FRIDAY FACTS
January 21, 2011
In December, NAR estimated that the sales of existing homes in 2010 would be 4.8 million, down about 6% from 2009. Contributing factors were unemployment, tight credit and worries about further price declines.
From an Inman News story titled, “Real Estate Market to Hit Bottom in 2011?” Altos Research expects the housing recovery to start in about a year. From 2012 to 2014 or so, the company expects the market to stabilize and slowly improve, though high unemployment and high inventory will keep prices low even as transactions pick up over time.
Here’s a quote from Lou Barnes in Inman News: “Financial market people do all they can to ignore housing, hoping that one day it will just go away. On current trend, it might. This notion of consumer-based economic acceleration is fatally incompatible with all four home-price gauges reporting new declines (CoreLogic, Zillow, Federal Housing Finance Agency, Case-Shiller); and new declines in sales, with possibly no net absorption of inventory at all. A 1% increase in mortgage rates is not helpful.”
RealTrends reports that Freddie Mac’s servicers have been told to delay initiating foreclosures for at least nine months for financially troubled service members who are released from active duty through the end of 2011 and have Freddie Mac owned mortgages.
We’re doing better than many. CoreLogic reports that 15% of homes with mortgages in Massachusetts are worth less than the loan amount compared with 23% of homes nationwide
A holiday card sent by Inman News had a quote from Albert Einstein that we should internalize:
“Learn from yesterday
Live for today
Hope for tomorrow”
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