Tag Archives: Mortgage Rates

Following a year of fast-paced appreciation, Fitch Ratings expects home price gains to slow to a more moderate pace in 2014 in the United States, according to its Global Housing and Mortgage Outlook released Tuesday. The ratings agency also predicts mortgage volume will decline and delinquencies and shadow inventory will decrease, albeit slowly, while liquidation timelines continue to rise.

In 1998, the top 10 mortgage lenders held around 40 percent of the market. By 2010, their share increased to nearly 80 percent; since then, it's dropped down to around 60 percent. Why the decrease? Because only five of the top 20 single-family mortgage originators in 2006 remain active today. So what's driving the big guys out--market cycles or market restructuring? And will the current trend of favoring smaller lenders and servicers last forever?

Despite recent gains, which some of us believe are more of a mirage than an oasis, the economy still isn't creating enough good-paying full-time jobs to drive a full recovery in the housing market. At the same time, stricter lending requirements--and a lending environment likely to get more challenging before it gets easier--are the other major headwinds that could slow down housing.

Looking at ongoing trends, Zillow made four major predictions about the course of housing over 2014, and while the company expects conditions next year to be a bit friendlier to homebuyers, that doesn't mean we'll necessarily see more owner-occupied housing. Zillow also combined data on unemployment, population growth, and its own Home Value Forecast to glimpse into what it believes will be the hottest markets in 2014.

The veterans of this business can remember when REOs ran in the neighborhood of 150,000 a year, delinquency rates were just around 4 percent, and you only needed a credit score of 620 to qualify for a prime mortgage loan. But the housing finance industry, and default servicing especially, has changed. In the cover story of it's September issue, DS News looks at the many factors--from a slew of new regulatory mandates to an altered public perception of debt obligations--that have altered the business into something far from customary.

With fewer properties entering the foreclosure process and more delinquent borrowers avoiding foreclosure, the number of foreclosed single-family homes held by lenders and government agencies has rapidly declined. In the April issue of DS News magazine, contributing writer Keith Button explored the many market drivers taking their toll on the once-strong stock of bank-owned homes.

DataQuick, a real estate information solutions firm headquartered in San Diego, announced it has expanded its Standard Recorder layout to provide a more comprehensive view of properties and transactions. The expanded layout allows for the creation of a custom bundle devoted to key loan transaction intelligence, including data on 12 million loan modifications, loan terms on four million mortgages, interest rates on 600,000 loans, and details on 525,000 reverse mortgages.

One of the earliest phenomenon of the housing bubble was the ascension of home prices, making housing unaffordable relative to incomes. Markets across the nation cascaded from affordable to unaffordable--a key signal that prompted us to warn of the coming housing downturn. And it now appears that this symptom has cropped up once again, as almost all of California's coastal cities are now unaffordable.

""Modest to moderate"" economic growth continues to be the theme at the Federal Reserve, which this week released its Beige Book, tracking expansion across the 12 Fed districts from October through mid-November. The central bank reported improvements in residential real estate activity in the Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and San Francisco regions, with single-family home sales softening in most of the remaining districts.

Fixed mortgage rates increased sharply this week while reports on adjustable-rate mortgages were mixed. Freddie Mac puts the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 4.46 percent for the week ending December 5, up from 4.29 percent last week. Bankrate's weekly national survey showed a rise of 11 basis points for the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage to 4.55 percent. Economists pinned the increases on encouraging growth in new home sales and private jobs.