Will 2016 be remembered as the peak of the recovery?  It was the best year for sales in more than a decade.  Will sales take a break in 2017, a victim of political uncertainty, rising rates and prices that are outpacing incomes? Even worse, will 2017 herald a multi-year downtrend in sales? Last year, existing-home sales finished 2016 at 5.45 … Read More »

The popular belief that the seven million Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure during the Housing Crash are healed, whole and forgiven of their debts after seven years have passed is only partly true. For foreclosures, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set a seven-year waiting period before defaulters can apply for a mortgage, measured from the completion date of … Read More »

August brought even worse news for first-time and move-up buyer as chronic inventory shortages grow even, inflating home prices even more.  A double whammy of unaffordable prices and shrinking selections of homes for sale continue to handcuff the housing recovery. “Hopes of a meaningful sales breakthrough as a result of this summer’s historically low mortgage rates failed to materialize because … Read More »

The percentage of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs is increasing while cost-burned homeowners are decreasing, according to the 2014 State of the Nation’s Housing report released yesterday by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. On the owner side, the number of households facing cost burdens has fallen steadily as high foreclosure rates … Read More »

Many of the nation’s housing markets are getting back to normal heading into the spring home buying season but many are not, according to Freddie Mac’s latest Multi-Indicator Market Index. Large pockets of weakness linger, particularly in the Great Lakes Region and the South outside of Florida and Texas. The national MiMi value stands at 82.7, indicating a housing market … Read More »

Nearly half of all homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure during the housing bust own their own homes again and most have a mortgage. just nine years after home prices bottomed in 2007. A new report from the Urban Institute that compares credit profiles of renters and owners found nine million (7.1 percent) of all adult consumers with a … Read More »

As the build-up to the spring buying season winds down in a matter of weeks, the inventory picture is shaping up be significantly worse than it was last year—which was one of the tightest in recent years.  A rush of new listings in February and March could brighten the picture, but through January it’s clear that inventories are going starting … Read More »

Next September, two months before the Presidential election, America celebrates eight years since the Treasury Department took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and turned them into wholly owned subsidiaries. Since then the federal government’s control over the nation’s housing markets has grown even greater than ever. While we’ve been waiting for policymakers to fix a broken system of housing, … Read More »

  Transaction prices reported by multiple listing services may differ by an average of 8.75 percent from sold prices reported on HUD-1 settlement statements, possibly because brokers are under pressure to inflate prices in a declining market, according to a new study by three real estate economists at Florida Gulf Coast University published last month by the Appraisal Journal. In … Read More »

The crisis in housing affordability will only get worse in the deceased to come, according to new research by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard and Enterprise Community Partners Inc (Enterprise).  The number of households spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent is expected to rise at least 11 percent from 11.8 million to 13.1 million by … Read More »