Mortgage Industry News and Insights
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Slower Appreciation Has Upside
The good news is that home prices are still going up. The better news is that it’s happening a little more slowly. All three of S&P Case-Shiller’s home price indices for August exhibited a degree of moderation in what are still strong price gains. The National Home Price Index (HPI) fell below 6.0% for the…
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Market Shifting
There has been a lot of evidence of late that the market might be shifting to a pattern more favorable to buyers than sellers. This week the picture got both clearer and a little pixelated. Data on September’s new, existing, and pending sales all came out and the first two continued what has become a…
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Better than it Looks
Home building failed to meet analysts’ predictions in September, but, as is often the case with the residential construction report from the Census Bureau and Housing and Urban Development, things got better the deeper one dug. Permits only lost a bit of ground, down 0.6%, and all of that can be accounted for by the…
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Crossing the Line
The week’s headline was the announcement by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) that interest rates for the 30-year conforming mortgage had crossed the 5.0% line, with FHA and jumbo loans close behind. All the rates quoted by MBA (which differ slightly from Freddie Mac’s) were the highest in at least seven years. Rates have been…
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Spring Sales Spring
Each month the housing news seems to hit all at once and this was April’s big week. First were March home sales, new and existing. Both held their own, looking Spring Market-like despite unseasonal weather and tiny inventories. Rising prices provided the second piece of the week’s news, although it wasn’t terribly newsy. Existing home…
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Lowering the Temperature
The country is still effectively at full employment; the unemployment rate has spent six months at 4.1%, but things did soften a bit in the first quarter of this year. The March Employment Situation Report reported an increase of 103,000 jobs, well below the forecast of 175,000. The average for the first three months of…
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Curve Ball
Home prices bumped up another 6.7% on an annual basis in February according to CoreLogic’s Home Price Index. This is 0.1% more than the January 2017 to January 2018 gain, and again raises the issue of when enough will be enough. When will prices reach a point where most buyers, especially first timers, won’t be…
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Swinging Into Spring – March 30th
New home sales are off to a ragged start in 2018. Sales fell by 7.8% in January after plunging 9.3% in December although an upward revision of about 30,000 annualized units did take a little of the sting out of the January loss. That recalculation, which brought January sales up to an annual rate of…
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Fed Watch – March 23
To hardly anyone’s surprise, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) ended its March meeting with a unanimous vote to raise the fed funds rate. Citing expectations that “economic activity will expand at a moderate pace in the medium term and labor market conditions will remain strong,” the group raised the target range for the sixth…
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Prices Continue to Rise
The first March home price data shows month-over-month appreciation at the fastest pace in 11 months. The CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI) rose 1.6% compared to February, the largest gain since last April. After more than a decade of decline, the homeownership rate set a record low of 62.9% in the second quarter of…