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

According to the National Association of REALTORS, housing affordability fell for the second straight month to 166.7 in March due to the median home value rising for the second straight month. Housing affordability, much like housing inventory or the month's supply of housing, is best understood ...

Not only did housing starts set a new record low (again) this month, but permits did too.  Housing permits dropped -3.3% month over month and -50.2% year over year to a seasonally adjusted rate of 494,000. This is further evidence that the housing market has not yet cratered into a "bottom" as Wa...

If 600,000 monthly job losses, a prolonged housing depression, insolvent banks, and a pending GM bankruptcy are not enough to slow down this completely ridiculous stock rally, at least we finally know what will get Wall St.'s attention, the credit rating of the United States. On Thursday credit a...

Wall Street will be facing "a headwind of continued losses for the better part of five years", that according to Whitney Tilson, the founder of hedge fund T2 Partners during a recent interview on CNBC. Tilson estimates that over $1 trillion in residential and commercial real estate losses are sti...

Apparently there are not as many "green shoots" as Bernanke had once thought. The latest Federal Reserve forecast which was part of their minutes from April projected higher unemployment rates and a deeper economic contraction than what they had predicted just three months ago. Specifically, the ...

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the mortgage purchase application index was down -4.4% from last week to a seasonally adjusted rate of 254. I continue to write about this index every week waiting for a signal that demand for real estate is going to pick up for the peak buying seaso...

For the second time in four months housing starts set a new record low according to the Census Bureau. Housing starts dropped -12.8% month over month to a seasonally adjusted rate of 458,000.  Additionally, housing starts are down -54.2% year over year and are now at the slowest pace on record go...

If credit card defaults are any indication of future foreclosure activity, the housing market still has a ways to go until it finds a bottom. According to a Reuters report, credit card defaults reached record highs in April.  The following is a comparison of the default rate from March to April o...

According to Moody's, 15.4 million homeowners are currently under water; this number is up from an estimated 13.6 million at the end of 2008 and it appears that the number will continue to rise over the next couple of years. Contrary to CNBC's Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow, the housing market is no...

Fannie Mae reported a first quarter loss of $23.2 billion and has submitted an additional request for $19 billion from the Treasury department to keep it afloat according to an article written by Aaron Smith with CNNMoney.com The $19 billion is in addition to the $15.2 billion that had been drawn...