Beazer Homes USA Inc. (NYSE: BZH) was weak earlier because of its proposed secondary offering that will add to dilution of shareholders. This morning the company’s secondary offering of 19,500,000 shares of its common stock at $4.60 per share. It also priced its $50 million in mandatory convertible subordinated notes. Beazer shares closed at $4.77 yesterday and had been up at $5.40 before the company disclosed the offering. But then came Lennar Corp. (NYSE: LEN) showing a surprise positive earnings report this morning, and that has changed everything. This is having a broad implication in the SPDR S&P Homebuilders (NYSE: XHB) ETF, but hardly impacting the thinner-volume iShares Dow Jones US Home Construction (NYSE: ITB) ETF.
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It is a paradox and one that is bad for both the residential and housing real estate markets. Reis, an industry analyst group, says that the vacancy rate in the apartment sector rose 8%, the most in fifty years. Looking at the data, The Wall Street Journal
The residential real estate crisis is over. Home prices are stable. The number of people who are in the market for a home is up. Tax credits and home prices, which are still historically low, are the cause for a rise in home shopping all over the country. All of that is true until it is not. The most recent data on mortgage defaults and pending home sales indicates that the housing market may be in for another sharp fall.
Pending home sales fell in November as the National Association of Realtors index for that part of the market fell to 96 in November from 114.3 in October. The sharp drop brought with it the fear that the housing recovery is only a mirage and that unemployment and an increase in mortgage costs will push the home market back into hell.
The Federal Reserve was not to blame for any of the financial events that caused the collapse of the credit markets late in 2008. It is the same credit collapse that caused Congress to create the TARP so that the Treasury could bail out the faltering American banking system.
2009 is over, for better or worse. Now it is time to look ahead. We wanted to look for the best top stock picks for 2010 from our partners and from key financial websites. We compiled all of these 2010 stock picks into grouped lists with links directly to each, but there was one standout issue here: Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) were hardly picked for 2010. Some of the more common and widely held names that came up as common 2010 stock picks were Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA), Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ: MRVL), Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU), DryShips, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRYS), Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan (NYSE: POT), Level 3 Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: LVLT), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX), Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), and KB Home (NYSE: KBH). There are literally dozens of other stock picks in 2010’s top stock picks.
Moody’s reports that credit card charge-offs by financial firms hit 10.56% in November. This represents sums that lenders feel they will not be able to collect .The credit rating agency expects that figure to grow to perhaps as much as 13% by the middle of 2010. That would make sense given the direction of unemployment and the falling wages of many people who do have work. Moody’s also noted that yields earned on credit cards rose to 21.09%, which may not constitute usury on a legal basis but would by any common application of the term.

There was an interesting filing out during the Christmas holiday showing that Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) weren’t in the holiday spirit for much of 2008. There were 21,000 fewer employees at Berkshire Hathaway entities in 2009 compared to 2008’s 246,000 employees.
It is not clear whether there is a housing recovery underway in the US. Home sales have, in some cases, picked up. Most of the activity has been due to low mortgage ratesm which have been below 5%, and new homeowner credits created by the government of as much as $8,000.
The Treasury Department announced that it would give 
IHS Global Insight has released a report that say that housing price in the US rose by .2% in the third quarter compared to the second. The research firm looks at 300 metropolitan markets. Prices rose in 169 of these markets.
There are 1.7 million homes on the market which have gone through the foreclosure process. The number is at the highest level in history. The number, up from 1.1 million a year earlier, is likely to keep rising through the middle of next year or later, said Mark Fleming, chief economist of First American CoreLogic, the real estate research firm
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that many people are defaulting on their home mortgages not because they have to but because it makes sense. Some homeowners can afford the monthly payment, but they know that their houses will never give them a financial return.
People do not have an interest in buying homes in foreclosure at anywhere near the level that they did earlier this year. Trulia.com and RealtyTrac
It may be another sign of a bottoming in the housing market, both in terms of foreclosures and prices. RealtyTrac
Zillow, the real estate home price research company, says that the value of residential real estate ended its sickening drop in 2009. The firm’s chief economist writes, “Total home values in the United States fell $489 billion in the first 11 months of 2009. A large drop, to be sure, but it marks a significant improvement from 2008, when homes lost a total of $3.6 trillion in values.” Zillow says that residential real estate values actually rose in 48 of the 154 markets that it tracks.
