I have to say I was a little surprised (read: disappointed) to hear so very little about housing in President Obama's State of the Union speech last night. Yes, he mentioned folks were losing their homes, in the long list of ills plaguing the American people.
The Federal Reserve is winding down its $1.25 trillion in agency mortgage-backed security, purchases, but it's still in there buying, and that is keeping interest rates on the 30-year fixed right around a very low 5 percent.
I'm trying to refinance my mortgage right now, not because I have to, but because I'd like to take advantage of historically low interest rates, which will likely rise after the government begins pulling out of the housing business this spring.
The economic recession and the housing depression will cause many Baby Boomers to push back retirement, but that doesn't mean they're not still eyeing and buying homes built specifically for retirees. Builders of these "active adult communities" are therefore changing some of their models to reflect homeowners' new desires.
The lead story in commercial real estate today is the dynamic duo of Tishman Speyer and BlackRock walking away from Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan. The two have been trying to refi $4.4 billion in debt on the 11,200-apartment property, to no avail. So now they're handing over the keys to the lenders.
The good news is that homeowners are expected to spend more on home remodeling in 2010, the bad news is that "green" remodeling isn't adding to home values. Two reports from the International Builders Show in Las Vegas this week have served to put me, and many other potential remodelers, into a conundrum.
There are some interesting tallies in the 2009 report: Home prices began bouncing back moderately, up 6.3 percent on the National Index from its trough in Q2 2006. Peak to trough decline was 32 percent nationally. But one chart really stood out to me.
In a move to shore up the FHA's beleaguered balance sheet, Commissioner David Stevens on Wednesday announced big changes at the government mortgage insurer that now backs about half of all home loans to the nation's minorities.
Our investigation into allegations of short sale fraud by some of the nation's major lenders certainly struck a nerve in the lending community, but it also served to show me just how uneducated many in that same community still are, even today.
Just as regulators, lawmakers and all forms of financial oversight boards are talking about new regulations to guard against mortgage fraud and another mortgage meltdown, there appears to be yet a new mortgage fraud out there today, allegedly perpetuated by agents of, yes, the big banks.
