Data released by the Bank of England confirms a continuing drop on mortgage approvals as the number of loans approved for house purchases in April were 107,000, for remortgaging 98,000 and for other purposes 72,000 were all lower than in March. The numbers are all down significantly on the start of the year.
Four rate rises […]

US home sales fell in April to their lowest depths in almost four years as the glut of unsold properties swamping the market ballooned to a record high, an industry report showed Friday.
The monthly snapshot by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) dashed hopes that the ailing housing market could be on the cusp of […]

An economics presentation at Humboldt State University. Special guest lecturer Dr. Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics discusses the current housing bubble and its effects on California
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New home construction in the U.S. may take until 2011 to return to last year’s level, said David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders in Washington.Monthly construction starts would need to jump by 21 percent to reach Seiders’s benchmark for full recovery, which is 1.85 million. There were 1.53 million in […]

Residential foreclosures have been increasing steadily. Industry insiders say foreclosures in Connecticut through April are up 40 percent over the 2006 pace and the trend is continuing. Inventories of foreclosed homes, coupled with slow-moving real estate listings, could have a significant impact on residential values and consumer spending.
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The deterioration in the US housing market is accelerating, new figures showed yesterday, and at a faster rate than Wall Street had been expecting.
With the number of house sales in April down 2.6 per cent on the same month last year, the average selling price for homeowners who do find a buyer has started to […]

Some economists see steeper drop in store for home prices.
Most industry watchers agree that home prices will continue to slide before they recover, but now some economists say they’ve got a long way to fall before bouncing back.
David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poors, has forecast a price drop of about 8 percent for […]

A real estate investment and analysis firm, John Burns Real Estate Consulting, said on May 21 that it is “going public with our concerns” that the national sales information for both new and existing homes, is misleading and covering up a deep plunge of the housing sector. “The housing market has softened much more than […]

The housing market has softened much more than is being reported. We have been advising our retainer clients for more than one year about misleading national sales information, both with the Existing Home Sales and New Home Sales data. We are now going public with our concerns because we are concerned that policy makers are […]

The looming introduction of home information packs (Hips) will no doubt have had many property investors and landlords scratching their chins and wondering whether they would cost more than they could possible save.
While the packs might be a welcome boost for landlords looking to expand their portfolio, those aiming to sell off a few properties […]

After the killer storm and resulting flood wrecked havoc on New Orleans commercial real estate, many lessons were learned.
For one, most communications were knocked out. Property owners had to contact tradesmen that remained in town via text messaging. Telephone calls on hard lines and via cell phones did not work, but for some reason, a […]

The real estate scenario in India is getting bigger with each passing day and attracting attention from more and more foreign investors. Also, add the foreign exchange glut in the country fuelled to a great extent by Non Resident Indians (NRIs) investing their dollars in the market.
NRI participation in Indian realty has certainly brought greater […]

Adrian Ash writes :Buy low, sell high - it sounds simple enough. Yet the strategy eludes most people.
Drowning in newsprint, they like to buy what’s hot instead – like Tech Stocks in late 1999, oil futures in summer 2005, subprime mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, tulip bulbs in Amsterdam, 1624.
Average behavior won’t beat the average, of […]

MUMBAI: It’s not just RBI, but International Monetary Fund (IMF) and central banks across Asia too are concerned over the spiralling property prices and the possible impact on the banks’ books.
In its regional economic outlook for Asia-Pacific, IMF has warned that although rising home loans portfolio appears to be manageable, if home loans continue to […]

Dan Denning writes : Just a quick note on the US housing market, mostly as a cautionary tale about the grinding and plodding nature of house price declines. Two things happened in the US market last week worth noting. First, existing home sales fell by 2.6%. Second, median home prices fell for the ninth straight […]

Britain’s housing market boom is finally on the verge of coming to an end, according to the latest figures.House prices in two-thirds of postcodes in England and Wales registered no increase at all this month or even fell, according to Hometrack, the housing market analyst.
The figures provide fresh evidence that a double whammy of higher […]

Headline: “C.A.R. [California Association of Realtors] reports sales decrease 27.8 percent in April, median price of a home in California at $597,640, up 6.2 percent from year ago.” Then we also read, “Throughout the state inventory levels have increased to their highest levels in recent years…”
Price increase in the climate of declining sales and rising […]

The Times speculates that the UK housing boom is about to come to an end on the back of four interest rate rises, and unaffordability concerns.
However a crash does not seem on the cards, nevertheless some sort of fall is expected.
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INVESTORS seeking the cheapest property stocks are buying in Japan, Germany and China after a two-year tumble in shares of United States home builders.
Japanese land prices are rising for the first time in 16 years, yet shares of developers trade at less than a third the global average, according to UBS AG.
The start of real-estate […]

The census bureau reports that house sales compared to April of 2006 are DOWN 11%, but the press, desperately cheerleading for their real estate advertisers, ignore this fact and instead concentrate on the slight rebound from the truly dismal month of March 2007.
Here are the US Census sales numbers, in thousands:
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Sales of new houses in the US in April rose to a 14-year high, according to the US Commerce Department. The number of new builds sold leapt 16.2%, ahead of forecasts and making an annual rate of 981,000 units.
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Shrewsbury Road, in the well-heeled southern suburbs of Dublin, typifies the frenzy of the Irish housing market over the last decade.  A house here once sold for EUR55 million  ($74 million) just so the new owner could demolish it and build two new properties in its place, as Ireland’s economy boomed.
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A big drop in the price of the typical new home sold in April spurred much better-than-expected sales, according to the latest government reading on the battered real estate and home building market released Thursday.New homes sold at an annual pace of 981,000 in April, up 16.2 percent from the revised 844,000 pace in March. […]

Rising interest rates have slammed the brakes on the housing market, according to a raft of figures out today.
House prices grew at their slowest rate for months in April while mortgage lending also cooled, signalling that the market may be on the verge of a correction.
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The TimesFreePress is reporting Boomers look to bankruptcy system for relief.
“People are getting squeezed,” said Mr. Young, [a bankruptcy lawyer] who has practiced in Chattanooga for almost 30 years. “A lot of baby boomers are seeing incredible debt loads. All the sudden you’re just keeping your mouth above water to keep from drowning.”
Competing financial obligations […]

 ”National Association of Realtors: Sales of existing homes in the U.S. dropped 8.4% in March, their biggest tumble since a 12.6% decrease in January 1989. Economists… were expecting home sales to slip to a 6.45 million unit rate from the 6.69 million unit pace originally reported for February… The inventory of homes for sale fell […]

Real Estate Consultant John Burns has looked at the housing data and reached a rather interesting conclusion: “The housing market has softened much more than is being reported.”Given all the negative news coverage, that’s almost hard to believe. But John does a good job dissecting the data, and he is now concerned that both the […]