As the Foreclosure Era enters its final months, completed foreclosures are increasingly concentrating in a handful of states and one state reports three times as many as the next runner-up.  Regions of the nation have virtually returned to normal as their foreclosure inventories dry up and are not refilled. Five states account for almost half of all completed foreclosures in … Read More »

Too many homeowners are still underwater on their mortgages for home values in half of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas to reach their pre-recession peak levels  within the next  three-plus years, according to the second quarter Zillow Real Estate Market Reports Nationally, home values remain 11.3 percent below their 2007 peak. Looking ahead, U.S. home values are expected to … Read More »

The folks in Conecticut will be unpleasantly surprised to learn they beat out Vegas and Miami as the riskiest market to buy a home. Zillow set out to look at the markets where housing prices have declined the most over the past 35 years  and chained the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) backward in time to 1979 Q4 using the … Read More »

  Price growth will plummet to an annual rate of only 0.9 percent for the balance of the year after the tumble began with a stumble when price increases fell to just a 0.9 percent quarter over quarter growth rate at the end of second quarter in June. That’s the latest prognosis from Dr. Alex Villacorta, Clear Capital’s  vice president … Read More »

Sea changes are in store for residential real estate ten years from now.  Millions of new households will lift rental and starter home markets, half of the new families will be minorities and their ability to access mortgage finance will determine whether they own or rent. Those are some of the headlines from the Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ … Read More »

  Most housing markets remain weak despite declining mortgage delinquencies, improving local employment, house price gains and attractive mortgage rates due to weak home purchase mortgage applications. The latest data from Freddie Mac’s Multi-Indicator Market Index(SM) (MiMi(SM)) showing mixed signals for the U.S. housing market: The national MiMi value stands at -3.01 points indicating a weak housing market overall with … Read More »

  Though home purchase applications have picked up with onset of the spring season, they’re still currently 13 percent below last year. As a result, last week Freddie Mac’s economists lowered their overall homes sales forecast from 5.5 million to 5.4 million. Low for-sale inventory is helping to sustain house price and rent gains but at the expense of affordability … Read More »

Put five of the nation’s top housing economists together on a panel and it’s unlikely they will agree on the big issues facing residential real estate, but at a June 12 panel at this year’s spring conference of the National Association of Real Estate Editors in Houston, they did.  Unfortunately, their consensus was not good news for anyone who makes … Read More »

In the first quarter, Texas had the highest percentage of mortgaged residential properties in an equity position at 96.7 percent, followed by Montana (96.3 percent), Alaska (95.7 percent), North Dakota (95.7 percent) and Hawaii (95.6 percent) according to the latest report from CoreLogic. CoreLogic said more than 300,000 homes returned to positive equity in the first quarter of 2014, bringing … Read More »

Home prices are projected to increase 1.0 percent every month from until May 2014, reaching an 6.3 percent year-over-year increase (+/- 1.5 percent) from April 2014 to April 2015, according to the latest forecast by the CoreLogic Home Price Index. excluding distressed sales like foreclosures and short sales,  prices are expected to rise between 0.8 percent month over month and … Read More »