3.5 percent in closing-cost assistance from Fannie Mae!!!!!

Discussion in 'Wall St. News' started by S2007S, Feb 1, 2010.

  1. S2007S

    S2007S

    Just more incentives to push all these foreclosed homes off the market and into the hands of new homeowners. They will come up with just about anything to keep housing prices from falling any further and try and keep the housing market as stable as possible during these times where unemployment is above 10% and jobs almost impossible to find. Wonder what kind of programs they will push once this one ends on May 1st, 2010. It seems once these programs are finally off the market, hopefully sometime in 2010, that housing prices will continue to drop further. Without these programs in place housing prices would be down another 25% across the board. Remove the $8,000 tax credit and watch sales and housing prices drop, especially in the $250,000 or less range which have made up a significant amount of the sales during these last 6-8 months.


    Fannie Offers Aid to Buyers of Its Foreclosed Homes
    January 28, 2010, 02:22 PM EST



    By Theo Francis and Dawn Kopecki

    Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage- finance company, is offering buyers of its foreclosed homes as much as 3.5 percent in closing-cost assistance to help clear an inventory of properties acquired during the housing slump.

    The offer is good through May 1, the Washington-based company said in an e-mailed statement today. Buyers can choose between help on closing costs or appliances of equal value, the company said.

    Fannie Mae has been trying to trim its stock of foreclosed homes, an inventory that has risen amid a three-year housing slump in which home prices have plummeted as much as 30 percent. The move is designed to foster sales in a still-weak housing market, Terry Edwards, Fannie Mae’s executive vice-president of credit portfolio management, said in the statement.

    “Attracting qualified buyers to the market and reducing the inventory of vacant homes is critical to stabilizing neighborhoods and helping the market recover,” he said. “Many families are taking advantage of the federal homebuyer tax credit to buy a new home so this is a great time for Fannie Mae to offer some additional help.”

    The company sold 89,691 foreclosed homes in the first three quarters of 2009, up from 39,864 during the first nine months of 2008, the company said in its most recent quarterly filing. It had 72,275 so-called real-estate-owned homes remaining in inventory as of Sept. 30.

    Offering closing incentives should help Fannie Mae release inventory in a controlled fashion, Mahesh Swaminathan, a mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse Group in New York, said in an interview.

    “It’s the kind of thing which could draw buyers,” Swaminathan said. “I fully expect there to be more of these types of things.”