Mortgage Rate Drop Below 5% Stirs Demand

Mortgage Rate Drop Below 5% Stirs Demand
March3, 2010, CNBC

U.S mortgage rates retreated below 5 percent last week, propping demand for home loans after purchase applications sank to a nearly 13-year low the prior week, Mortgage Bankers Association data showed on Wednesday. February's volatile swings in housing demand comes on the heels of a steep January sales slump, blamed mainly on unusually harsh winter weather. The industry group's market index, which measures requests for loans to buy homes and refinance, rose by a seasonally adjusted 14.6 percent in the week ended Feb. 26 to the highest level since mid-December.

Detroit Homes Sell for $1 Amid Mortgage and Car Industry Crisis
March2, 2010, The Guardian

One in five houses left empty as foreclosures mount and property prices drop by 80 percent. Some might say Jon Brumit overpaid when he stumped up $100 (£65) for a whole house. Drive through Detroit neighborhoods once clogged with the cars that made the city the envy of America and there are homes to be had for a single dollar. You find these houses among boarded-up, burnt-out and rotting buildings lining deserted streets, places where the population is shrinking so fast entire blocks are being demolished to make way for urban farms.

MBA Mum on How They Fixed Their Own Mortgage Woes
February 6, 2010, Wall Street Journal

Is the Mortgage Bankers Association embarrassed by the way it resolved its own mortgage mess? In any case, officials of the trade group are refusing to provide details on that question. Surely, many Americans could sympathize with the MBA’s plight. Like them, it made a bad bet on real estate at the peak of the bubble and then watched the value of that property fall far below the loan balance, a predicament known as being “under water.” Unlike most of those other distressed borrowers, however, the MBA seems to have found a way out of its real estate nightmare. On Friday, CoStar Group Inc., a provider of commercial real estate data, announced that it had agreed to buy the MBA’s 10-story headquarters building in Washington, D.C., for $41.3 million. The price is well below the $79 million the trade group says it paid for the glass-walled building in 2007, while it was still under construction.

Home Prices Will Not go up Anytime Soon, Says Barclays Capital
February 26, 2010, Housing Wire

The rate at which home prices are dropping may be slowly coming to a halt across the United States, with analysts at Barclays Capital predicting only a 4 or 5% dip left to go before stabilization. But the rate of appreciation on the back side of that bottoming out is likely to “muddle along for the next few years,” they say in a weekly letter to investors.