February 22, 2011 (Jeff Alan) The housing crisis which has famously ravaged Florida and the Southwest, is delivering a new wave of distress to communities once thought to be immune, where the housing boom was relatively restrained. In the last year, home prices in Seattle had a bigger decline than in Las Vegas. Minneapolis dropped [...]
February 22, 2011 (Shirley Allen) Texas Republican Randy Neugebauer, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Oversight Subcommittee, says that he believes that the government needs to come to terms with the fact that its foreclosure prevention efforts are failing and actually making the housing market worse. The Chairman went on to say that the [...]
February 22, 2011 (Shirley Allen) Despite data indicating otherwise, Fannie Mae is predicting that it expects housing starts to triple by 2013. According to the agency's economic outlook, housing starts are predicted to increase 17.3 percent and hit 710,000 this year, with another 47 percent increase to 1.1 million in 2012 and another gain of [...]
February 22, 2011 (Chris Moore) Driven in part by rising sales of distressed properties and higher foreclosure-sales discounts, home prices declined for the seventh straight month in December and suffered their largest one-month drop during the year according to FNC’s recently released Residential Price Index (PRI). According to the RPI, 2010 year end prices declined [...]
February 21, 2011 (Jeff Alan) Standard & Poor’s and Experian released their S&P/Experian Consumer Credit Default Indices, a comprehensive measure of changes in consumer credit defaults, showed a decline in monthly default rates across all credit lines. First mortgage defaults fell to 2.84% and second mortgages, with a monthly decline of over 13%, fell to [...]
February 21, 2011 (Jeff Alan) It’s a brave new world out there. There are more homes for sale than political promises, but getting a mortgage loan has never been tougher. The housing crisis has resulted in a boon of new regulations, with new mortgage-lending regulations to protect you from predatory lenders and many new underwriting [...]
February 21, 2011 (Chris Moore) Fair, Isaac & Co., the folks who originated the closely guarded “FICO” credit score, have launched a website that helps consumers understand how credit scores can affect many areas of your life in this era of new financial regulations. The company also recently opened up about how your activities can [...]
February 18, 2011 (Jeff Alan) Wells Fargo & Co. has dramatically lowered credit score requirements for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages, the first major lender to do so following pressure from the agency and housing advocates. Beginning last month, Wells began accepting applications in its retail branches for FHA loans from borrowers with FICO scores [...]
February 18, 2011 (Shirley Allen) Lender Processing Service (LPS) released its monthly “First Look” Mortgage Report for January 2010 yesterday which is derived from its loan-level database of nearly 40 million loans. The month-end data shows a rise in foreclosure inventories with a slight decrease in the delinquency rate. Read more...
