The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

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Real Estate Broker/Owner
RECENT BLOG POSTS
This past week the White House downgraded their assessment of the economy when they contracted their GDP projection for 2010 from 3.2% to 2% and increased their original unemployment outlook from below 8% to 9.8%. There are two concerns with unemployment.  The first is the actual percent, and the...
08/29/2009
According to the Census Bureau, new home sales jumped 9.6% from June to July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 433,000. This is the highest rate of home sales since August of 2008.  However, new home sales are still down -13.4% from last July. The inventory of unsold new homes fell -3.2% fr...
08/29/2009
The MBA reported on Wednesday that the mortgage purchase application index rose 1% this past week to 280.5. While the reading of 280.5 does not represent overly encouraging demand for real estate, the index has slowly risen for four consecutive weeks. The 30-year fixed rate mortgage rose from 5.1...
08/27/2009
On Monday CNBC's Diana Olick wrote a post about mortgage cure rates.  For those of you who haven't read her stuff before, I recommend it.  She is one of a very small minority of housing analysts who understand the comprehensiveness of the housing market. A cure rate is a term used to represent th...
08/25/2009
Case-Shiller announced today that home prices rose in June from May by 1.4% for both the 10-city and 20-city indexes. I'm still trying to figure out why this makes headlines and why people think that this indicates that the housing market is bottoming. Of course home prices rose from May to June....
08/25/2009
On July 3rd, more than half-way through the year, I wrote a post that the number oif bank failures had reached 52.  Now here we are, less than two months later and that number has exploded to 81.  We have had nearly 30 bank failures in less than two months.  That is a pace of nearly one every oth...
08/23/2009
With existing home sales rebounding this past month to the fastest pace since the financial crisis made land-fall in September, it begs the question, was the Fed's monetary policy of purchasing $1.25 trillion in mortgage backed securities worth the cost? To put this Fed monetary intervention into...
08/23/2009
With all of the talk about a housing bottom, I thought I would point out a small little statistic that the media continues to overlook...home values are still falling.  And they are still falling in all four regions that the NAR tracks.  Specifically, the median home value fell by -15.0% in the N...
08/22/2009
The NAR published their monthly existing home sales report on Friday which showed that home sales rose 7.2% in July from June on a seasonally adjusted rate and are up 5% from last year at this same time.  This is clearly good news as the real estate market needs a massive increase in demand in or...
08/22/2009
The MBA announced today in their quarterly delinquency report that a new record 13.16% of all mortgages were at least 30 days late or already in the process of foreclosure.  This was an increase from the previous record of 12.07% during the first quarter of 2009.  The MBA's chief economist, Jay B...
08/20/2009
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Mark MacKenzie

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