps his stuff in a car his