Today, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released its 2010 report on the state of the American housing market. The verdict? Not good, if stable. The bottom line:
The nation has not faced housing problems of this magnitude since the Great Depression. Heavy job losses and lingering high unemployment
That is the worst-case scenario, according to Egan-Jones Ratings Co., quoted in a Bloomberg article making the rounds. The agency says that if home prices decline 20 percent from their current level — they are now off around 25 percent from their summer 2006 peak — losses will ultimately More…
This morning, the Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that sales of new homes spiked in April. They also revised their March sales estimates upward:
Sales of new one-family houses in April 2010 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 504,000, according to estimates
As if we needed more evidence that not all is well in the housing market: Bloomberg reports that the Federal Housing Administration “may be involved in more home-purchase transactions than borrowing financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
“This is a market purely on life support, sustained by the
For the past year, Republicans have insisted that Congress take up legislation to stop the losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government-sponsored enterprises that buy up and repackage mortgages, keeping loan prices stable. Fannie and Freddie have incurred more than $150 billion in losses since the burst More…
Today, April 30, is the last day for the Obama administration’s tax-credit programs for homebuyers. Purchasers need to have signed a binding agreement by the end of the day and have closed on the home by June 30 in order to receive the credits — $8,000 if it is their More…
Citigroup is selling new mortgage-backed securities for the first time in two years.
The company expects the mortgages to be rated AAA. But, BusinessWeek notes, “$67.3 million of the loans were to self-employed borrowers and $66.3 million didn’t require borrowers to document two years of their incomes and assets.”
With Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on the cusp of pushing his financial regulatory reform bill through Congress, the head of the Senate Banking Committee is looking forward to the next legislative fight, over housing and mortgage finance. This morning, Dodd said that the government-sponsored enterprises — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac More…
Housing sales should rise a strong 5 percent in March, housing economists say, with the rush fueled by the end-of-the-month expiry of the first time homebuyer’s tax credit. All in all, 5.3 million Americans will purchase a new home. But The Associated Press story injects a note of caution: More…
Today, New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt has a good column on why it might be a good time to buy a home in some unlikely parts of the United States.
Leonhardt shows that the rent ratio — the price of the home divided by the estimated annual More…
rss