The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) today announced the maximum conforming loan limits for mortgages to be acquired by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2019. In most of the U.S., the 2019 maximum conforming loan limit for one-unit properties will be $484,350, an increase from $453,100 in 2018.
Baseline limit
A modest increase in interest rates and home prices kept housing affordability at a 10-year low in the third quarter of 2018, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) released today.
In all, 56.4 percent of new and existing homes sold between the beginning of July and end of September were affordable to families earning the U.S. median income of $71,900. This is down from the 57.1 percent of homes sold in the second quarter that were affordable to median-income earners and the lowest reading since mid-2008.
By Kelsey Ramirez
The homeownership rate increased slightly in the third quarter, driven primarily by a jump in first-time homebuyers.
Freddie Mac today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey® (PMMS®), showing that rates increased slightly across the board.
Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, says, “Despite volatility in the stock market, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage inched forward just 1 basis point to 4.86 percent this week. We expect rates to continue to rise, which will put downward pressure on homebuying activity. While higher borrowing costs will keep some people out of the market, buyers with more flexibility could take advantage of the decreased competition.”
By Jessica Guerin
It’s been just a few weeks since the Federal Housing Administration announced that it will now require a second appraisal on select reverse mortgage loans, but lenders are already feeling the effects.
Visit any urban center in a major U.S. city and you'll see a similar view: cranes dotting the landscape and billboards advertising units in the latest luxury apartment projects. Has the focus on high-end units gotten out of hand?
New research from RentCafe found that luxury rental properties had accounted for 79 percent of all apartment construction in the U.S. And in the 2018 that number has grown to a whopping 87 percent. In many cities, a full 100 percent of projects completed in the first half of the year were upscale units.
By Ben Lane
The world’s largest mortgage insurer can only check for mortgage defects on a “small” number of mortgages due to technological shortcomings and that’s leading to a potential rise in appraisal-related issues.
ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation’s premier property database, today released its Q3 2018 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™, which shows a total of 177,146 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions — in the third quarter, down 6 percent from the previous quarter and down 8 percent from a year ago to the lowest level since Q4 2005 — a nearly 13-year low.
U.S. foreclosure activity in Q3 2018 was 36 percent below the pre-recession average of 278,912 properties with foreclosure filings per quarter between Q1 2006 and Q3 2007 — the eighth consecutive quarter where U.S. foreclosure activity has registered below the pre-recession average.
By Jessica Guerin
The Federal Housing Administration’s investigation into possible appraisal inflations on reverse mortgage loans revealed an issue the agency decided it must address.
Starter homes are now more costly to purchase than at any time since 2008, when the last boom came to a crashing halt. In the second quarter, first-time buyers needed almost 23 percent of their income to afford a typical entry-level home, up from 21 percent a year earlier, according to an analysis by the National Association of Realtors.
The property market, after years of price gains that outpaced income growth, is showing signs of slowing as sales decline. The affordability crunch is especially severe at the low end of the market and in hot areas where supplies are tightest and values have risen most. A jump in mortgage rates this year only made it worse.
Confidence in the multifamily housing market edged down in the second quarter of 2018, according to the Multifamily Production Index (MPI) released today by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The MPI dipped two points to 51 compared to the previous quarter.
The MPI measures builder and developer sentiment about current conditions in the apartment and condo market on a scale of 0 to 100. The index and all of its components are scaled so that a number above 50 indicates that more respondents report conditions are improving than report conditions are getting worse.
Existing-home sales subsided for the fourth straight month in July to their slowest pace in over two years, according to the National Association of Realtors®. The West was the only major region with an increase in sales last month.
Total existing-home sales1, https://www.nar.realtor/existing-home-sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, decreased 0.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.34 million in July from 5.38 million in June. With last month’s decline, sales are now 1.5 percent below a year ago and have fallen on an annual basis for five straight months.
By Ben Lane
One of the vestiges of the financial crisis is now officially in the past.
By Karan Kaul
First-time homebuyers face a difficult housing market: high prices, low supply, tight credit, and renting costs that make it difficult to save for a down payment. But compared with repeat buyers, first-timers have dominated the mortgage market for the past 10 years, and their share today is still high. We don’t see this changing anytime soon.
Freddie Mac (OTCQB: FMCC) today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey® (PMMS®), showing that mortgage rates decreased slightly for the second consecutive week.
Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, says mortgage rates remained mostly flat over the past week, which has been the dominant theme since late spring. “This stability in borrowing costs comes despite the highest core inflation rates since 2008 and turbulence in the currency markets,” he said. “Unfortunately, this pause in rates is not leading to increasing home sales.”
A new analysis by Freddie Mac (OTCQB: FMCC), finds that the strong performance experienced by the multifamily market in the first half of 2018 will continue throughout the end of the year and well into 2019. The findings were released as part of Freddie Mac Multifamily’s 2018 Mid-Year Outlook pdf and companion video. The Outlook predicts that in 2018, multifamily origination volume is expected to grow by 3.3 percent to $305 billion.
In the Outlook, Freddie Mac Multifamily Research and Modeling vice president Steve Guggenmos and manager Sara Hoffmann find that overall, the multifamily market continues to experience very healthy performance. While fundamentals have started to moderate over the past few years, the factors most critical to market strength continue to remain strong, for example, with rents rising above inflation and vacancy rates only increasing slowly.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency extended the public comment period for the Agency's proposed rule on Enterprise Capital Requirements by an additional 60 days, citing "high level of interest in the proposed rule and requests from multiple stakeholders for more time to evaluate it."
The previous deadline for comments was September 17; the new deadline is November 16.
Some Fed districts reported moderate improvements in the residential real estate sector, but their reports on commercial activity revealed largely stagnant conditions, the Federal Reserve reported July 18 in its newest Beige Book.
Written by Kelsey Ramirez
Last Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had his second hearing this week, this time before the House Committee on Financial Services for his semi-annual monetary policy report.
Written by Ben Lane
We’ve known that the rent may be too high for quite a while now, but a new report shows that rent has never been this high before.
