Below is a chart that cuts right through the noise and semantics, and shows that when expressed in a currency — Gold — that has not been battered and diluted endlessly, the true normalized value of housing is really down 80% not just since the housing peak but since the turn of the millennium. Median home price priced […]

Housing is nothing short of Gloom and Doom. Following yesterday’s news out of Zillow of a 0.77% drop in April 2011 home values compared to March 2011, today we get an update from CoreLogic which in turn looks at the latest trends on “underwater” (or negative equity) mortgages in the US. In summary:
 

“10.9 million, or 22.7 percent, of […]

S&P/Case-Shiller home-price data indicated a clear double-dip for housing, as a tax-credit-induced bump last year was erased and national prices fell back to mid-2002 levels.

The composite 20-city home price index, a broad gauge of U.S. home prices, posted a 0.8% drop in March from a month earlier and fell 1.1% from a year earlier. The […]

After reading these 20 “really wacky statistics about the U.S. real estate crisis,” you may never want to own a home again. But that’s not stopping foreigners from swooping in to pick up cheap U.S. real estate, made even cheaper once exchange rates are figured in. 

The team over at Zillow Real Estate Research has just published its first quarter 2011 research numbers showing some dismal numbers for the housing market. “Home values fell three percent in the first quarter of this year, marking a pace of decline not seen since 2008 when the housing recession was at its worst,” the group says. […]

Case-Shiller home price index (January 2011): Smaller drop. In earlier research they found that home “asking prices” provide valuable leading information for house price trends (See Sven Jari Stehn, “House Prices: Asking Prices Point to Further Near-term Weakness.”US Daily Comment, September 30, 2010). Asking prices remain soft, and we therefore forecast another decline in the […]

By most accounts, and as outlined and analyzed extensively in a Knowledge@Wharton article, What the Demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Mean for the Future of Homeownership –  the federally sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not cause the housing and mortgage crisis. But they were a big part of the problem, prompting […]

What’s old is new again. Just posted to www.ZeroHedge.com, is a fairly comprehensive and enlightening recap of the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report which documents their stress testing of 53 large banking holding companies and published its findings last month.
This report and analysis is not only objective, but it’s consistent with many postings on this Blog. All […]

One more chart to put the home price development in a broader context. This chart compares residential home prices to commercial property prices.
Residential prices have fallen about 30% from their peak, while commercial property prices have fallen 40%.
 
Those are serious and significant declines that reflect a huge amount of price adjustment, easily enough to absorb excess […]

ALARMINGLY, today we discover that more than 1.2 million households [have been] lost to the recession, according to a report issued this week by the Mortgage Bankers Association that looked at data between 2005 and 2008.
That number doesn’t include information from 2009, when job losses and foreclosures continued to rise. So it’s likely that the […]