October 2006 - MND NewsWire

New home prices took a heck of a hit in September according to information released by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Thursday. This disquieting news came hard on the heels of a National Association of Realtors survey released on Wednesday that showed declines in both the sales and the median prices of existing homes.

After surging a bit during the week ended October 12, mortgage rates barely moved according to the Primary Mortgage Market Survey conducted by Freddie Mac for the week ended October 19.

The Mortgage Bankers Association released the results of their Mortgage Originations Survey for the first half of 2006.

If you follow network or cable news you probably believe that the real estate market has gone from unbridled insanity where buyers apparently losing all perspective, bid wantonly against dozens of other equally crazed buyers for the same house, stretched way above their means to purchase increasingly unaffordable houses which seemingly increased exponentially in value every hour to a market today where...

...nothing is selling!

Maybe it was just too good to last.

After four weeks of declining interest rates Freddie Mac reported a relatively sharp jump for each of the products it tracks during the week ended October 12.

Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac's vice president and chief economist blamed...

Mortgage rates for the week ended October 5 barely budged. After substantial downward moves over the last ten weeks only the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and the one-year ARM changed at all, declining only slightly from the previous week.

Freddie Mac�s Primary Mortgage Market Survey reported that...

Could America's record balance of payments deficit with China be the solution to low cost housing? Might it even be an unprecedented opportunity to be Green?

America is buying so much merchandise from other countries, primarily China and selling so little back to them that shipping containers are actually becoming an environmental hazard. Apparently it is cheaper to manufacture new ones on the opposite side of the ocean than transport them empty back to where they originated.

The old mortgage tracking clock has just rolled back to March 2. That was the last time that the interest on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was lower than the average contract rate that Freddie Mac reported for last week, the week ending September 28.

Applications for mortgages increased 11.9 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from the earlier week and 11.5 percent on an unadjusted basis. The change from the same week a year earlier was...