Market Studies

The uncertainty surrounding the highly anticipated interest rate hike has kept the industry on its toes about just when the Federal Open Market Committee will raise rates, but New York Fed President William Dudley has recently reversed his initial forecast for the increase, presenting even more skepticism.

Insurer MGIC, which provides mortgage insurance through its principal subsidiary Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., saw its stock rise 2 percent in morning trading after Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW) analysts gave the company a vote of confidence in a new report. KBW raised MGIC to “outperform” from market perform on Monday.

Today, the GSEs and Ginnie Mae are the only companies securitizing loans in large numbers. The GSEs typically attract high quality, less risky loans within their limits, while Ginnie Mae mostly caters to minorities and first-time buyers.

Ask the Economist is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with an economist about the most pressing issues facing the nation's housing industry and the economy. This installment features Selma Hepp, Chief Economist with Trulia.

The index showed that four of the six components questioned posted net positive gains. The Good Time to Sell component increased 13 points in September compared to the prior month, with 52 percent indicating that it was a good time to sell, up five percentage points from last month.

Foreclosure starts and foreclosure completions were also down over the year, according to the OCC. Servicers initiated 70,728 foreclosures during Q2, which was down from 11.3 percent in the same quarter in 2014. Completed foreclosures during Q2 totaled 37,725, which was a drop of 23.4 percent from a year earlier

While the national unemployment rate held steady at 5.1 percent from August (the U6 rate, the broadest measure of unemployment, fell 3 basis points to 10 percent), September saw a gain of just 142,000 jobs, bringing the average monthly total for the first nine months of 2015 down to 198,000, according to the September 2015 Employment Summary released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday. By comparison, average monthly job gains for the first nine months of 2014 totaled 260,000.

The labor market has improved as the economy has rebounded, and people are moving from the center of the country to the coasts to places that have experienced robust job growth like New York, Florida, and Los Angeles—but they want to be able to move around without being tied down to a mortgage.

Some housing experts expected the homeownership rate, which has been decreasing since 2004, to get a much-needed boost as millennials entered the housing market. However, there have been no results on this end and the homeownership rate has continued to fall.

The ARP 2014-SRF1 transaction (American Residential Properties) once again had the highest delinquency rate out of the 21 transactions at 2.2 percent as of the end of August, holding steady from July after taking a big drop from 3.0 percent in June.