If Uncle Sam Takes Mortgages and Becomes Landlord
What if the government adopted a new strategy on how to keep homes occupied by delinquent and troubled owners by letting them stay in the house as a renter? This may sound crazy or…
Housing
All Housing Articles
Newest first · Page 202The Next Great Stimulus: Mortgage Help For The Unemployed
The stimulus package has failed to halt the rise of unemployment and has done little to improve investment spending by businesses. Real estate prices are still dropping and the default rates on credit cards…
Troubled Homeowners Slashing Prices
Analysts who thinks that the housing market may rebound this summer better think again. Home sales have been slow and now there is evidence that homeowners are having so little success moving their residences that…
The Great American Credit Card Debt Foregiveness Program
The Administration has gone to great lengths to put together a package of programs to allow worthy homeowners who are having trouble meeting their mortgages to modify home loans to cut monthly payments. This allows…
ISM, Construction, and Home Sales… Pulling In Opposition
Any time you have three economic reports hitting at once, you have a risk for confusion or for diverging data. That is the case today as the Institute for Supply Management gave the June…
Mini Earnings Season on Deck Thursday (PALM, ACN, MU, LEN, CAG, FINL, JTX, TIBX)
Thursday is shaping up to be a miniature one-day version earnings season this week. This is likely the last of the major earnings reports we’ll see for another three or four weeks until the…
Cheering Poor New Home Sales (XHB)
The data on new home sales for the month of May is going to be a disappointment even for the green shoots crowd, at least on the surface. Sales of new homes in May…
Bogus Home Appraisals May Derail Real Estate Recovery
A huge number of home value appraisals may be wrong, with most of them being much too high. That is causing banks to back away from mortgages. A house that has been appraised for…
Existing Homes Sales Bump, Very Misleading
While existing home sales are not a true barometer of new home sales, there was at least a bump up in existing home sales for May. This rise of 2.4% to 4.77 million annualized…
Lowering Mortgage Market Expectations
There is a study from the Mortgage Bankers Association showing that the outlook for the mortgage market in 2009 is going to be weaker than it previously expected. Not by a bit, either. The…
Can Boomer’s Children Save Housing?
It is a nifty, logical, and overly optimistic theory. Housing demand will rise as the children of the baby boomers hit their late twenties and thirties and need homes where they can raise their offspring. According to…
Misleading Gains in Housing Data
Housing Starts came in much better than expected, on the surface. We saw a reading of 532,000 on housing starts on an annual basis. This is a gain of 17.2% and we were only…
Questionable Confidence Among Builders (XHB, ITB)
The confidence among home builders looked like it was creeping higher, but the most recent data from the National Association of Home Builders showed a decrease in June. This drop put the index down…
A Sign Of Bottom In Mortgage Delinquencies?
Large credit rating agency Equifax believes that the rate at which mortgage delinquencies have been rising has moderated and may have found a bottom. According to Reuters, “While the year-over-year increase is dramatic, the…
Foreclosures Keep Up Economic Pressure
The optimist’s view of the May foreclosure data from RealtyTrac is that the rate dropped 6% from April. The realist’s view is likely to focus on the 18% increase from May 2008. Neither view…