Market Studies

On a year-over-year basis, national home prices, including distressed sales, declined 5.7 percent in November 2009, according to the LoanPerformance Home Price Index (HPI) by First American CoreLogic. This was an improvement from October's year-over-year price decline of 7.6 percent. However, on a month-to-month basis, national home prices in November declined 0.2 percent from October 2009.

The Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) share of the mortgage financing market has increased nearly 1,000 percent since 2006, and with that exponential leap in the size of its portfolio, defaults and foreclosures have also begun to mount. Real estate experts at the online foreclosure marketplace USHUD.com predict FHA will hold title to 49 percent of residential foreclosure properties by 2018.

According to the latest housing data released by Florida Realtors, both existing home and condo sales in the Sunshine State increased in December 2009. A jump in existing home and condo sales in December was reported in 17 of Florida's metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), and a majority of the state's MSAs reported increased sales for 18 consecutive months.

Consumer demand for home loans fell last week for the first time in a month, as low interest rates failed to entice borrowers to refinance their mortgages, according to data released by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Wednesday. According to the industry trade group's weekly study, applications for refinancing plummeted 15.1 percent, dragging overall volume down 10.9 percent.

The Arizona real estate market seems to be on the mend, according to recent data released by Fidelity National Title, a title insurance and escrow service company in Arizona, in partnership with The Cromford Report, an online statistical resource on the metropolitan Phoenix residential resale market.

Despite the income verifications and trial modification periods being carried out by mortgage servicers, modified loans continue to redefault at extremely high rates. The debt ratings agency DBRS estimates that more than half of all restructured mortgages become delinquent or fall into foreclosure again within six months. As a result, DBRS expects modifications that forgive mortgage debt to become the preferred loss mitigation strategy for many servicers during 2010.

As low interest rates and the tax credit stimulus helped to reduce inventories through the end of 2009 and more markets reported median price increases in December, the Illinois housing market is beginning to show signs of stabilization. Totaling 8,197 transactions, statewide total home sales in December 2009 were up 20.

Following a surge in sales from September through November, existing-home sales fell 16.7 percent in December 2009, according to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The longer-term results, though, demonstrated the ongoing momentum in sales activity throughout the year. For all of 2009, there were 5,156,000 completed sales of previously owned homes, a 4.9 percent jump from the annual sales recorded in 2008. This is the first annual sales gain since 2005, NAR said.

After six straight years of double-digit growth, lenders' reports of suspected mortgage fraud remained relatively flat during the first half of 2009, according to a new government report. The Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said depository institutions reported 32,926 cases of possible mortgage fraud in the first six months of last year - just a 1 percent increase over filings during the same period in 2008.

While the number of initiated foreclosures in Massachusetts increased year-over-year in 2009, the number of completed foreclosures decreased during the same period, according to the latest report from The Warren Group, a Boston-based provider of real estate data in New England.