New York Times: Housing will eventually recover from its great swoon. But many real estate experts now believe that home ownership will never again yield rewards like those enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century, when houses not only provided shelter but also a plump nest egg.
The wealth generated by housing in those [...]
(Reuters) – The house on the 53rd block of South Wood Street in Chicago’s Back of the Yards doesn’t look like a $355,000 home. There is no front door and most of the windows are boarded up.
Public records show it sold in foreclosure for $25,500 in January 2009, then resold for $355,000 in October. In [...]
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — New home construction ticked higher in July, but indications of future building were weak, the government said Tuesday.
Housing starts rose 1.7% from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 546,000 last month, the Commerce Department said.
Economists were expecting housing starts to rise to 555,000, according to a consensus estimate from [...]
Palm Beach Post: ”South Florida was definitely ground zero for the housing bust,” said Larson, an analyst with Weiss Research, a Jupiter-based provider of global investment information. “We had a lot of rampant speculation and fly-by-night mortgage lenders and when they went away, the market collapsed.”
The result: plummeting home prices that have hammered Broward and Palm [...]
(Reuters) – Faced with a lose-lose proposition, Congress put off its decision on the fate of mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, perhaps hoping the housing market recovers before losses get too big.
The financial regulatory overhaul, approved by Congress on Thursday, steered clear of reorganizing the government sponsored enterprises — companies at the [...]
Palm Beach Post: WEST PALM BEACH — Authorities will hold a news conference this morning to announce the arrests of people on charges stemming from a housing fraud probe.
According to a release this morning from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, the agency – along with Palm Beach County Housing Authority, U.S. [...]
New York Times: LOS ALTOS, Calif. — No need for tears, but the well-off are losing their master suites and saying goodbye to their wine cellars.
The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this [...]
Reuters: WASHINGTON – High unemployment and a moribund housing market have increased risks to the U.S. economic recovery, while the public debt looms large and needs to be cut, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday.
In a statement after annual consultations with U.S. authorities, the IMF raised its U.S. growth forecasts slightly to 3.3 percent [...]
CNBC: The long-term mortgage, which began as a Depression-era remedy to keep Americans in their homes, may be out of step, given the current housing crisis.
Could it be time to say good-bye to the popular 30-year mortgage?
“The 30-year mortgage is outdated, the standard fixed-rate mortgage is outdated, and it has to be improved,” housing expert Robert J. Shiller [...]
(Reuters) – A broad rewrite of financial rules will make it tougher to get a mortgage, but Congress may not be going far enough to crack down on the easy home loans at the heart of the financial meltdown.
Lawmakers negotiating final changes to a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street’s rules last week melded housing-related provisions [...]
New York Times: Before the recession, people simply looked for a house to buy. Later they got squeamish just thinking about buying. Now they are on a quest for perfection at the perfect price. Exacting buyers are upending the battered real estate market, agents and other experts say, leading to last-minute demands for multiple concessions, [...]
CNBC: Upcoming data this week, expiration of friendly government policy and chart analysis points to a housing market double-dip in the second half of the year, according to some economists and analysts.
“We expect the first of May housing data out this week to show a significant decline from April, given that May is the first [...]
Palm Beach Post: Florida’s struggling homeowners could get an 18-month reprieve on mortgage payments under a state plan to spend $418 million in federal foreclosure prevention aid. Palm Beach County would receive $28.9 million from the proposal, which was discussed last week during a meeting of the Florida Housing Finance Corporation and still requires approval [...]
(Reuters) – The U.S. labor market will hold the key to a recovery in the hard-hit housing sector, according to a Harvard University report released on Monday. Record high foreclosures and a high jobless rate both pose significant challenges to the housing market, but some recovery in labor markets and record low mortgage rates could partly [...]
U.S. house prices will manage a small gain in 2010 after the worst crash since the Great Depression but gains in coming years are likely to come slowly, a Reuters poll found. Home sales and prices may retreat in the near-term after government tax credits to homebuyers as large as $8,000 ended on April [...]
(Reuters) – Housing starts touched a 1-1/2-year high in April, but a drop in building permits to a six-month low implied the housing market recovery may struggle to gain momentum without more government aid. Tuesday’s data indicated the economic recovery was continuing into the second quarter, but worries persist that the debt crisis in Europe could [...]
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Can it be possible? Despite the housing bust and high foreclosure rates, in some areas real estate agents are complaining that they don’t have enough homes to sell. There is currently an eight-month supply of homes on the market — meaning that, at the current sales pace, it would take eight [...]
Palm Beach Post: More than half of South Florida homes sold in March did so at a loss as desperate homeowners and overwhelmed banks continued to unload properties at cut-rate prices. In Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, about 51.3 percent of houses sold in March were purchased for less than the previous sale price, [...]
John S. Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made $15 billion shorting the real estate market, said Monday that he expects housing prices to rise between 3 percent and 5 percent this year and another 8 to 12 percent in 2011. He also said he expects a strong V-shaped economic recovery.
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