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Category: housing news

Home Values May Prove Political Football in Battleground States

Home values dropped an average of 16% in 15 of 16 key presidential battleground states since the financial crisis.  Despite this key fact most of the Republican presidential candidates have chosen to be largely silent on what they would do to end the housing crisis. They have preferred to concentrate on jobs and unemployment issues. [...]

Survey Shows Real Estate Cash Buyers Place Downward Pressure on Home Values

A report associated with the Campbell Housing Pulse Tracking Survey concludes that real estate investors buying with all cash are putting downward pressure on home values. In December 2011 cash buyers represented 33.2% of the market, according to the Campbell study.  Most of these real estate cash buyers are real estate investors buying investment properties [...]

Housing Inventory Declines

The NAR also released statistics on the inventory of homes for sale and shows a decline of 22.29% from a year ago.  The 146 MSAs monitored by the NAR survey found that at the end of 2011 there were 1.89 million single family homes on the market in the U.S., a drop of 6% from [...]

Existing Home Sales Up 5% in December: NAR

According to the National Association of Realtors existing home sales surged 5% from 4.39 million units in November to 4.61 million units in December. Investors represented 21% of the market, up from 19% in November. All cash sales were 31% of all closed deals compared to 28% in November.  The median home price was $164,500 [...]

How is BOA Short Sale Incentive Test Going in Florida?

One would think that desperate homeowners would be jumping for joy in Florida with the opportunity of making up to $20,000 as an incentive for selling an under water house through a Short Sale or deeding it back to the bank with a Deed-In-Lieu for foreclosure.  The results of Bank of America’s test program have [...]

Is There Consumer Demand to Refinance?

A recent Harris Interactive poll asked a group of 2,237 adults who were online in December about their planned financial behaviors in 2012.  One of the questions asked whether respondents planned on refinancing a mortgage in the new year.  Only 5% responded positively, the same percentage as those who answered the same question in 2009 [...]

Freddie Mac Cuts Refi Credit Score Requirements for Some

In an effort to make refinancing available to more homeowners Freddie Mac announced that it would no longer require homeowners to have credit scores of 620 or higher as long as the loan is current, the LTV at 80% or higher, and the refinance is being completed with their existing lender. The new rule became [...]

Fed Makes Recommendations to Improve Health of Housing Market

This past week two Federal Reserve officials made suggestions to improve the housing market in addition to Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, who came out with a game-changing white paper with numerous suggestions on how to reduce foreclosures and their negative impact on home values. Federal Reserve Bank of New York president, William Dudley, espouses the [...]

Voters’ Biggest Concerns: Jobs and Housing

A Houselogic survey demonstrates that voters are most concerned about jobs and housing policy as election year issues for 2012.  Respondents were asked: “What issue area will have the greatest impact on your vote in 2012?” Jobs were mentioned as the top issue by 54% of respondents.  The next most critical issue was housing, which [...]

Foreclosure Dockets are Crowded

LPS reported that foreclosure starts jumped 5.7% between September and October as processors served notices on 232,865 families. On the positive side, delinquencies are down significantly.  Homeowners who were 90 days late but not yet in foreclosure in October were down 19% from last January.  A total of 1.76 million homes were in that category, [...]