Private mortgage insurance firms changing direction - 04/28/10 05:22 PM
PMI, or private mortgage insurance, played a large role in yesterday's real estate boom, allowing buyers acquire property without putting a penny down. That was a tempting prospect indeed. 100% financing actually became quite popular those days as values kept galloping up on a steady pace that quickly generated equity no borrower in his right mind would dare turn down. The standard rule required a PMI if the down payment was less than 20%. These insurers were making money hand over fist, like just about all the other housing market participants did.
The real estate market's collapse changed everything in a … (6 comments)

High housing inventory could further delay expected market turnaround - 04/26/10 07:20 PM
The residential real estate market is on a turbo-charged roller coaster ride. One day the news is encouraging in the form of increased existing home sales over previous months. Or that housing prices are beginning to stabilize across the country. Pieces like that will get mortgage and housing industry observers and homeowners from Las Vegas to Miami all perked up and dreaming of a brighter tomorrow. And then out of nowhere all that good feeling and improved adrenalin flow is coldly shattered by another report saying that it's not over until it's over. And it may get worse before getting better.
… (4 comments)

Private mortgage market showing signs of thawing - 04/25/10 06:11 PM
When the real estate market succumbed a few years ago into a deep recession it took the home loan sector with it. While many mortgage lenders failed spectacularly, others were kept from falling off the map by costly government bailouts or found a hopeful merger partner. This sudden inferno quickly chased the private - domestic and foreign - investor almost completely away from the secondary mortgage market where they had been buying securities to support the U.S. housing industry. Mortgage financing lately has been almost exclusively provided by government-affiliated agencies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA. The behind the scenes mover … (4 comments)

CityCenter puts off Veer Towers completion - Las Vegas high-rise condominium market still struggling - 04/22/10 03:07 PM
MGM Mirage is now planning to open the two-tower luxury complex - sitting in the middle of CityCenter and drawing admiring and sometimes quizzical looks with its two leaning towers - in May. It was scheduled to do so in mid-December when most of the mammoth multi-billion-dollar resort on the Strip began welcoming its first guests. The reason to the delay is quite clear. The current economic slump has deeply trimmed down the potential buyer pool for condos at Veer Towers. The same actually goes for all high-rise projects in Las Vegas.
Mortgage finance has been a problem all along. Lenders … (6 comments)

Las Vegas real estate may not be as affordable today as it seems - 04/20/10 08:58 PM
The housing market bust in Southern Nevada - home to communities like Summerlin, Silverstone Ranch, Henderson, Mountains Edge, North Las Vegas and Rhodes Ranch - has taken down with it homeowners, mortgage lenders, real estate agents and builders, and a host of others closely tied to the industry. It has been as brutal a segment collapse as any in history. One of the most plundered victims has been the price. Homes in some of the newer subdivisions have lost as much as 60% of their value in just a few years.
To scores of once-happy and optimistic homeowners the word underwater … (4 comments)

Fannie Mae adjusts eligibility rules following pre-foreclosure action - 04/18/10 08:44 PM
The sometimes shell-shocked players in the mortgage industry are continuously scrambling to meet the exceptional challenges they face almost daily. Seemingly, not a week goes by without one of the major home loan organizations - government or private - announcing a new policy it deems necessary to better handle the real estate market's peaks and valleys. Lately it has been more valleys - the ones that ruin weekends - than the other kind.
Fannie Mae is now updating its rules on borrower eligibility after he has undergone a pre-foreclosure process, usually meaning a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, a pre-foreclosure sale or then … (4 comments)

White House solicits ideas for mortgage finance reform - Let's give them some - 04/16/10 01:27 PM
The home loan market has evolved over the decades into a colossal and thoroughly complicated system that is so hard to get one's arms around with any authority. One of the latest additions to it were the otherworldly subprime mortgages and their subsequent securitization that eventually grew so tricky that few, if anyone for that matter, can today decipher what they actually look like. A fair part of the blame for the current real estate collapse can be squarely allocated to this out-of-control creativity.
The White House put forth seven questions for public comment in its quest to overhaul the mortgage … (8 comments)

Freddie Mac to auction REO homes in Vegas in late April - Be there - 04/13/10 05:15 PM
Mortgage money remains affordable, prices are way low in Southern Nevada - with subdivisions like Rhodes Ranch, Southern Highlands, Silverstone Ranch, Charleston Heights, Silverado Ranch and Mountains Edge - and Washington is sweetening the pot with an up to $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit. What more can a rookie home buyer expect? Well, there is more. Now Freddie Mac brings its multi-car auction train to Las Vegas with a passion.  
Freddie Mac has a HomeSteps unit that markets and sells its REOs, or real estate owned, across the country. In this exhausting housing downturn it has been increasingly … (5 comments)

FHA takes risk management seriously - 04/11/10 10:25 AM
As FHA's market share has soared over the past few years, thanks to the vacuum left by conventional mortgage lenders whose fortunes have suffered terrible setbacks in the ongoing real estate calamity. But it hasn't escaped the anger of the sinking housing market either. It has bravely insured mortgage loans with only the minimum 3.5% down all along and as prices have continued spiraling south these loans have gone underwater sometimes in a few months - particularly vulnerable were many Las Vegas mortgage borrowers, as well as those in Miami and many parts of California -  and that often spells trouble. … (21 comments)

Las Vegas existing home sales take a solid leap in March - 04/08/10 02:21 PM
Southern Nevada resales slowed down considerably over the winter months and understandably put a little scare on local real estate folks. In the fall things had moved right along, raising hopes that some kind of a housing rebound was underway, spurred on by delicious mortgage rates and shamefully low prices. Then March rolled in and decided to reverse what had been going on over the past few months.
A total of 3,175 existing homes were closed in March, a strong 32.8% increase from February and even a 6.5% improvement from the same month last year. This data was brought to the … (6 comments)

Trump International Las Vegas condo-hotel charms financing help - Say What? - 04/06/10 04:04 PM
Mortgage financing in Las Vegas has been hard to come by in recent months. Single-family home underwriting criteria is tough enough as it is and condominiums are treated with even harder scrutiny. And then there are luxury condo-hotels that standard mortgage lenders don't want to touch today with any length pole. The latter were the darlings of the Southern Nevada condominium developers in the middle of the last decade when they couldn't build them fast enough to meet seemingly insatiable demand. That was then. How quickly real estate markets can reverse themselves is purely extraterrestrial.
Despite the obvious mortgage freeze on … (9 comments)

Las Vegas real estate prices deemed stable by price-rent ratio - 04/04/10 04:23 PM
Price-rent ratio is one good way to gauge whether a particular housing market's values are stable or not. The popular ratio is figured by dividing a city's median home price by its median annual rent. A pretty basic calculation that will actually say a lot. The national historical average has been 15, according to Marcus & Millichap, a California commercial real estate brokerage. That's where it again stood at the end of the third quarter of 2009, having retreated there from almost 21 where it had soared to during the housing bubble's climax in 2005.
By many real estate yardsticks, a … (5 comments)

Delinquent mortgage borrowers with PMI staging fragile comeback - 04/01/10 02:12 PM
Some good news are starting to sneak into the devastated real estate market from far-off directions. They may not mean all that much in the conventional big picture that usually chews over topics like foreclosures, short sales, home price drops and mortgage lender failures. Nevertheless, many small time indicators often give hints about which way the housing market is heading. One of these gems is the private mortgage insurance, or PMI, default rate.
Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, or MICA, keeps tabs on this and just released its latest report. In short, the trade group explains that 80,758 homeowners with PMIs … (6 comments)