Mortgage Industry News and Insights
-
It’s All About Inventories
Sales of new homes in January were every bit as good as those released last week for existing homes. There were an estimated 41,000 newly built homes sold during the month compared to 38,000 in December. On a seasonally adjusted annual basis that works out to a pace of 555,000 units, up 3.7% from December…
-
Fifty-Nine Months in a Row
Rising interest rates apparently aren’t scaring off buyers, so far at least. A spurt in existing home sales in January pushed the seasonally adjusted annual rate up 3.3% over December to 5.69 million units, a gain of 3.8% year-over-year. The rate of increase was the strongest for any month since the previous January and…
-
Pending Home Sales Up
As reported last week, home sales finished out the year on a down note with both new home and existing home sales retreating from November’s levels. Rising interest rates along with an inventory of existing homes that was the smallest in the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR’s) record books got the blame. Sales numbers…
-
Tough Sledding
Despite taking a dip in December, existing home sales still closed out 2016 as their best year since 2006. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said that over the 12 months an estimated 5.45 million single-family houses, townhomes, condos, and cooperative apartments changed hands. This was 200,000 more units than sold in all of 2015…
-
Getting a Jump
Housing news this week was dominated by construction reports. Well, maybe dominated is too strong a word–there wasn’t much competition. A burst of enthusiasm on the part of homebuilders last month had carried the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) Housing Market Index to a 12-year high. NAHB said builder confidence moderated a bit this month;…
-
More Than Half-Full
Two pieces of news dominated an otherwise slow week. Taking them in order of appearance, last Friday brought a very encouraging Employment Situation Report. Job creation in December was good, if not spectacular at 156,000 new non-farm jobs. There were also revisions to the October and November reports that added a total of 19,000 jobs…
-
Playing Catch-Up
The Old Year and our two-week break has left us with a lot of make-up work. While sales and pricing data dominated the usual end-of-month flood and was largely positive, the Census Bureau’s construction numbers took some of the edge off. The two backward looking reports on home sales–new, and existing–continued to show a…
-
They Finally Did It!
The Fed raised rates…and having done it, apparently may do it again. The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) ended their monthly meeting on Wednesday with an announcement of a quarter point increase in the federal funds rate. This brings the target for the overnight lending rate between banks–to a range of 0.5% to…
-
Potent Cocktail
November was another good month for jobs with 178,000 new ones created and unemployment dropping to 4.6%. The bad news was that after an encouraging 0.4% gain in October, average hourly wages dropped back by 0.1%. Flat wages are not hurting home prices–at least so far. They continue to defy forecasts of smaller increases.…
-
Where to Begin
It is rare indeed when we can report on new, existing, and pending home sales in one fell swoop but all three reports were issued while many of us were enjoying friends, family, turkey and pie. The data was mixed, and relatively flat, but then we are morphing into the holiday rather than the home…