Housing News: Weakness, Weakness

(From NakedCapitalism.com)
The latest housing news is not pretty. The decline, however, was only slightly below the expected annualized level of 4.94 million units. From Bloomberg:
Sales of previously owned U.S. homes fell in June to the lowest level in a decade, signaling tumbling real-estate prices and consumer confidence are hurting demand.
Resales dropped 2.6 percent to a [...]

Arson Rages In Foreclosed Homes…Housing Bubble Breaks Records

July 3 (Bloomberg) — At 10:40 p.m. on April 27, a blaze at the beige Victorian house at 19 Nye St. lit up a neighborhood littered with boarded-up homes on the north side of New Bedford, Massachusetts. It left charred wood and melted vinyl siding on the three-story structure.
The house had been abandoned after the [...]

Homebuilder Eli Broad Sees Bad News on Housing….

The greybeards are not only chastened by the state of the economy, but as the example of Eli Broad illustrates, they are speaking up about it. That’s telling, because there is an unspoken rule in American business to stay upbeat, lest you unnecessarily scare investors and consumers who supposedly aren’t sophisticated enough to handle bad [...]

Countrywide, Mozilo Will Be Facing Lawsuits For Years

Angelo Mozilo, who started Countrywide Financial in 1969 with David Loeb, will bid adieu to the torn-and-tattered remains of the company today as it formally completes its sale to Bank of America.
The fallout from the subprime debacle will likely continue to unfold in courtrooms for years to come. With foreclosures still on the rise and [...]

Home Prices Dropping At Highest Rate Ever…Bottom Could Take A Year Or More

(From HuffingtonPost.com, by J.W. ELPHINSTONE | June 24, 2008 04:36 PM EST)
NEW YORK — No matter who’s measuring, the results are the same: Housing prices are tumbling at the sharpest rates ever with a bottom still at least a year away, economists say.
Both the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price indices and the Office of Federal [...]

Home Price Rebound?…Don’t Hold Your Breath

 (From TheHousingBubbleBlog)…
The Associated Press reports on California. “Median home prices dropped 26.7 percent in May across Southern California’s six most populous counties compared with last year. DataQuick said it marked the steepest annual drop since the firm began keeping records in 1988. Median home prices fell to $370,000 in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, [...]

Subprime Mortgage Lender Failures: Peoples Choice

How homeowners’ missed mortgage payments set off widespread problems and woke up the Fed.
By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Alec Klein
The Washington Post
Monday, June 16, 2008; A01

 
The mortgage executives who gathered in a blond-wood conference room in Southern California studied their internal reports with growing alarm.
More and more borrowers were falling behind on their monthly payments [...]

Home Buyer Horror Stories From San Diego

By ZACH FOX and EDWARD SIFUENTES – Staff Writers, North County Times
VISTA —- Working as a real estate agent, insurance dealer, income tax preparer and credit repair specialist, Miguel Romero has helped Latinos buy 122 homes since 2004, becoming one of his firm’s best salesmen.
But his customers have not been so fortunate —- at least [...]

Mortgage Interest Rate Resets To Increase…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The current national housing crisis will continue to cause disruptions in the economy as interest rates increase on more mortgages and more home loans fail, the top U.S. housing policymaker said on Thursday.
“We know that much of this issue is still in front of us,” Steve Preston, secretary of the Department of [...]

We Are ALL Subprime Now…

First the Bloomberg………
 
 

“The movement in the forward Libor-OIS spreads is telling you that the market is concerned that things can get even worse before they get better,” said Carl Lantz, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Credit Suisse, one of the 20 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the Federal Reserve. [...]