Mortgage rates capped off a great week in sour fashion last Friday. After four days of stock selling induced rate rallying, lenders were finally forced to reprice for the worse on Friday. While mortgage rates did rise more than they have on average, the best 30 year conventional fixed loan rate was still...
Consumer mortgage borrowing costs improved a few basis points yesterday as prices of mortgage backed securities ticked higher, recapturing the price losses that occured late last week. As the price gains held through close, most lenders repriced better, lowering consumer borrowing costs by 0.125 to 0...
Sales of new single family houses dropped again in November according to a joint report issued Friday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau. Single family homes sold at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 647,000 units. This is 9 percent below the revised...
As usual the two monthly reports on home sales - existing homes and newly constructed houses - were issued in lockstep on Wednesday and Thursday and while one was loudly proclaimed as an indicator that things were still getting worse, the second contained a germ of hope. The National Association of Realtors...
The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued their monthly joint report on August new house sales on Thursday. Like statistics on the sales of existing homes issued earlier in the week by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), sales were off significantly...
The National Association of Realtors can always be depended upon to put the best face on housing news. The monthly report on the sales of existing homes for May released on Monday was headlined "Homes Sales Show Market is Under Performing" and the opening paragraph read "Existing-home sales were essentially...
The National Association of Realtors has backpedaled on previous housing forecasts with it U.S. Economic Outlook report for June released on Wednesday. NAR has consistently asserted that the housing bubble would not burst but rather would deflate and, when it happened, there would be a soft landing ...
According to figures released on Thursday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau, new house sales in April showed the first improvement of the year, and a substantial one at that. Last December new house sales were at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 1,019...
Reports on January sales of both new and existing houses were released this week. Conclusions were, to say the least, mixed. The National Association of Realtors report on the sales of existing home in January stated that those sales had hit the highest level in seven months, increasing to a seasonally...
The usual spate of monthly reports on new home sales, existing home sales, housing starts, and builder confidence were all released recently. Taken together they do little to clarify the state of the housing market. First out was the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index...