Housing Wire

MAY 10, 2023

Did you hear that sound? That’s the entire mortgage industry shouting, “hip, hip hooray!” The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) on Wednesday announced that it would rescind a controversial loan-level pricing adjustment (LLPA) for conventional borrowers with debt-to-income (DTI) levels at or above 40%. The FHFA, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , had previously delayed implementation of the DTI LLPA from May 1, 2023 to August 1, 2023 following a chorus of upset fro

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Sacramento Appraisal Blog

JANUARY 3, 2023

What’s the real estate market going to do in 2023? Nobody has a crystal ball, but here are some emerging trends. Scroll quickly or digest slowly. UPCOMING (PUBLIC) SPEAKING GIGS: 1/12/23 McKissock Webinar (register here) 1/18/23 WCR Market Update in Cameron Park (register here) 1/19/23 Big market update at SAR on Zoom (register here) 1/20/23 […].

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Inman

APRIL 18, 2023

In total, the company cut 560 positions, according to a statement Opendoor provided to Inman. The cuts, which were announced internally Tuesday morning, primarily focused on operations roles.

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Technology 218

Appraiserblogs

MARCH 27, 2023

Dear representative, waiving/eliminating property appraisal for lending purposes is wanton recklessness. Fannie Mae’s decision to waive/eliminate property appraisal for lending purposes is nothing more than wanton recklessness that could have serious repercussions in the future. The truth of the matter is that appraisals are an essential part of any mortgage transaction and should not be taken lightly or eliminated without due consideration.

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Eyes on Housing

MARCH 15, 2023

After four consecutive declines, the producer price index (PPI) for inputs to residential construction less energy (i.e., building materials) rose 0.3% in February 2023 (not seasonally adjusted) follow a 1.1% increase in January (revised), according to the latest PPI report. Price growth of goods inputs to residential construction, including energy, gained 0.4% over the month.

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McKissock

JANUARY 19, 2023

On January 18, 2023, HUD issued an announcement regarding revisions made to Handbook 4000.1. According to the announcement, the revisions included “enhancements and revisions to existing guidelines and various technical edits.” The most significant of these revisions was the elimination of the requirement to include the 1004MC form as an attachment to the appraisal report.

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National Association of Realtors

MAY 8, 2023

Proper documentation can help appraisers evaluate high-performance home features. From the 2023 REALTORS® Legislative Meetings in Washington, D.C.

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Houston Properties

MAY 26, 2023

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Lamacchia Realty

MAY 5, 2023

Lamacchia Realty, Inc. has released its “Top Producing REALTORS®,” for April 2023! This program recognizes the Top 10 REALTORS® by company and the Top 3 or 5 REALTORS® by office with the highest transaction numbers or sales for the month! April 2023 Winners of the Top 10 for the Company are: Kyle Denlinger joined Lamacchia Realty part-time in 2021, and officially switched to real estate full-time in the beginning of 2022.

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Housing Wire

MAY 10, 2023

The massive inflation and double-digit mortgage rates of the 1970s and early 1980s seem to haunt the Federal Reserve , which wants to cool the economy and even provoke a job-loss recession to avoid that scenario. But the latest Consumer Price Index inflation report shows how the fear of 1970s-style inflation is wildly overblown. Today’s numbers don’t look like the 1970s at all, when rent, wages, and oil shocks sent inflation running hotter than anything we have seen in recent modern-day hi

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Housing Wire

MAY 19, 2023

Add Rocket Mortgage to the list of companies selling mortgage servicing rights (MSR) in a difficult operating environment. The Detroit, Michigan-based lender sold about $20 billion in MSRs to JPMorgan Chase in April, following a decline in its servicing book in the first quarter of 2023. The company’s unpaid principal balance reached $524.8 billion as of March 31, compared to $535 billion at the end of December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. “In Apr

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Housing Wire

APRIL 23, 2023

Can we now say that the housing market ‘s spring selling season is finally underway? Since 2020, the seasonal bottom for housing inventory has arrived several months later than normal, making it more complicated to track housing inventory data. Still, we have some promising signs that we might have finally hit the inventory bottom for 2023. We didn’t see too much volatility in mortgage rates last week, but purchase apps declined in reaction to rates rising two weeks ago.

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Housing Wire

MAY 23, 2023

In a country with more than 330 million people, there are only 70,000 new homes available for sale today in the U.S. housing market. And with total active house listings in America near all-time lows, that is all we have for completed units for sale. The number of new homes doesn’t ever get into the millions, but we are still working our way back to the pre-COVID levels of 80,000 to 100,000.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 9, 2023

The housing market welcomed the news of lower mortgage rates last week after four reports showed that the labor market isn’t as tight as it seems and that the fear of 1970s-entrenched inflation was a lousy narrative. The 10-year yield finally broke below a critical technical level it had difficulty breaking for many months and we had a very small increase in inventory.

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Housing Wire

MAY 21, 2023

It was a wild ride for the housing market last week! The 10-year yield rose noticeably, sending mortgage rates near 7% right in the heart of the spring selling season. New listings data fell, however, active inventory grew. And purchase apps had a weekly negative print, continuing the 2023 theme of higher rates impacting the data. Here’s a quick rundown of the last week: Total active listings grew by 3,809 weekly, but new listings are still trending at all-time lows.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 30, 2023

The spring housing market music is playing, and purchase application data and active listing inventory rose together last week. The fear of not having an increase in inventory this spring should be put to rest. The other focus should be where mortgage rates go; only a little happened last week. Here’s a quick rundown of the last week: Active listing rose 8,260 week to week, down a bit from last week’s gain, but I’m not complaining — anything on the plus side is positive.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 7, 2023

Shrinking wholesale lender Homepoint is closing its mortgage origination business and will sell its origination-focused assets to competitor The Loan Store , the company announced on Friday. Michigan-based Homepoint is “winding down” its tenure as a direct participant in the mortgage origination business and becoming an investor in the market, as the company will hold an equity interest in The Loan Store.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 20, 2023

We only have 2.6 months’ worth of housing inventory in the U.S. after coming off the single biggest home-sales crash year in history. That is where we are today in America. As expected, existing home sales fell from February to March since the previous month’s report was intense. We have a workable range for 2023 sales in the existing home sales market between 4 million and 4.6 million.

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Housing Wire

MAY 7, 2023

Just when I thought it was safe to say we were getting more traditional spring housing inventory , we hit a snag last week, as active inventory and new listings declined. Hopefully, this is just a blip, which can occur from time to time with weekly data. We had a lot of drama over the week between Federal Reserve meetings and banking stress, and mortgage rates and purchase applications both fell.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 16, 2023

The seasonal housing inventory bottom evaded us again last week as active listings fell and new listing inventory decreased. Purchase application data rose again, with more positive than negative data in 2023. Mortgage rates didn’t move much last week, but the 10-year yield rose even though inflation data was tamer than expected, and we had a weaker retail sales report number.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 9, 2023

One slice of the single-family home market that has gained traction over the past year in a topsy-turvy housing landscape is the build-for-rent sector — or BFR. Construction starts in the BFR market are being propelled by the ongoing demand for single-family rental units as high mortgage rates and limited for-sale inventory push home-purchase prospects further out of reach of many would-be homebuyers.

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Housing Wire

MARCH 23, 2023

If there’s one sector of the economy that benefits from the very low levels of total housing inventory , it’s the homebuilders , but for a reason you might not think. If national housing inventory were back to normal, we would have 2 to 2.5 million active listings, and these active listings would be direct competition for the builders. New homes are traditionally more expensive than existing homes, which don’t have all the bells and whistles.

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Housing Wire

MAY 23, 2023

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives recognize that the wave of loan-repurchase requests represents an added challenge for lenders who already have a stretched balance sheet. However, Fannie Mae’s position is that the loan-repurchase increases are an economic problem, not an underwriting process issue. Meanwhile, Freddie Mac said it’s in talks with lenders to address the problem through a more customer-focused approach.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 20, 2023

The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week made a series of significant changes to loan level pricing adjustment (LLPA) fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on conventional/conforming mortgages. It’s generating concern among mortgage and real estate trade groups, who fear the tweaks will hurt qualified borrowers amid an existing affordability crisis.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 20, 2023

On Friday NAR reported that total housing inventory levels broke under 1 million in December, dropping to 970,00 units for a population of 330 million people. And existing home sales crashed in 2022 from a peak of around 6.5 million in January down to about 4 million in December, We now have total inventory levels near all-time lows again. In one of the most historical years in the U.S. housing market , we just experienced an event that most people never thought could happen.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 16, 2023

Here’s the rundown for the last week: Purchase application data has stabilized — the bleeding stopped. Housing inventory increased by 1,339 homes nationwide. This is a small number but could be the start of an important trend. Mortgage rates fell along with bond yields, showing that mortgage rates peaked on Oct. 20. The weekly data shows some good news for the housing market !

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 12, 2023

Today’s inflation data has shown that the peak growth rate of inflation is behind us. This should also mean mortgage rates hit their highs. The key phrase I have stressed since I wrote about the case for mortgage rates to go lower on Oct. 27 is thinking 12 months out. The trend is your friend, and the month-to-month data has cooled off noticeably. That cooling happened even with the biggest inflation component — shelter inflation — still rising in the lagged modeled CPI data.

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Housing Wire

MARCH 30, 2023

Mortgage rates declined for the third consecutive week, sparking hope for a good homebuyers’ spring season. But while rates have dropped, the housing market has continued to be challenged by low inventory levels. Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey showed on Thursday that the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.32% as of March 30, down 10 basis points from the previous week, mainly due to the economic uncertainty caused by bank collapses.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 11, 2023

Loan officers saw an increase in mortgage demand during the first week of 2023 as mortgage rates ticked down. And to close deals, sellers are increasingly coming to the table with concessions and rate buydowns. . “I’ve had five people contact me in the last week or so to talk about buying a new home, which is much better than a month or two ago,” Rochelle Gano , a Vancouver, Washington-based loan officer at Movement Mortgage , told HousingWire. “It seems like, with every

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 27, 2023

What is happening with homebuilders and the new home sales sector as we head into the spring housing market ? We have had some conflicting data points recently. On the one hand, cancelation rates have been rising. On the other hand, mortgage rates have gone down more than 1% since Oct. 20, 2022. The builders’ stock prices have done well as mortgage rates have fallen , and this illustrates the simplicity of the homebuilders’ position: their story is really about mortgage rates and moving pr

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Housing Wire

MAY 5, 2023

Is the labor market finally normalizing? Jobs Friday data came in as a beat of estimates, but the labor market is clearly starting to come back to earth, killing the fear of 1970s wage spiral inflation. We’ve had a good week’s worth of data to show that the Federal Reserve is starting to get what it wants if you know where to look. The headline jobs data beat estimates, but we did have 149,000 negative revisions to the previous month’s data.

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Housing Wire

APRIL 18, 2023

What is the best news for mortgage rates long-term? It’s getting more supply of apartments! The best way to fight inflation is always by adding more supply; if your goal is to destroy inflation by killing demand, that is only a temporary fix. Housing inflation post-2020 was one for the record books, not only because home prices accelerated in such a short time, but more importantly for the inflation data, rents took off, something that didn’t happen during the housing bubble years.

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Housing Wire

JANUARY 5, 2023

The 2022 housing market was savagely unhealthy , with all-time lows in inventory leading to massive bidding wars and price spikes until the Fed put a screeching halt to all of it with rate hikes that resulted in the most significant one-year spike in mortgage rate history. Housing went into a recession in June and mortgage volume fell off a cliff. So where does all that drama leave us for 2023?

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Housing Wire

MAY 18, 2023

Just when I thought days on market were returning to normal, that number for existing homes fell back down to 22 days. Why is this so important to me? If the days on the market are at a teenager level or even lower, it’s never a good sign for the housing market. I would say it’s savagely unhealthy to have that level and even though we’re not there yet, we are dangerously close.

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