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 »

Fourteen years ago, improving minority homeownership was front burner issue.  In 2002, the Bush Administration even set a goal of expanding the number of minorities who owned their own homes by 5.5 million—approximately the number of existing homes sold in a very good year. The subprime crash and housing depression put a sudden end to that effort.  Minority homeownership plummeted … Read More »

‘Closed loan credit scores continued tumble, while DTI rose in October’ promised the headline from Ellie Mae this month. Eagerly I scanned through the data, hoping at last to see a relaxation of the squeaky tight lending standards for purchase loans, enough to really mean something to the millions of young buyers trying to maneuver their way through student loan … Read More »

  Perhaps you have heard that it’s getting easier to get approved for a mortgage to buy a home. Yet the first-time buyers you work with don’t seem to be doing any better than they did six, 12 or even 24 months ago. The news reports you’ve been reading are misleading.  They may accurately trends for refi mortgages or mortgages … Read More »

The January reduction in FHA mortgage insurance premiums increased the first-time homebuyer share of April closings by three points, according to one survey of Realtors, while NAR’s Realtor Confidence Index said the first-timer market share has remained unchanged for months due to difficulties getting financing. The First-time homebuyer share rose to 37.6 percent of home purchases in April, up from … Read More »

Closing rates for conventional and FHA refinancings improved dramatically in April, while lending standards for purchase loans hardly burned and remained at virtually the same levels as three years ago despite housing industry complaints that overly restrictive underwriting rules are crippling sales to first-time buyers. The refinancing approval rate for all mortgage types jumped to 64 percent in April, up … Read More »

An analysis of trends in mortgage originations by two economists at the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank found that even though the amount of credit available for mortgages have been improving since 2013, the “credit box” of mortgage origination data indicates that the process of getting a mortgage has not loosened up. Carl Hudson, director for the Center for Real Estate … Read More »

  New research by loanDepot LLC indicates the number of parents who expect to help their Millennial-age children purchase a home in the future will increase by 31 percent compared to the past five years, from 13 to 17 percent. Half (50%) of the parents who will help their children buy a home say they’ll contribute toward down payments, while … Read More »

    A new study by RealtyTrac found that in 25 counties with the highest median home sales prices at the end of 2014, the average down payment percentage was 24 percent for homes purchased, nearly twice as high as the national average of 14 percent. The average down payment in dollars in the pricier 25 counties was $138,547 compared … Read More »

Weekly applications for mortgages zoomed 49.1% for the week ending January 9, the biggest weekly increase recorded by the Mortgage Bankers Association since 2008.  In raw numbers the spike was even bigger. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 119 percent compared with the previous week. But don’t break out the bubbly quite yet. The biggest boost was in refi … Read More »