Is The Real Estate Market Turning Around?

The home sales index spike from the home buyer tax credit has almost run out. If you didn't have a deal in escrow by April 30, you didn't get the credit. The time to close a deal was extended to September 30. The predictions were that we'd see a fall in July activity which is exactly what is occurring.

The reports that are currently coming in don't yet reflect July sales which will show a drop in sales. For example, the Case-Shiller report came in yesterday for May, 2010, but that report is a three-month average of prices. The report said prices were up 1.2% MoM, and 5.4% YoY. That was the peak of housing credit driven sales.

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Lower Home Prices Are Spurring Sales In Utah

About one quarter of all real estate transactions in Park City involve distressed properties.

That's not bad, said Deanna Devey of the Utah Association of Realtors. It's average for the state if not slightly better.

Foreclosure activity is definitely improving, said Park City Board of Realtors president Mark Seltenrich.

"They appear to be trending down, but remain historically high," according to the second quarter report summary from the board released July 22.

Devey said short sales account for 13 percent of all sales in Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Weber and Tooele counties. They are only 10 percent of sales in Summit and Wasatch counties.

"Comparatively, Summit County isn't doing too bad," she said via email.

Statistics that sound negative but are actually good news was a theme for the mid-year report from the board of Realtors.

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Home Prices Falling Despite Low Mortgage Rates

The fine bloggers over at Calculated Risk have a good article today about the future of housing prices. In essence the article asserts that there have been declines in home values in both May and June that have yet to fully show up in many measures of home prices.

This premise is based upon data from Campbell Surveys that shows prices for short sales fell 6.3%, move-in ready foreclosures fell 6.8 percent, and non-distressed properties dropped 4.6 percent.

The decline can likely be traced to several factors. First is the collapse in demand for homes following the expiration of the first time home buyer tax credit at the end of April (the overall weakness of the economy also plays a part in the lack of demand). The next factor is the massive overhang of houses on the market and in the hands of banks and lenders. Finally, the sheer volume of foreclosed and distressed homes negatively affects the price of homes.

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Mortgages After Financial Reform: 5 Ways They’ll Change

The financial reform law includes tough new mortgage regulations, to stop the deceptions (and self-deceptions) that have driven millions of homeowners into foreclosure. Here’s how the market will change in 12 to 18 months, when the new rules start to take effect:

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Pricing Your Home To Sell In Today's Market

With no federal tax credit to entice buyers, today's home sellers have to get even more serious about making a deal.

That means pricing aggressively -- low enough to compete with foreclosures in some markets. It's a conversation that stings, said Summer Greene, a real-estate agent for a Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate brokerage office in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"It's like telling them that their children are ugly," she said.

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Realtor's Incompetence Means I Can't Move Into My Vandalized, Deteriorating Short-Sale House

One might think that with the collapse of the housing market and the global economy, realtors and banks might have some idea how to handle a short sale transaction. A short sale, after all, is when a homeowner sells their home for less than they owe on the mortgage in order to avoid foreclosure. Frank writes that he would like very much to move into the house he signed a contract to buy back in November, but the seller's realtor forgot to submit documents to the seller's bank, leaving the house vacant to be vandalized and deteriorate for months on end.

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Foreign Buyers Like U.S. Residential Real Estate

International buyers are snatching up U.S. residential real estate, with people from Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and China doing the most buying, according to a report in the Washington Business Journal.

The National Association of Realtors said foreign buyers accounted for 7 percent of all U.S. residential sales in the year ending March 31.

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New-Home Sales Fall To Lowest Level On Record

Sales of new homes in Utah and much of the rest of the country dropped in May as many potential buyers stopped shopping for homes once they could no longer receive government tax credits.

Nationally, sales sunk 33 percent to the lowest level on record, according to a report from the Commerce Department. The numbers show just how much the end of federal tax credits could weigh on the nation’s housing market, even though Realtors locally and nationally point out that low prices and favorable mortgage rates still make a purchase attractive.

The credits expired April 30, the date when a new homebuyer would have had to sign a contract to qualify. Buyers must close before June 30 to complete the process.

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Should I Buy a Home in Foreclosure?

The long shadow of the housing market crisis doesn’t seem to fade.

Despite government efforts to stem the foreclosure crisis with its mortgage-modification programs, new waves of foreclosures are expected to hit this year. According to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing service, between three and 3.5 million homes in the U.S. will go into foreclosure in 2010, up from 2.8 million in 2009. Indeed, May marked the 15th consecutive month where there were more than 300,000 households that received a foreclosure notice. “We’ve plateaued at an unprecedented level of foreclosure activity,” says Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac.

Prospective home buyers have long been cautioned about approaching bank-owned houses, or real-estate owned properties (REOs) as they’re known. These are homes reclaimed by a bank after a foreclosure auction.

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Congress Could Extend Home-Buyer Tax Credit Closing Deadline

What if the home-buyer tax credit worked too well?

That’s the latest concern from the real-estate industry, which says that a last-minute home-buying rush in April created bottlenecks at lenders and real-estate service companies that may not be able to finalize purchases in time for tens of thousands of buyers to receive a tax credit worth up to $8,000.

On Thursday, there were signs that the real-estate lobby had successfully communicated those concerns to Congress. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) joined Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) and Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) in sponsoring a measure that would give buyers until Sept. 30 to close on sales that went into contract by April 30. That measure would be attached to a job-related bill before the Senate. It would need House and Senate passage before being signed by President Obama.

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After Shopping For A Home, Tired Buyers Often Make Poor Mortgage Choices

New research suggests that buyers' minds are so taxed after they go through the ordeal of finding a house that they often rush into the next step — applying for a loan — and make poor choices.

Sometimes they opt for the first choice presented to them without regard to the dangers that may be inherent in that particular mortgage. Other times they pick the loan with the lowest monthly cost, even though the price might skyrocket in a few short years.

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Foreclosures Creates Boon For Homebuyers

Eric Adams remembers well the surge of foreclosures that occurred when Utah's economy bottomed out in the 1980s.

Banks were pushing foreclosed properties onto the market in hopes of recouping their losses, glutting an already depressed market.

In some ways, Adams, a Realtor with ReMax Results in Provo, said the current mortgage crisis is far worse. In 25 years of doing foreclosure sales, he's never seen more foreclosed homes for sale.

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Good Times Ahead For The Homebuyer?

If you missed the April 30 homebuyer tax credit deadline without snagging a house, pat yourself on the back: You just may turn out to be one of the lucky ones.

While the credit is now history, savvy buyers may be able to make up that money -- and then some -- through some shrewd house hunting over the next two months, industry experts say.

"Savvy buyers can put their feet back into the market," says Rona Fischman, principal broker at 4 Buyers Real Estate in Cambridge, Mass. "It will be more sane and less of a sellers' market."

Thanks to the tax credit, buyers came into the market over the past year who otherwise might have waited on the sidelines, says Olivier Garret, chief executive officer of Casey Research in Stowe, Vt.

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Single Women Home Buyers: Key to the Housing Recovery?

Looking to sell your home? Make sure you don't overlook single women as potential buyers. A recent National Association of Realtors report found that single women outdistanced unmarried men when it came to buying real estate in 2009.

Unmarried women made 21 percent of home purchases, while single guys made up 10 percent of the buyers. According to the research, single females also made up a quarter of first time-home buyers.

This wasn't always the case. In 1995, single women represented only 14 percent of home buyers. But in recent years, they have raced ahead of their male counterparts in snapping up real estate.

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Home Prices Stabilizing

Home prices appear to be stabilizing as demand for higher-priced homes picks up and distressed properties, still a large part of the market, are no longer changing hands at the deeply discounted prices of a year ago.

Overall, home prices declined 0.7% in the first quarter of 2010 to an average of $166,100, the lowest first-quarter national median price since 2002, when the average was $158,600 according to a report by the National Association of Realtors. However, there was wide variation by region, with median prices up 9% in the Northeast and down 8% in West.

And the number of metropolitan areas where median prices are rising, instead of falling, grew for the fourth consecutive time. In the latest quarter, prices gained in 91 of the 152 metropolitan areas tracked by the Realtors compared to 67 in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 30 in the third quarter.

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Are Builders' Incentives For Home Buyers Legal?

Question: Builders in my area are offering incentives to buyers who use their respective in-house mortgage companies. But they aren't offering the incentives to all buyers, just those who secure financing through the company-owned lender. I recently read that if the incentives aren't offered to all buyers, regardless of whether they use the builder for a loan, it is a violation of federal law. Is that correct?

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Congress Considers Mandate on 5% Minimum Down Payments

Some Republican lawmakers are calling for the Senate’s financial-overhaul bill to include specific mortgage standards that originators would be required to meet when underwriting home loans.

In exchange, they want to dump from the current legislation the “skin in the game” rules that would require banks that package loans into securities to hold a portion on their balance sheet.

Under the amendment, proposed by Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), Congress would set minimum down payments of 5%. Mortgage originators and investors who buy loans in the secondary market would also have to adhere to other standards including, documentation of a borrower’s income and assets and certain metrics to determine that borrowers were able to repay their loans.

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How to Buy a Foreclosure

You want to buy a foreclosure? Remember, there are both great opportunities and great pressures and pitfalls in this market.

First, you have to decide at what stage of foreclosure you want to buy. There are three options: 1. pre-foreclosure; 2. sheriff's auction; 3. repossession, called REO (for real estate owned by the bank).

"The safest and best way to buy is when it's a bank-owned property," said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosure properties.

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Tax credit end not deterring US homebuyers -survey

Home buyer tax credits have been a boon to the U.S. housing market, but their expiration this week is unlikely to deter home purchasing activity as consumers grow more confident, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

Among consumers shopping for homes, 65 percent said the end of the tax credits will have little or no effect on their interest in purchasing a home, according to the survey, which was conducted by Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services, part of Prudential Financial.

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Housing Market Off To A Good Start This Spring

Prompted by the federal home buyer tax credit, low mortgage rates and lower home prices home re-sales rose 6.8% in March after three straight months of declines, according to the National Association of Realtors. The rise in sales demonstrates a stronger housing market moving into the historically most active season of the year.

Existing home sales, including single family homes, condominiums, townhouses and co-ops hit a seasonally adjusted 5.35 million units.

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