The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

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Real Estate Broker/Owner
RECENT BLOG POSTS
Whoever said, Jim Cramer, that the housing market has bottomed doesn't know anything about Option ARMs.  Those loans are represented by the light yellow bars in the graph below, the ones that surge in 2010 and 2011.  Never mind that a record 12% of all mortgages are 30 days late, or that the real...
07/05/2009
According to CNNMoney.com writer Catherine Clifford, the number of failed banks in 2009 jumped to 52 as the FDIC took over seven more banks on Thursday.  The total cost to the FDIC has been $12.3 billion this year.  In 2008 there were a total of 25 bank failures at a cost of $17.6 billion, the ar...
07/03/2009
The NAR recently published their May Housing Affordability Index which showed that while affordability did drop from a record high 178.8 in April to 171.6 in May, it remains well above historic norms. Prior to this year, the highest housing affordability index reading was 147.9 in 1973.  The firs...
07/03/2009
The NAR announced yesterday that their pending home sales index held steady in May rising 0.1% to 90.7.  It is the highest reading since September of 2008 when the index hit 90.9.  That's the good news. The bad news is that while there is the possibility that home sales have bottomed, at least fo...
07/02/2009
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that the U-6 unemployment rate rose to 16.5% as a result of 467,000 jobs being lost in June.  The number of June job losses breaks a trend of four consecutive months of job loss declines.  The advertised unemployment rate rose to 9.5%. The U-6 unempl...
07/02/2009
In the latest sign that Washington has been behind the curve on this housing crisis, the FHFA announced today that they are finally changing their original refinance blueprint (Home Affordable Refinance Program, HARP) and are now authorizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to include refinance LTV's o...
07/01/2009
According to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, home values declined by -18.1% from April of 2008 to April of 2009. While real estate bulls will tout that the rate of decline is slowing down, there are two counter arguments that need to be considered. First, according to the NAR, home values ...
07/01/2009
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the weekly mortgage purchase application index fell -4.5% to 267.7 as mortgage rates eased from 5.44% to 5.34%. The weekly purchase application had hit a 10-week high last week when it rose to 280.3. And while the index did slip this past week, what ...
07/01/2009
Exactly $300 billion of what did taxpayers guarantee when the Fed stepped in to provide support to Citigroup in November of 2008? According to CNBC, that is the question that Rep. Alan Grayson is asking Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP. It is a fair question considering that ...
06/26/2009
The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said that consumer confidence rose to 70.8 in June, the highest reading since February of 2008. This of course begs the question, why? As I wrote about last month, it appears that the tail is wagging the dog with these numbers. There are thr...
06/26/2009
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