Bottom-pickers have smelly fingers. Ever since the first local home price declines of 2006, there have been groups calling the bottom. Realtors, mortgage brokers, home builders, and various economists crawl out of the woodwork each Spring to announce that home prices are about to start going up. Their logic is always flawed, their data too [...]
January 30, 2012
A lot of people ask where we get all of the news that we filter to find our daily news links. Here is my system… I use Google Reader, which is an easy way to track all the news and blog posts from the sites you care about in one place. Every morning, I’ll pull [...]
January 30, 2012
Check out the Youth Unemployment rates for Portugal, Greece, and Spain. Talk about driving social mood to a darker place… Courtesy Zero Hedge: For comparison, the Youth Unemployment rate (16-24 year olds) in the United States was last reported at 18.1%.
January 26, 2012
NAR has put out some data showing how much tougher it has become for younger people to sell their home and buy another. Repeat sales for people 44 and younger have fallen off a cliff. Obviously, most of this segment bought during the last decade and are now “equity-challenged.” Generations X and Y are either [...]
January 25, 2012
Wall St Journal, by way of Calculated Risk had some housing comments recently along the lines of markets “improving from the bottom up“. They referenced some data suggesting a surge in buying activity within lower price sectors of real estate in New York and New Jersey. They continued with analyst commentary suggesting that it was [...]
January 23, 2012
Dear Edward DeMarco, Your position regarding principal reduction for underwater mortgages illustrates just how unfit you are to be running the FHFA. You argue against principal reductions, because it might cost “marginally” more than principal forbearance, yet you completely ignore all of the data suggesting that negative equity leads to strategic defaults and a potential [...]
What We Are Reading Today
February 7, 2012
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