March 9th, 2010
How about this for a new and ingenious real estate money machine? Every time a house sells during the next 99 years, 1 percent of the price goes back to the original developer or is shared among investor partners. Ka-ching!
The levy won’t be subject to haggling between future buyers and sellers, either. That’s because it’s a covenanted mandate — a novel type of lien on the underlying real estate — called a private transfer fee. It’s not a government transfer tax. Nor is it a homeowner association or environmental protection covenant. It’s purely a private requirement that runs with the land. If a seller refuses to pay it to a third-party trustee at closing, the sale won’t proceed.
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February 25th, 2010
Home prices continued to climb for the seventh consecutive month in December, according to a report released Tuesday that provided yet another hopeful sign that the battered housing market may be slowly recovering.
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February 25th, 2010
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — Stabilization in U.S. home prices that may lay the foundation for a sustained recovery in the housing market is tied to government incentives to bolster the industry that precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s, said economist Robert Shiller.
“The rebound in the housing market since April seems to be related to these efforts” that include a homebuyer tax credit and Federal Reserve purchases of mortgage-backed securities designed to hold down borrowing costs, Shiller, co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index, said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
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February 25th, 2010
Lending by the banking industry fell by $587 billion, or 7.5 percent, in 2009, the largest annual decline since the 1940s, as the number of troubled financial institutions rose sharply, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported Tuesday.
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February 20th, 2010
The Mortgage Bankers Association released the National Delinquency Survey for Q4 2009 today. Total mortgage delinquency rates, seasonally adjusted, were down 17 basis points during the fourth quarter, but up year-over-year by 159 basis points.
9.47 percent of all mortgages on one- to four-family homes are now in some state of delinquency.
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February 10th, 2010
Home builders are ramping up speculative construction to attract last-minute home buyers who want to tap a soon-to-expire tax credit.
The strategy is risky. If the buyers don’t materialize, builders could be saddled with unsold homes that will require heavy discounting to sell, hurting profits and slowing the housing recovery. New homes may also continue to lose market share to lower-priced foreclosed houses. Indeed, some economists expect an avalanche of foreclosures in the months ahead as lenders release homes they have been keeping off the market.
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February 10th, 2010
WASHINGTON — Ben S. Bernanke, having survived a surprising challenge to his second term as Federal Reserve chairman, now faces the delicate task of beginning to pull the central bank out of its extraordinary effort to prop up the economy.
The main question is when and how the Fed should start raising short-term interest rates, which have been at a record low for more than a year. Related is the issue of how to manage, and eventually shrink, the record $2.2 trillion balance sheet that the Fed amassed as it pumped vast sums of money into the economy, starting in 2008. On Wednesday morning, the Fed will release a statement outlining Mr. Bernanke’s views on moving away from its exceptionally easy monetary policy.
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February 10th, 2010
NEW YORK, Feb 10 (Reuters) - One of every five U.S. home owners owed more on their mortgage than their home was worth in the fourth quarter, a trend that poses a serious threat to the U.S. housing market’s recovery, real estate website Zillow.com said on Wednesday.
Homeowners with “underwater” mortgages are more prone to defaults and foreclosures. They typically do not qualify for refinancings and are unable to sell their homes because they would need to cough up cash at closing time to pay off their mortgage.
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February 1st, 2010
The battered market for new homes ended 2009 with a whimper, according to government data released Wednesday, fueling concern that recent improvements in the housing sector could be short-lived.
In December, new-home sales fell 7.6 percent from the previous month, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 342,000, according to the Commerce Department. Sales were down 8.6 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.
Analysts had expected sales to rise, and the disappointing figures capped one of the worst years for home builders in decades. Overall, only 374,000 new homes were sold in 2009, down 22.9 percent from 2008. That is less than half the sales volume of a normal market, 900,000 to 1 million homes, and the lowest total on record, dating to 1963, according to National Association of Home Builders. At the peak of the market, in 2005, nearly 1.3 million new homes were sold.
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May 22nd, 2009
The economy will bottom out in the fourth quarter of 2009 and then begin a slow climb, predicts Mark Zandi, senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com
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