CoreLogic: Equity in mortgaged homes has more than doubled in past 5 years

The amount of equity in mortgaged real estate increased by $1 trillion in Q1 2018 from Q1 2017, an annual increase of 13.3 percent, and has more than doubled in five years. The nationwide negative equity share for Q1 2018 was 4.7 percent of all homes with a mortgage, more than 20 percentage points lower than the peak negative equity share - 26 percent - recorded in Q4 2009.

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CoreLogic: Most U.S. housing markets have returned to peak levels not seen since before Great Recession

The team at CoreLogic recently came out with a report covering the housing market from the Great Recession:

"Residential home prices began to peak in some parts of the country as early as 2005. Home prices collapsed in 2007, when Wall Street began to back out of residential mortgage-backed securities. 

After falling 33 percent during the recession, prices in most markets have returned to peak levels, growing 51 percent nationally since bottoming out in March 2011.

The average home price is now 1 percent higher than it was at the peak in 2006, and the average year-over-year home equity gain was $14,888 in the third quarter of 2017. This indicates the housing market has widely recovered."

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Southern California home prices in January rose at their fastest pace in 44 months

From the L.A. Times:

Home prices in Southern California jumped 11.4% in January — the largest year-over-year gain in 44 months as the region's already sizzling housing market got even hotter.

The double-digit rise in the median price put it at $507,000, which was lower than December's peak of $509,500 when the six-county region surpassed bubble-era highs of $505,000 in 2007, according to a report out Tuesday by research firm CoreLogic.

Affordability drives everything in the Inland Empire," said analyst Patrick Duffy, principal of MetroIntelligence Real Estate Advisors...And while mortgage rates remain historically low at about 4.5% for a 30-year fixed loan, they are ticking up and the increases may be impelling some buyers to sign on the dotted line, Duffy said..."I'll bet some people on the fence are saying 'I am going to pull that trigger,'" he said. "Here's your chance to jump before prices go higher."

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July Case-Shiller index up 0.7 percent from June and 5.8 percent year-on-year

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index, covering all nine U.S. census divisions, reported a 5.9% annual gain in July, up from 5.8% the previous month. Before seasonal adjustment, the National Index posted a month-over-month gain of 0.7% in July.

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CoreLogic: Delinquent mortgages fell to 4.5 percent in May

Nationally, 4.5 percent of mortgages were in some stage of delinquency (30 days or more past due including those in foreclosure) in May 2017. This represents a 0.8 percentage point decline in the overall delinquency rate compared with May 2016 when it was 5.3 percent.

As of May 2017, the foreclosure inventory rate, which measures the share of mortgages in some stage of the foreclosure process, was 0.7 percent compared with 1 percent in May 2016. The serious delinquency rate, defined as 90 days or more past due including loans in foreclosure, was 2 percent, unchanged from April 2017 and down from 2.6 percent in May 2016. The 2 percent serious delinquency rate in April and May this year was the lowest since November 2007 when it was also 2 percent.

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CoreLogic: May home prices up 1.2 percent from April and 6.6 percent year-on-year

Home prices nationally increased year over year by 6.6 percent from May 2016 to May 2017, and on a month-over-month basis, home prices increased by 1.2 percent in May 2017 compared with April 2017.

Looking ahead, the CoreLogic HPI Forecast indicates that home prices will increase by 5.3 percent on a year-over-year basis from May 2017 to May 2018, and on a month-over-month basis home prices are expected to increase by 0.9 percent from May 2017 to June 2017.

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BuilderBytes' MetroIntelligence Economic Update for 11/07/12

Please click here to see the edition of BuilderBytes for 11/07/12 on the Web.

In this issue of the MetroIntelligence Economic Update, I covered the following indicators:

• Home prices decline by 0.3% between August and September but still up by 5.0% over previous year
• Service sector economy grew at slower pace in October

Want to advertise in the newsletter and reach over 130,000 readers? Contact National Sales Manager Nick Cosan at nkosan@penpubinc.com.

Want to make sure your company or event is included in the events calendar? Contact editor Dani Smith at dsmith@penpubinc.com.

BuilderBytes' MetroIntelligence Economic Update for 10/3/12

Please click here to see the edition of BuilderBytes for 10/3/12 on the Web.

In this issue of the MetroIntelligence Economic Update, I covered the following indicators:

• August CoreLogic Home Price Index shows largest annual increase since 2006
• August construction spending dips from July but up by 6.5% since August of 2011

Want to advertise in the newsletter and reach over 130,000 readers? Contact National Sales Manager Nick Cosan at nkosan@penpubinc.com.

Want to make sure your company or event is included in the events calendar? Contact editor Dani Smith at dsmith@penpubinc.com.

BuilderBytes' MetroIntelligence Economic Update for 9/5/12

Please click here to see the edition of BuilderBytes for 9/5/12 on the Web.

In this issue of the MetroIntelligence Economic Update, I covered the following indicators:

• Home prices in July rise by fastest rate since 2006
• Construction spending falls by 0.9% from June but still 9.3% above same month of 2011
• Manufacturing sector dips for third time since July 2009 but overall economy continues to grow
• Factory orders rose by 2.8% in July, inventories up by 0.5%
• Consumer sentiment improves slightly in August as they pay down debt
• Personal income and consumption rise in July as savings rate dips
• Fed's Beige Book shows continued economic growth but manufacturing activity slowing

Want to advertise in the newsletter and reach over 130,000 readers? Contact National Sales Manager Nick Cosan at nkosan@penpubinc.com.

Want to make sure your company or event is included in the events calendar? Contact editor Dani Smith at dsmith@penpubinc.com.

CoreLogic says home prices rose at fastest rate since 2006

More good news for the slowly reviving housing market!  According to a story in the L.A. Times:

Nationwide home prices shot up 3.8% in July, making their largest year-over-year leap since 2006, according to real estate data provider CoreLogic.

The gain marks the fifth straight rise in the gauge, part of a positive swing following a year and a half of slumps. The last time prices rose so much was in August 2006, when they jumped 4.1%.

Prices in California bounded up 4.4%. Without distressed sales – including foreclosures and short sales – national prices were up 4.3% compared with last July.

Click here to read the entire story.

Click here for the CoreLogic report.

Trying to price your home? Don't trust the various index readings.

For many months I've been having the same argument with economists who are forecasting home price reductions of up to 50% or more in previous bubble areas: that doesn't mean all neighborhoods in a particular region will suffer the same fate. Although that also doesn't mean that they'll escape unscathed, factors such as good schools, access to public transit and freeways and jobs are just as important today as they always were. Call it the 'battle of the indices,' but each methodology has its strengths and weaknesses, and the search is on for a system that is the most accurate. From a Wall Street Journal story:

The one point of widespread agreement in the real-estate industry is that there is no single accurate index of home prices. They are all over the map, cover different sets of homes and may exclude parts of the country or be unduly influenced by the mix of homes sold in a given month...

To address these discrepancies, indexes are going increasingly local. Other, less-well-known measures of home prices -- some of them available only to paying customers -- are adjusting to exclude homes sold by banks...

The numbers from home-price indexes are widely watched. The Federal Reserve uses them to measure the value of housing stock. Banks use them to determine whether mortgages are underwater and to estimate the value of homes they will have to sell after foreclosure.

But the indexes may be leading everyone astray. Just as respondents to election surveys are meant to stand in for the broader electorate, the homes being sold need to represent all homes. The problem is, producers of these price measures aren't sure that sale prices reflect the values of houses not on the market...

The Case-Shiller index includes properties that had subprime loans attached.

"That's the stuff that went down most substantially, and that's probably the stuff that went up most substantially," Prof. Case says.

The federal index, though, doesn't include such properties, instead accounting only for properties with financing from mortgage giants Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. For that reason, many prefer Case-Shiller...

Most of the numbers that get headlines are based on metropolitan areas. Yet the housing-market picture can vary dramatically within the same region. Lynn, Mass., a suburb northeast of Boston, saw prices drop 10% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, according to Wellesley's Prof. Case. Yet in the same period prices in Cambridge, just west of the city, rose 13%.

Integrated Asset Services, or IAS, sells estimates by neighborhood. "We are a lot more granular" than Case-Shiller and the federal index, Chief Executive David McCarthy said.

Click here for full story.

Foreclosures still rising even though lenders are (finally) getting serious about cutting prices

As the tide of foreclosed properties continue to rise, lenders are finally realizing that they need to cut prices -- fast and low -- to move inventory to a skittish public and a tight credit market. But have they waited too long to do so? From a Wall Street Journal article:

The number of foreclosed homes owned by lenders continues to rise despite signs that they are increasingly willing to slash prices to sell those properties.

Lenders and investors in mortgages owned about 660,000 foreclosed homes in April, up from 493,000 in January and 231,000 in January 2007, according to First American CoreLogic, a research firm based in Santa Ana, Calif., that collects data from lenders and county clerks. The April total works out to about one in seven previously occupied homes available for sale nationwide.

A surge in defaults has increased the inventory of bank-owned homes, known in the trade as REO, for "real estate owned." By cutting prices, lenders have managed to increase sales of such homes sharply in recent months in some cities hit hard by foreclosures, including Las Vegas, Detroit and Sacramento, Calif., local real-estate brokers say.

With home prices falling, "holding the assets means further losses," said Mark Fleming, chief economist for First American CoreLogic. Some lenders now are cutting prices as often as every 20 days on homes that aren't selling, said David McCarthy, chief executive officer of Integrated Asset Services LLC, a Denver-based company that helps banks value and sell REO homes.

But lenders haven't yet managed to catch up with the inflow of foreclosed homes. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, forecasts that the inventory of REO homes won't peak before the end of 2009...

The REO glut is weighing on house prices in many areas, as banks tend to cut prices faster than other sellers. A new set of local home-price indexes, to be introduced this week by Integrated Asset Services, shows that the median price of homes sold in Riverside County, Calif., in April was down about 29% from a year earlier. The median price fell about 13% in Clark County, Nev., and 12% in Arizona's Maricopa and Pima counties. Median-price comparisons can be skewed by shifts in the proportions of high- and lower-priced homes sold from one year to the next but provide a broad indication of market trends.

To avoid or at least delay losses, many lenders are trying to avert foreclosures by easing loan terms or giving struggling borrowers more time to catch up. Hope Now, an alliance of mortgage companies and investors, said last week that mortgage companies completed loan workouts for 183,000 households in April, up from 160,000 in March.