The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

About three months ago the Mortgage Bankers Association published their quarterly national delinquency survey which showed that a record 11.18% of mortgages were at least 30 days late. Now, here we are 90 days later and we have a new record, 12.07% of mortgages were either at least one payment pa...

I wrote a blog yesterday detailing my concerns about the "new" monetized $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit and how not only will it not have any meaningful impact on demand, but it is likely to cause a lot of confusion as well, understandably. And while we may need to wait several weeks to ...

The FHA announced today that the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit can now be received by the buyer at the closing table in the form of a loan so that they can use the credit to pay for some of their closing costs or decorating expenses. This $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit/loan, ca...

The Census Bureau is reporting that new home sales in April rose 0.3% from last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 352,000, but are still down -34% from last year. While the new home market remains over shadowed by the existing home sales market in terms of sales and supply volume, it ...

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association and their weekly mortgage application index, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage jumped from 4.69% last week to 4.81% this week, a new 9-week high. While this modest rise in mortgage rates off of their recent historic lows will negatively impact housing a...

According to the NAR, home value declines in April fell by -15.4% when compared to last year.  The -15.4% decline is just off the record decline that was set in February of 2009 at -15.5%.  The latest data is yet another sign that not only is the housing market not at a bottom, but home values de...

The NAR announced their April existing home sales data yesterday which showed that while existing home sales were up 2.9% from last month, the supply of homes were up even more by 8.8% to 3.968 million. The result of this disproportionate change between the supply and demand was that the month's ...

Despite historically low mortgage rates, a first time home buyer tax credit, record housing affordability, and a significant but albeit skeptical surge in consumer confidence (if consumer confidence is so high, why aren't more people applying to purchase a home?) yesterday, the mortgage purchase ...

Consumer confidence jumped from 40.8 in April to 54.9 in May, the largest one-month jump since April of 2003, according to Reuters. In light of May's surge in consumer confidence as well as a deteriorating job market and housing market, it begs the question, is the tail wagging? What I mean by th...

According to Case-Shiller, home prices dropped -19.1% in the first quarter and are now down -32.2% since peaking in the second quarter of 2006. While we can debate the accuracy in terms of the percentage changewith the Case-Shiller index as there are a couple of other indexes that track home valu...