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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Housing Wire

OCTOBER 31, 2023

A Kansas City jury has found the National Association of Realtors , HomeServices of America and Keller Williams guilty of colluding to inflate or maintain high commission rates through NAR’s Clear Cooperation Rule, in the Sitzer/Burnett buyer broker commission lawsuit. The defendants have been ordered to pay damages of $1.78 billion. The jury reached its verdict after a little over two weeks of testimony from the plaintiffs and defendants.

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Mr. Cooper Group became the target of at least four consumer class-action lawsuits after disclosing a cyberattack at the end of October when customer information was compromised and the company shut down certain systems. On Oct. 31, the Dallas-based servicer and lender said it had experienced a cybersecurity incident with an unauthorized third party accessing certain portions of its technology systems and customer data.

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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

OCTOBER 18, 2023

One in five Americans now shares their homes with adult children, parents or grandparents. In the face of soaring housing costs nationwide, multigenerational living has gained traction as a path to make living expenses more manageable and to maintain closer family bonds. While many multigenerational families are living together under one roof, potentially leading to feelings of overcrowding, accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have emerged as a practical solution for affordable housing that allows f

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

In many communities, homeowners and homebuyers have been hit with eye-popping property tax increases. It is costing more for schools and governments to pay for services. And homes in many communities have shot up in value in recent years, leading to tax increases through reassessments. But opinions differ on how much impact higher taxes are having on local housing and mortgage markets.

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Housing Wire

DECEMBER 23, 2023

As we approach Christmas day, we can only hope that the Federal Reserve now realizes their fear of 1970s-style inflation created a rate-hike cycle that disproportionately impacted the U.S. housing market and that they need to be pro-housing again. Even with all the drama we have dealt with in 2022-2023, the housing market stayed intact and never broke.

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Housing Wire

OCTOBER 12, 2023

A coalition of trade associations — including the Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA), National Association of Realtors (NAR), and Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) — on Thursday called on the Biden administration to reduce the historically large spread between the 30-year mortgage rates and 10-year Treasuries. The trade groups noted that the spread sits at over 300 basis points (bps) compared to the historic norm of about 150 bps.

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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

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

Lower mortgage rates tend to take housing supply off the market and demand has been picking up lately as rates have fallen. However, the recent drop in housing inventory has more to do with seasonality factors than lower mortgage rates. Higher mortgage rates did push inventory higher during the seasonal period when it would normally be declining. However, seasonality tends to rule the day eventually.

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Housing Wire

JUNE 9, 2023

Home prices aren’t crashing, despite what the housing bubble boys are saying. In fact, home prices have firmed up higher recently. The housing bubble boys are a crew that from 2012 to 2019 screamed housing crash every year. They went all in during COVID-19 in 2020, doubled down in 2021 as the forbearance crash bros but really bet the farm on a massive home-price crash in 2023 after the most significant home sales crash ever in 2022.

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Housing Wire

JUNE 7, 2023

After the recent extraordinary show of force defending changes to LLPAs by federal regulators and their friends, the forest through the trees risk remains in focus to me. One of the great concerns I have, as both a former regulator and the former head of a major industry trade association, is the downside risk of keeping the GSEs in conservatorship any longer.

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Housing Wire

OCTOBER 21, 2023

The haunted house ride with the bond market and mortgage rates continued this week, but one housing data line hasn’t been spooked. New listing data appears unafraid of the mortgage rate ghost story over the last few months. Unlike last year, when new listings data had a noticeable move lower once mortgage rates reached 6%, 8% mortgage rates haven’t had any noticeable impact on the latest new listings data.

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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

MAY 19, 2023

Add Rocket Mortgage to the list of companies selling mortgage servicing rights (MSR) in a difficult operating environment. The Detroit, Michigan-based lender sold about $20 billion in MSRs to JPMorgan Chase in April, following a decline in its servicing book in the first quarter of 2023. The company’s unpaid principal balance reached $524.8 billion as of March 31, compared to $535 billion at the end of December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. “In Apr

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Housing Wire

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

The baseline conforming loan limit for mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2024 will be $766,550, up 5.5% compared to the current limit of $726,200 , the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced Tuesday. Conforming loan limits are increasing at a slower pace, mirroring home prices, overall. That’s because the FHFA’s conforming loan limit increase is based on a formula related to home-price data in the third quarter of each year.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 23, 2023

Can we now say that the housing market ‘s spring selling season is finally underway? Since 2020, the seasonal bottom for housing inventory has arrived several months later than normal, making it more complicated to track housing inventory data. Still, we have some promising signs that we might have finally hit the inventory bottom for 2023. We didn’t see too much volatility in mortgage rates last week, but purchase apps declined in reaction to rates rising two weeks ago.

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Housing Wire

MARCH 23, 2023

If there’s one sector of the economy that benefits from the very low levels of total housing inventory , it’s the homebuilders , but for a reason you might not think. If national housing inventory were back to normal, we would have 2 to 2.5 million active listings, and these active listings would be direct competition for the builders. New homes are traditionally more expensive than existing homes, which don’t have all the bells and whistles.

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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

MAY 17, 2023

The best way to fight inflation and get lower mortgage rates is to get more apartment units finished, and so far, this has been slower than my tortoise Grundy. One of the most frustrating data lines since COVID-19 has been housing completion data. Of course, we all understood the delays during the pandemic, but those days are over. We need to ramp things up and so far, it hasn’t been spectacular.

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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 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

JANUARY 6, 2023

Can we have a soft landing in the economy? Friday’s job report shows there is a clear pathway to get there. Mortgage rates fell aggressively down to 6.20%, putting us at more than 1% below the highs of 2022. The bond market saw that wage growth was cooling down, leaving the Federal Reserve with few reasons to keep the rate hike story going much longer.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 27, 2023

What is happening with homebuilders and the new home sales sector as we head into the spring housing market ? We have had some conflicting data points recently. On the one hand, cancelation rates have been rising. On the other hand, mortgage rates have gone down more than 1% since Oct. 20, 2022. The builders’ stock prices have done well as mortgage rates have fallen , and this illustrates the simplicity of the homebuilders’ position: their story is really about mortgage rates and moving pr

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Housing Wire

JUNE 20, 2023

The U.S. single-family rental market is still strong, but the pace of rent increases has cooled significantly over the past year. The market is looking more like 2019 than the price spikes witnessed during the pandemic. U.S. single-family rent increases in May registered a 3.7% gain, compared to the 14.2% growth observed in the same month in 2022, according to Corelogic ’s Single-Family Rent Index (SFRI).

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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

JANUARY 4, 2023

Cyberattacks, particularly wire fraud through business email compromise, remain a major concern for the title industry. Attempted attacks increased significantly, according to a 2022 survey by the American Land Title Association , with 46% of respondents saying their employees receive at least one email a month attempting to change wire or payoff instructions.

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Housing Wire

MAY 18, 2023

Just when I thought days on market were returning to normal, that number for existing homes fell back down to 22 days. Why is this so important to me? If the days on the market are at a teenager level or even lower, it’s never a good sign for the housing market. I would say it’s savagely unhealthy to have that level and even though we’re not there yet, we are dangerously close.

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Housing Wire

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Have we finally hit the limits of the massive boom in 5-unit apartment construction that has been a positive driver of jobs and the fight against inflation since January of 2021? Tuesday’s housing starts report was a mixed bag: housing starts and completions fell with a big hit to 5-unit housing starts. However, housing permits continued to slowly increase, as we’ve seen over the last several months.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 9, 2023

One slice of the single-family home market that has gained traction over the past year in a topsy-turvy housing landscape is the build-for-rent sector — or BFR. Construction starts in the BFR market are being propelled by the ongoing demand for single-family rental units as high mortgage rates and limited for-sale inventory push home-purchase prospects further out of reach of many would-be homebuyers.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 7, 2023

Given Friday’s job report , those who have been concerned with entrenched 1970s inflation — which would lead to double-digit mortgage rates — can put their disco shoes back in the closet. I have tried to explain that the 1970s inflation isn’t a reality , and Friday’s report should ease the fear that wage growth is spiraling out of control.

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Housing Wire

MAY 10, 2023

Did you hear that sound? That’s the entire mortgage industry shouting, “hip, hip hooray!” The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) on Wednesday announced that it would rescind a controversial loan-level pricing adjustment (LLPA) for conventional borrowers with debt-to-income (DTI) levels at or above 40%. The FHFA, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , had previously delayed implementation of the DTI LLPA from May 1, 2023 to August 1, 2023 following a chorus of upset fro

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Housing Wire

APRIL 9, 2023

The housing market welcomed the news of lower mortgage rates last week after four reports showed that the labor market isn’t as tight as it seems and that the fear of 1970s-entrenched inflation was a lousy narrative. The 10-year yield finally broke below a critical technical level it had difficulty breaking for many months and we had a very small increase in inventory.

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