After reading these 20 “really wacky statistics about the U.S. real estate crisis,” you may never want to own a home again. But that’s not stopping foreigners from swooping in to pick up cheap U.S. real estate, made even cheaper once exchange rates are figured in. 

The never ending pipeline of shadow inventory – 1,800,000 homes in foreclosure while another 2,000,000 are underwater by 50 percent. No housing recovery without clearing out shadow inventory and expanding real household wages.
There will be no recovery until the shadow inventory is cleared out. This backlog of properties hangs over any sustainable housing recovery like a dark cloud […]

The WSJ just reported that “mall vacancies hit their highest level in at least 11 years in the first quarter, new figures from real-estate research company Reis Inc. showed. In the top 80 U.S. markets, the average vacancy rate was 9.1%, up from 8.7%.” From the WSJ:

 
 
Mall vacancies hit their highest level in at least 11 years in […]

Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic just published an interesting article, “Is the Commercial Mortgage Market healing?”Frankly, it is not wholly clear that the commercial mortgage market is, or will, become better in the very near future. However, Indiviglio lays down a fairly solid argument that is more than worthy of a quick  look. For quite some time […]

What’s old is new again. Just posted to www.ZeroHedge.com, is a fairly comprehensive and enlightening recap of the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report which documents their stress testing of 53 large banking holding companies and published its findings last month.
This report and analysis is not only objective, but it’s consistent with many postings on this Blog. All […]

Finally, some good news. Commercial real estate markets across the U.S. continued on their trend of improvement in the second quarter 2010, according to Moody’s. The news is more than welcome, in that some upward pricing movement is always a good sign for the market, if not for the industries psyche. But the long-standing problems are […]

Fitch reported today the commercial real estate (CRE) values continue to decline giving rise to greater loan losses on CRE. On the average throughout 2009, lenders recovered ONLY 43 cents on the dollar on distressed loans. And there’s more bad news; they see the loss rate only going up.

The average loss severity rate or the ratio […]

ALARMINGLY, today we discover that more than 1.2 million households [have been] lost to the recession, according to a report issued this week by the Mortgage Bankers Association that looked at data between 2005 and 2008.
That number doesn’t include information from 2009, when job losses and foreclosures continued to rise. So it’s likely that the […]

Here at MarylandCommercialTitle.com we have blogged on several unique methods to peek into the current and future economic forecasts. Here’s a new one for us: NEMA Lighting Systems Index.
Seems that as a result of tracking lighting purchases, economists and us onlookers, too can immediately shed light on what is truly happening in the marketplace, as well as what may be occuring […]

Here at MarylandCommercialTitle.com we have reported on much of the bad news since way back in December 2007 (when the markets started to tumble and, ultimately, crash). Now, just maybe things are starting to turn for the better.
As noted previousy, the American Institute of Architects Billing Index is typically considered a LEADING economic indicator. Translated, that means that […]