•Housing Recovery in Peril as Obama Aid Fails to Get Financing Breakthrough

Discussion in 'Economics' started by ByLoSellHi, Jun 29, 2009.

  1. Housing in Peril as Obama Fails to Get Breakthrough (Update1)
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    By Kathleen M. Howley

    June 29 (Bloomberg) -- Driving through Riverside, California, Bruce Norris pointed to a half-dozen empty houses with “For Sale” signs stuck in untended lawns that he said investors might buy if banks would just extend some credit.

    “People today look at us as the enemy,” said Norris, 57, head of Riverside-based Norris Group, which purchases and renovates homes to rent or sell. “That’s a big problem for housing because if we can’t get the financing we need, a lot of these properties are going to sit vacant.”

    Four months after President Barack Obama pledged $275 billion to shore up home sales, the engine that powered every U.S. recovery since 1960 is stalled. Bankers’ reluctance to finance buyers who won’t live in properties is one barrier to a turnaround. Stricter qualifying rules and a rise in the cost of residential loans to 5.42 percent have impeded new mortgage lending, which is at a 13-year low. An inventory of 2.1 million unoccupied houses on the market, created by the fastest foreclosure pace in history, may be a drag on a revival.

    The $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit in the U.S. economic stimulus package and a government program to subsidize some mortgage payments have had little effect, according to Eric Belsky, executive director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    “It hasn’t been much more than a see-sawing of data,” Belsky said in an interview. “Housing has led the U.S. economy out of every recession for at least 50 years, and for that to happen again more stimulus is going to be needed.”

    Leading Indicator

    The residential real estate market improved ahead of the end of the past seven contractions, with home construction starts beginning to climb an average of seven months before gross domestic product picked up and sales gaining about four months in advance, according to data compiled by David Berson, chief economist of PMI Group, a mortgage insurer in Walnut Creek, California...

    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aFMKsUkXOvuU
     
  2. It's all bullish. The S+P can't even break 850 let alone retest the lows!
     
  3. actually i am hearing that the lower end that can use a conforming loan is hot in california. multiple offers and sales over asking.
    higher end non conforming propertirs are still slow.