Two good posts from CalculatedRisk this morning.
First: The Fed's Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) purchase program is now 99.84% complete. Only $2 Billion (only!) remain to be spent on MBS of the original $1.25 Trillion that was printed for their purchase.
Remember, the reason this program exists is to drop the interest rate on mortgages. Low interest rates mean borrowers can bid higher prices for a house while keeping the same monthly payment. The end result is that home prices drop less. This was a very creative way for the Fed to put a floor under falling home prices.
Now that the program is over, mortgage interest rates will increase. The question is: how much will they rise? CR has consistently predicted a 0.35 to 0.5% increase (that is, from 5.0% to 5.35% or 5.5%).
Interestingly enough, mortgage demand is very low and has been since October. Low demand for mortgages is also helping to keep mortgage rates down. It also means that the government's other housing program, the first time home buyer's tax credit, has pulled forward as much demand as it can. There is no future demand to borrow. The anemic sales reported for January and February, while this program is still active, suggest* that when the program ends, there will be hardly any sales volume at all. Future demand has been tapped; it's dry. When we get to the future, there will be little demand waiting.
*(to me, CR has not made this assessment)
Second. February unemployment by state has been released. North Carolina is at a new historic high at 11.2%. That put's North Carolina as having the 10th worst unemployment currently. Again, bad news for a housing "recovery" if people out there are still holding their breaths for one.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Saturday, March 06, 2010
a lost resource
A few months back, I mentioned a Realtor whose blog I had been following. I decided that I didn't want to link directly to that Realtor's blog so that, in case they were watching their incoming traffic, they wouldn't see the link from my web page and know that I -- a bear! -- was relying on their blog postings to get a sense of the market. Instead, I listed a few search terms that google would magically transform into a link to this guy's page.
That Realtor stopped posting on his blog at basically the same time. I no longer have access to his lists of home-sale closure prices. He listed for each neighborhood all the homes for sale in that neighborhood, their asking prices, and, when those homes sold, the date of their sale and how much money they finally sold for.
That's a bummer, because these lists were really handy. Crawling the Orange County website, I can get basically the same information, but it's on a 2 or 3 month delay (since the county is so slow to record sales events) and it's not as nicely organized by neighborhood. This data he posted was in the "For Buyers" section of his blog. I agree that such data would be useful for a perspective buyer.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether my admitting that I liked his data on my blog caused him to stop posting it. Here is his last post from back in November, 3 days before I talked about his blog here. Since then, silence.
Now, I count how many people read my blog. There are like 5 of you. So I'd say the conspiracy theory has a 1/10,000 chance of being right. (50K residents in chapel hill). But in the off chance that one of my five readers is you, Joe Rogers, I would ask you kindly to resume posting sales data for Chapel Hill. If you stopped posting useful data for home buyers to keep one stupid anonymous blogger from getting access to it, then you're only doing yourself a disservice.
That Realtor stopped posting on his blog at basically the same time. I no longer have access to his lists of home-sale closure prices. He listed for each neighborhood all the homes for sale in that neighborhood, their asking prices, and, when those homes sold, the date of their sale and how much money they finally sold for.
That's a bummer, because these lists were really handy. Crawling the Orange County website, I can get basically the same information, but it's on a 2 or 3 month delay (since the county is so slow to record sales events) and it's not as nicely organized by neighborhood. This data he posted was in the "For Buyers" section of his blog. I agree that such data would be useful for a perspective buyer.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether my admitting that I liked his data on my blog caused him to stop posting it. Here is his last post from back in November, 3 days before I talked about his blog here. Since then, silence.
Now, I count how many people read my blog. There are like 5 of you. So I'd say the conspiracy theory has a 1/10,000 chance of being right. (50K residents in chapel hill). But in the off chance that one of my five readers is you, Joe Rogers, I would ask you kindly to resume posting sales data for Chapel Hill. If you stopped posting useful data for home buyers to keep one stupid anonymous blogger from getting access to it, then you're only doing yourself a disservice.
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