How to Buy and Sell Real Estate with ETFs

If you’ve had your eyes open the last two years, you know that real estate is in a brutal bear market.
Just in October, new home sales dropped 5.3%.
Existing home sales fell 3.1%, according to the National Association of Realtors.
And the latest S&P/Case-Shiller report shows home prices dropped 17.4%. That’s bad enough but in some [...]

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S&P 500 Crashes Through Bear Market Low! Housing Heads South!

Thursday was a historic day for the market. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index plunged by 6.7% to 752.44. The bear market low of October 2002 was 768.63 — and we sliced through it like a hot knife through butter.
Stated another way, every last penny of profit an investor earned — even if he bought at [...]

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What’s bearish for stocks, is bullish for the dollar

I came across a study that confirms just how tightly tied the markets have become. According to James Bianco, president of Bianco Research LLC:
Over the last six months, seven separate assets have maintained an 85%, or better, correlation with the S&P 500.
That means, at least 85% of the time these assets moved the same direction as [...]

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The Great American Housing Nightmare: Next Phase

One of the greatest blunders of our time is made by those who blindly assume home prices are so low they couldn’t possibly go any lower.
In reality, home prices don’t stop going down at some particular level that appears to be “cheap.” Nor do they stop falling because they match some historical price that was [...]

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Why Mortgage Rates Are Rising Despite Government Efforts!

The government is throwing everything … and I do mean EVERYTHING … at the credit and mortgage markets.
It has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It has agreed to buy Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) in the open market.
It has pledged to take hundreds of billions of dollars in crummy assets from the nation’s major financial [...]

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Market Update Fannie and Freddie Takeover 09/08/2008

Monday: 09/08/08 5
Treasuries were all over the place today as the news of the Fannie and Freddie takeover scared off traders. But the changed dynamics in the mortgage backed securities market spurred a heavy round of hedging activity that involved the purchase of Treasuries. 

As a result, Treasuries recovered from their losses to finish with [...]

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Interest rates down, existing home sales up

 
Mortgage interest rates are down, while sales of existing homes are up – a welcome development for consumers and real estate professionals. The long awaited increase in sales is a big and important event, carried by all major news media. At this writing, the average rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage is 5.85 percent, down [...]

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RESPA rules finally published

After long delays, the proposed regulation on the new Real Estate Settlement Procedure Act (RESPA) was recently published by the Federal Register. The 94-page regulation includes, among other things, a mandatory Good Faith Estimate and a modified HUD form requiring that a “closing script” be read orally at settlement. It also includes enhanced disclosures and [...]

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Sales of super-luxury homes robust

 
Many multimillion dollar homes don’t seem to be affected by the highly publicized housing slump. Their prices remain firm or continue to rise, and there’s an ample supply of affluent buyers ready and will to buy – many opting for an all cash purchase transaction.
One reason for that strong market niche is that the nation’s [...]

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Proposal to decrease conforming rate cancelled

 
The proposal to decrease conforming mortgage loan limits from the current level of $417,000 has been squelched by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Any amount over that limit is considered a “jumbo” loan, since it is not salable to the major secondary buyers of mortgages thus making them more expensive for borrowers.
Leading real [...]

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