24/7 Wall Street is constantly on the lookout for dividend gains for investors. While this is not due to any breaking news, there was a secondary offering this morning that we saw and it…
Almost all indicators in the housing market are starting to point downward. The National Association of Realtors reports that The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator, declined 2.8 percent to 88.9 based on…
The elimination of the federal home buyer tax credit and the foreclosure documentation issue put a lid on fourth quarter 2010 foreclosure sales, but for the full year, foreclosure sales accounted for 26% of…
Jon OggThe Home Depot, Inc. (NYSE: HD) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) both reported earnings this morning. Both also gave two very different reads on the economy and the implications may be in…
“Data through December 2010, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller. Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the U.S.National Home Price Index declined by 3.9% during…
Jon OggThe ongoing fight for how to run The St. Joe Company (NYSE: JOE) is heating up and taking a strange turn. Bruce Berkowitz, whose Fairholme Capital is a near-30% owner of St. Joe,…
Housing prices may not return to pre-credit crisis levels for another five years, so experts say. They may never recover to those levels at all in hard-hit areas such as Las Vegas and South…
The average value of a home declined by 25% to 30% from the period from the third quarter of 2005 to the third quarter of last year. The end of 2005 and beginning of…
The Commerce Department reports that new home sales reached a 47-year low in 2010 at 321,000. According to the AP, the figure was “a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in…
Anyone who questioned whether the housing depression continues only need look at the new S&P Case Shiller price data. The odds that home values will return to 2006 levels within the next decade get…
The world of mortgage insurers is not looking too hot after MGIC Investment Corp. (NYSE: MTG) gave its earnings report this morning. The largest insurer for conventional mortgages reported a loss of -$0.93 EPS…
The single biggest problem in the U.S. real estate market is simple: There are very few homebuyers. That seems obvious, but the “buyers’ strike” has caused house prices to drop, along with an epidemic…
A majority of Americans expect the drop in home prices which began in 2007 and has occurred each year since then to continue in 2011. This is not surprising. S&P recently wrote that the…
Freddie Mac is out with its projections for 2011, titled “A Slow Start to the New Year, But Better News Ahead.” Despite recent employment data showing a slow 2011 start, the report calls for…
The real estate web site Zillow ginned up a real doozy of a statistic about the state of the real estate market today arguing that the “Zillow Home Value Index has now fallen 26%…