Housing Wire

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Since the 2008 housing crisis , there have been significant changes that prompted the Treasury to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under conservatorship. While the conservatorship has allowed for the mortgage market to be restored to its pre-crisis state and strengthened these two government-sponsored entities (GSEs), there are significant downsides to maintaining the status quo indefinitely.

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Sacramento Appraisal Blog

DECEMBER 4, 2023

Wall Street has invaded Main Street. It’s truly stunning to see that a company like Invitation Homes owns over 9,000 units in California. Today, I want to debut an interactive map I made to show where these homes are located. UPCOMING (PUBLIC) SPEAKING GIGS: 12/08/23 Free Q&A event for appraisers only (on private work) […] The post This one company owns 9,000+ homes in California (interactive map) first appeared on Sacramento Appraisal Blog.

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Real Estate News

DECEMBER 15, 2023

Five women told the Times that it took a lawsuit to get action on predatory behavior. A second lawsuit has been filed. eXp says it let “bad actors” go.

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George Dell

DECEMBER 20, 2023

More appraisal censorship is here! Have you noticed this new regulation that censors California appraisers and flat out appears to prohibit accepted sound appraisal methodology and practice? Editor’s Note: A Guest Post from Bruce Hahn, CCIM, MAI, SRA Consider California Business & Professions Code Section 11424(a) which says: Licensees shall not base, either partially or […] The post More Appraiser Censorship??

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Inman

DECEMBER 11, 2023

When it comes to marketing high-end homes, it pays to think like an ad firm. That means knowing your target audience, using themes they’ll understand, and finding ways to creatively defy convention.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 2, 2023

What a week! Mortgage rates almost fell below 7%, the 10-year yield is below 4.25% again, and people are seriously talking about Fed rate cuts in 2024. Times can change quickly, which is why we created the weekly tracker so you have the information you need in real-time. Purchase application data Hello, early Christmas present! Mortgage rates have fallen by almost 1% in a short time, and it has created four straight weeks of positive purchase application data.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 16, 2023

The Federal Reserve played the good grinch for Christmas this year and delivered the best gift for homebuyers nationwide, leading to lower mortgage rates. The 10-year yield and mortgage rates fell together after the Fed meetings, which gave us mortgage rates under 7% last week. Mortgage rates and the 10-year yield What a crazy week! Not too long ago, on jobs Friday, I was on the HousingWire Daily podcast saying it’s time to declare war on the Federal Reserve for being too restrictive; you can li

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 9, 2023

The most underreported housing story I’ve seen this year is that even with mortgage rates rising to 8%, the number of homes that took price cuts before they sold was 4% below 2022 levels. This happened even with higher home prices and higher mortgage rates in 2023. Weekly housing inventory data We will start with the price cut data percentage because it deserves a detailed explanation. 2022 was a historic year for housing as we had the most significant home sales crash ever, and mortgage r

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 22, 2023

New home sales missed sales estimates , but the builders’ stocks have been roaring higher. What gives? There are two key things to remember before I go into the report’s details. Mortgage rates rising to 8% in October impacted the data line, which I spoke about on CNBC recently. Also, new home sales are notorious for big positive and negative prints that tend to get revised.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 8, 2023

After today’s jobs report , which showed unemployment at 3.7%, it’s now clear that the Federal Reserve does not need to create a job-loss recession to bring down the growth rate of inflation. The Fed has much to answer for after their massive rate hikes and quantitative tightening policy. These were created to bring down inflation by impacting the labor market but they disproportionally affected housing in a negative way.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 21, 2023

First American is the latest real estate firm to suffer a cybersecurity incident. Sources told HousingWire the incident occurred Wednesday afternoon, with First American confirming the incident Thursday morning. In a statement on the title company’s website it notes that First American has “taken certain systems offline” and that it is working to resume normal business operations as soon as possible.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Mortgage rates continued their downward trajectory this week as the 10-year Treasury yield dropped below 4.2% for the first time since September, according to new data from Freddie Mac. The 30-year, fixed mortgage rate averaged 7.03% for the week ending Dec. 7, according to Freddie Mac ‘s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That’s down significantly from last week ’s 7.22% and up from 6.33% the same week a year ago.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Boom! Housing starts had an epic beat Tuesday, which usually means the data will get revised lower at some point, but one thing is for sure: the housing starts and new home sales sector came to throw shade at the 2023 recession crowd. Many say housing leads the economy into a recession, which has been the case for decades since higher rates tend to put the U.S. economy into a recession.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 13, 2023

The Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) held its short-term policy interest rate steady at a range of 5.25% to 5.5% at its last meeting of the year on Wednesday. It was the fourth pause recorded in 2023. Investors will parse Jerome Powell’s press conference this afternoon for clues about when and why the central bank might change its policy stance next year.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 30, 2023

Going into 2023, people thought housing inventory would skyrocket, home prices would crash, and we would see the housing market of 2008 all over again. We created this weekly tracker at the end of 2022 to give people a live weekly outlook on everything that drives the housing market and which factors to follow. Those reading the tracker would have understood why the housing market dynamics shifted on Nov. 9, 2022, and they’ll be ready for what’s coming next.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 6, 2023

Falling mortgage rates last week brought increased demand. Total home loan applications increased 2.8% for the week ending Dec. 1 compared to the previous week , according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 7.17% last week. Slower inflation and the confidence financial markets have that we are nearing the end of the Fed ’s hiking cycle has brought mortgage rates to the lowest level since August.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 26, 2023

Kyle Joseph, a specialty finance equity research analyst at Jefferies , believes that the worst of the current mortgage cycle may be behind us, a sentiment shared by most analysts covering this industry. “Barring any sort of unforeseen consequences, I’d like to think so , ” Joseph said in an interview. “Obviously, this cycle was fast and furious – for lack of a better term – in terms of how quickly rates went up, and volumes basically got cut into a third of what they wer

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 26, 2023

Despite lower sales activity, home prices continued their upward trend in October, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Real estate experts say the performance reflects limited inventory in the country, a problem expected to continue in 2024. The data released on Tuesday shows that home prices in all nine U.S. census divisions posted a 4.8% annual gain in October, up from a 4% gain in the previous month.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 21, 2023

Mortgage rates stayed below 7% for the second week in a row, a welcome relief after a 17-week streak of above-7% rates. This week’s dip is the largest weekly drop since November 2022. The 30-year, fixed mortgage rate averaged 6.67% for the week ending Dec. 21, according to Freddie Mac ‘s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That’s down from last week’s 6.95% and up from 6.27% the same week a year ago.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 27, 2023

Zillow Group and ShowingTime are taking two multiple listing services (MLSs) to court, due to their allegedly anticompetitive behavior. On Friday, Zillow Group and ShowingTime filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Arizona against Arizona Regional MLS and Wisconsin -based Metro MLS. The lawsuit also names MLS Aligned , the parent company of showing platform Aligned Showings.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 27, 2023

The nation’s second largest title insurer , First American , as well as some of its subsidiaries, remain offline as of Wednesday morning in the wake of the title firm’s Dec. 20 cybersecurity incident. The systems outage has derailed closings across the country over the holidays for homebuyers and sellers using the company’s title services in more than 2,000 locations.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 1, 2023

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Friday published a proposal that would require public housing agencies (PHA) to provide 30 days’ notice before filing an eviction notice in court for nonpayment of rent. PHAs with tenants in public housing and owners of properties participating in HUD multifamily project-based rental assistance programs would need to provide “written notification at least 30 days” before a court filing for an eviction due to rent nonpayment.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 28, 2023

As we prepare to bid adieu to 2023, mortgage rates this week again stayed below seven percent. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.61% as of Dec. 28, a slight decrease from the 6.67% rate recorded on Dec. 21 according to Freddie Mac ‘s Primary Mortgage Market Survey released on Thursday. The 15-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 5.93% this week, down from 6.95% one week ago.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 26, 2023

Mortgage subservicer Loancare informed authorities that the data of about 1.3 million customers was compromised following a cyberattack in November on its parent company, the big four title firm Fidelity National Financial (FNF). This data includes customers’ social security numbers. The company informed officials in Maine and California that 1,316,938 customers had information accessed by hackers during the incident.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Today’s inflation reports show that Federal Reserve rate cuts are in play in 2024 — not because of the labor market breaking, but because real rates are too high. If the labor market gets weaker, meaning jobless claims break over 323,000 on the four-week moving average, we can get even more rate cuts. The labor market is not there yet so for now we can focus on the fact that the Fed overhiked, and because of that, they have room to cut.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 4, 2023

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us and December is well under way, we can start looking ahead to the 2024 housing market. New listings and home sales remain low this week while available inventory of unsold homes is finally falling across the country after rising with mortgage rates late into November. It’s looking like we’ll end 2023 with higher housing inventory than this time last year.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 6, 2023

In September 2022, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate averaged 6.1%, according to Freddie Mac data. Fast-forward one year, and the rate averaged 7.2%, an expensive difference for many homebuyers (rates have since started to drop ). But compare mortgage delinquencies over the same period: 2.8% in September 2022, 2.8% in September 2023, according to CoreLogic data.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 26, 2023

U.S. house prices increased year over year in October, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index. However, the data shows it slowed down compared to the previous month. In fact, home prices climbed 6.3% from October 2022 to October 2023, compared to 5.5% year over year in September, according to the FHFA HPI released on Tuesday.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 14, 2023

The holidays have come early for the mortgage industry. Mortgage rates fell below the 7% threshold this week as markets prepared for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s announcement on Wednesday. The 30-year, fixed mortgage rate averaged 6.95% for the week ending Dec. 14, according to Freddie Mac ‘s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That’s down from last week’s 7.03% and up from 6.31% the same week a year ago.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 18, 2023

A decline in mortgage rates since November helped end four months of declines in builder confidence. Recent economic readings suggest improving housing conditions in 2024. Builder confidence gained three points to 37 in December, the first monthly increase since July, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI).

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 29, 2023

More than a week after it shut down systems to combat a cybersecurity incident , title insurance giant First American Financial says it has restored some key systems and “contained the threat.” Though details about the hack — which has delayed closings across the country — remain sparse, a filing was made with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday for the first time disclosing data theft. “As of the date of this filing, the Company believes it has contained the incid

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 19, 2023

The landscape of real estate is undergoing significant transformations in 2024, driven by a confluence of technological advancements, shifting market dynamics and evolving consumer behaviors. 1. Technology 2024: Proptech challenges and profitability pursuit The proptech sector, a technological cornerstone of the real estate space heavily reliant on venture capital, has encountered formidable challenges in the past year.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 15, 2023

After two straight years of double-digit declines, home sales will pick up in 2024 thanks to lower mortgage rates. This is according to NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun, who shared a presentation of his 2024 forecast on Tuesday. While the past two years have been challenging to say the least for prospective homebuyers , homeowners have been reaping the fruits of their investments, as home prices steadily appreciated for the past three years.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 15, 2023

As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas. A copycat commission lawsuit filed on Thursday by home sellers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accuses 47 real estate industry defendants of allegedly conspiring to artificially inflate real estate agent commissions. This is the second commission lawsuit filed in the Lone Star State since a Missouri jury found the real estate industry liable for colluding to inflate agent commissions in late October.

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