Archive for 'Mortgage Rates' Category
Helping to Explain the Bailout Issue to Jittery Clients/Consumers
1 October 2008If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!by: Chris Galler, COO - Minnesota Association of REALTORS
Most of the consumers you talk with will not have a good handle - I am not sure anyone does yet - of the nature of the credit problem. In this [...]
US Housing Rescue Bill Resources
5 August 2008There’s some good things in the housing bill that Congress & the President signed into law but also some surprising disappointments. An 800+ page bill takes time to process, but here are a few resources so far that deal with some of the biggest parts of the bill:
First Time Buyer Credit Analysis from the National [...]
Loose Lending Broke Housing, Tight Lending Keeps it Broken
20 June 2008The several years of “loose lending” by mortgage lenders helped bring a surge of bad loan programs with borrowers that were either overextended from Day One or should have been unqualified to begin with. This surge has now become a tsunami of foreclosures and short sales, which Jeff Allen and I have lumped together as [...]
Great Article on Future ARM Resets for Loans
5 June 2008Great article talking about how ARM mortgage resets happening right now are not so bad but that there’s still a lot of ARMs out there in future years that might have a problem. I’ve heard quite a bit of this before but this is a pretty good summary of it all.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/04/closer-look-at-arms-reset-problem.html
Twin Cities Mortgage Rates Fall
22 March 2008On Friday my loan officers were quoting rates on 30yr fixed mortgages in the 5.5% - 6% range again… which is down more than .5% from just a couple weeks ago. On a $200,000 house, that means a monthly payment that is more than $80 less than it was just 2 weeks before. Or in [...]
Twin Cities Real Estate Affordability Hits 5 Year High
12 March 2008The Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS released their latest market update this week which shows a Housing Affordability Index number of 157… the highest affordability in 5 years and 14% higher than a year ago!
Though interest rates did tick up some in the last month, median sales price took another dip which more than made up [...]
Twin Cities Affordability Hits Highest Level in Nearly 4 Years!
14 February 2008With the release of this week’s Weekly Market Activity Report we find that the Twin Cities Housing Affordability Index hit a near 4-year high!
The Housing Affordability Index takes into account interest rates, area median income, and median home sales price. With both sales prices and interest rates falling recently, we find the Index has increased quite substantially [...]
Declining Market Takes a Bigger Bite
8 February 2008I heard from my loan officer Thursday that between the lenders marking zip codes as “declining market,” and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac doing the same thing, and appraisers noting it more and more as well, nearly all markets in the Twin Cities have been marked as a declining market or are likely to be hit by [...]
Economy in Trouble: Bad for Stocks, Good for Housing
24 January 2008As the news about a slowing economy and fears of recession mount, the stock market has taken a huge hit, falling double-digit percentages in the last couple months, but housing is benefitting.
As money has been taken out of stocks, it has been flowing into bonds, which are historically a very safe investment. When demand for [...]
Twin Cities Interest Rates Drop to Multi-Year Low
10 January 2008Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been seeing rates on 30-year fixed mortgages fall substantially… I’ve seen some recent quotes for 5.5%!
When you look at a straight affordability perspective, taking 1/2% off the interest rate (which is what has happened in the last few weeks) on a $200,000 loan saves you $1000 per year in [...]