The Mortgage Bankers Association’s figures on home loan performance just keep getting worse and worse. Here is what things looked like in Q3 2009:
* The overall mortgage delinquency rate surged to 9.64% in Q3 2009 from 9.24% in Q2 2009 and 6.99% a year earlier. Once again, this is a fresh record high for the [...]
From the category archives:
Housing Market
We just got the latest data on housing construction activity. Here’s a recap:
* Overall housing starts plunged 10.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 529,000 in October from 592,000 in September. That was much worse than the 600,000 units that economists were expecting. Building permit activity was also weak. Permitting activity dropped 4% to [...]
The National Association of Home Builders just released its latest builder sentiment index. The reading came in at 17. That was unchanged from a downwardly revised 17 in October and slightly below the 19 number economists were expecting.
Among the sub-indices, the one measuring present single family sales was unchanged at 17. The prospective buyer traffic [...]
We just got pending home sales figures from the National Association of Realtors. Here’s what they looked like:
* Pending home sales surged 6.1% in September. That was much better than the unchanged reading that economists were expecting. It’s also the eighth consecutive monthly rise.
* On a year-over-year basis, the pending sales index jumped 21.1% to [...]
The latest S&P/Case-Shiller home price index figures were just released. On a month-over-month basis, prices were up 1.2% in 20 top metropolitan areas in August. That marked the fourth consecutive monthly gain. On a year-over-year basis, home prices were down 11.3%. That was better than the 11.9% decline economists were expecting and an improvement from [...]
The September existing home sales figures recently hit the tape. Here’s what the numbers looked like:
* Existing home sales jumped 9.4% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.57 million units from 5.09 million in August. That was twice the gain that was expected and the rate of sales was the highest since July 2007.
* [...]
We just got the latest data on housing starts and permits. Here’s what the numbers showed:
* September housing starts inched up by 0.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 590,000 from a downwardly revised 587,000 in August. Single family starts rose 3.9%, while multifamily starts dropped 15.2%. Starts are still down 28.2% from year-earlier [...]
The latest National Association of Home Builders index was just released. The index fell to 18 in October from 19 in September. The subindex tracking present sales fell to 17 from 18, the subindex tracking expectations about future sales dropped to 27 from 29, and the subindex measuring prospective buyer traffic slumped to 14 from [...]
There’s an interesting debate going on in D.C. right now over the FHA loan program. FHA was a non-player during the housing boom because private lenders were falling all over themselves to offer crappy loans to crappy borrowers. Now they’re out of the business … and all those crappy borrowers are going to FHA instead. [...]
The latest data on home prices from S&P/Case-Shiller was just released. It showed prices down 13.3% in July from a year earlier in the 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the group. That was a smaller rate of decline than the market was looking for (-14.2%) and a smaller decline than we saw in June (-15.4%). [...]
