DEAD ON ARRIVAL: Courtesy of the WSJ, which summarizes the prevailing views on this topic:
Edward Mills, analyst, FBR Capital Markets: “We believe that this program would be dead on arrival in Congress, as congressional Republicans are opposed to additional intervention in the mortgage market and are philosophically opposed to a bank tax. This should be confirmation that […]

The Obama administration, in conjunction with federal regulators and led by the overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to industry reports, is very close to announcing a pilot program to sell government-owned foreclosures in bulk to investors as rentals.
The Scope of the Problem: There currently […]

I GUESS THINGS WERE WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT … HMMMMMM! This just in …..

EXISTING U.S. HOME SALES REVISED DOWN BY 14% FROM 2007-2010
EXISTING HOME SALES REVISED DOWN BY 15% IN 2010 TO 4.19 MLN

This SHOCKING news proves — once and for all – what everyone in the know, intuitively suspected: What you see, when it comes […]

They say, as the housing market goes, so goes the economy. If that’s the case, things are not looking up in Maryland.
More specifically, sales of existing homes in Maryland fell for the second consecutive month in October 2011 from a year ago, according to new figures from the Maryland Association of Realtors and Metropolitan Regional […]

We are in unchartered territory. A whopping 28.6 percent of homeowners with mortgages owe more on their loans than their homes could sell for, according to quarterly data released Tuesday by Zillow.

That’s up from 26.8 percent in the second quarter 2011.
Home values declined only 0.2 percent from the second quarter but were down 4.4 percent […]

Lets see into the future. Looks like RENTING is on the upswing. Check it out.
70660484-housing-joint-report-final.pdf

So, is this déjà vu, all over again?
Not weighing in on the plans viability, with respect to solving the overall housing crisis issue, but today the federal government announced that it would overhaul a program that lets homeowners refinance mortgage loans at lower interest rates to […]

Below is a chart that cuts right through the noise and semantics, and shows that when expressed in a currency — Gold — that has not been battered and diluted endlessly, the true normalized value of housing is really down 80% not just since the housing peak but since the turn of the millennium. Median home price priced […]

Housing is nothing short of Gloom and Doom. Following yesterday’s news out of Zillow of a 0.77% drop in April 2011 home values compared to March 2011, today we get an update from CoreLogic which in turn looks at the latest trends on “underwater” (or negative equity) mortgages in the US. In summary:
 

“10.9 million, or 22.7 percent, of […]

S&P/Case-Shiller home-price data indicated a clear double-dip for housing, as a tax-credit-induced bump last year was erased and national prices fell back to mid-2002 levels.

The composite 20-city home price index, a broad gauge of U.S. home prices, posted a 0.8% drop in March from a month earlier and fell 1.1% from a year earlier. The […]