“Australian sales of newly built homes slumped to the lowest level on record in August, a private report showed, underscoring the central bank’s decision to resume lowering interest rates.

Sales decreased 5.3 percent to 5,383 from July, when they dropped 5.6 percent, the Canberra-based Housing Industry Association said, citing a survey of the nation’s largest builders. Detached house sales fell 5.8 percent, while apartments slipped 2.5 percent, it showed.

“New home sales for August are the latest in a string of soft new housing updates for this financial year,” Harley Dale, HIA chief economist, said in a statement. “A fresh round of interest rate cuts will help rebalance this situation, although financial institutions obviously need to play their role in cementing this outcome.”

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“The volume of home sales in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, fell 21 percent in September from the same month last year, realtor data shows.

The number of homes sold in the Greater Toronto Area fell to 5,879 from 7,422, the data show, while the average price rose more than 8.5 percent to C$503,662 ($510,335), the Toronto Real Estate Board said in an e-mailed statement.

“While sales have been lower due to stricter mortgage lending guidelines, we continue to see substantial competition between buyers,” said board President Ann Hannah in the statement. “The months of inventory trend remains low from a historic perspective, which explains the strong price increases we are experiencing.”

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“The huge number of loans that needed to be reworked, combined with burdensome documentation requirements and a lackluster effort on the part of banks’ mortgage servicing divisions, guaranteed the program was “doomed to failure,” according to Bair.

“What’s more, it cheated borrowers,” she wrote. “Because Treasury wanted to demonstrate quickly that huge numbers of borrowers were being modified, it let borrowers enter into ‘trial modifications’ whereby they would start making reduced payments pending completion of all of their paperwork. But many of the borrowers could not provide all of the extensive documentation required by the program, so they would be put into foreclosure even though they had been making timely payments for months!”

Bair’s book describes Obama as engaged and knowledgable about housing recovery efforts, but undermined by his aides, particularly Treasury Secretary Tim Geither and former economic adviser Larry Summers.”

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Just look at the NASDAQ when looking at bubbles. Housing may suffer the same long term fate.

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“The Federal Reserve’s latest mortgage bond purchases so far are helping profit margins at lenders including Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. more than homebuyers and property owners looking to refinance.

Since the Fed’s Sept. 13 announcement that it would buy $40 billion more securities per month, the rates offered for new 30-year loans have fallen by just 0.11 percentage point, compared with a drop of more than 0.6 percentage point for yields on the bonds into which the loans get packaged, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Bankrate.com.

The gap between the two, which typically signals increasing lender revenue when it widens, has reached a record of more than 1.6 percentage point.”

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“Applications for U.S. home mortgages rose last week as interest rates dropped to record lows in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s latest stimulus efforts, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.”

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“Royal Bank of Scotland Plc’s Irish unit offered to sell properties, including 640 apartments and a hotel, for about 70 percent less than their value at the market’s 2007 peak, according to the broker managing the sale.

The Gemini portfolio, containing buildings in the Irish cities of Dublin and Cork, has an asking price of 75 million euros ($97 million), according to Domhnaill O’Sullivan, a director at Savills Plc (SVS)’s Dublin office. The London-based broker is selling the real estate, which also includes stores, on behalf of receivers KPMG and Grant Thornton Ltd.

The property crash and a lack of mortgage financing caused the number of Irish households in rented accommodation to increase by almost 50 percent in the five years through April 2011, the country’s Central Statistics Office said in a report in August. That’s attracting private-equity firms that are looking to buy as many as 3,000 apartments at a time, Brendan McDonagh, chief executive officer of Ireland’s bad bank, the National Asset Management Agency, said in April.”

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Permits were at 803k

“Wendell and Margret Brady haven’t paid their mortgage in more than three years, withholding the money amid a foreclosure dispute on the couple’s 11-bedroom house in Morristown, New Jersey.

The Victorian home, built in 1887 and owned by the retired couple for 38 years, is part of the growing backlog of properties facing repossession in the state, which now has the second-highest serious delinquency rate in the U.S. While shrinking nationwide, the pipeline of distressed real estate, or shadow inventory, is also growing in New York, Connecticut, Maine and Pennsylvania because of state laws that slow the foreclosure process. The Bradys heard nothing from their lender from May 2011, until a letter arrived in the mail last week.”

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“(Reuters) – Silicon Valley, the birthplace of the microprocessor, the personal computer and the iPhone, is a model of private enterprise at work. But not when it comes to getting a mortgage.

In Santa Clara County, the center of the global tech industry and one of the wealthiest places in the United States, most home buyers get help from the government, an analysis of government lending data shows. The same is true in other wealthy enclaves such as Nassau County, outside New York, and Arlington County, outside Washington, the analysis of more than 50 million loans finds.”

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An interesting study with no surprising results from the banking system…

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“Applications for U.S. home mortgages rose last week as demand for refinancing and new loans jumped, an industry group said on Wednesday.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage application activity, which includes both refinancing and home purchase demand, rose 11.1 percent in the week ended Sept 7.

The MBA’s seasonally adjusted index of refinancing applications rose 11.9 percent, while the gauge of loan requests for home purchases, a leading indicator of home sales, rose 8.1 percent.”

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The US housing market’s correction after that bubble appears to be finally at an end. This shows up in house prices, where the latest reading of the Case-Shiller 20-city index this week showed an increase over the past 12 months.

Read the rest here.

“Despite expectations of a drop-off in home sales this fall, a forward-looking indicator shows a growing number of buyers are jumping back into the housing market.”

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From the Bonddad Blog:

But the Case Shiller index is only one house price index. There are a dozen such indexes, all relying on different methods. There are asking prices indexes, median and mean sales price indexes, and repeat sales indexes. Within each type there are seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted metrics. Back in April I reported on slew of house price indexes, and concluded that March may have marked the turn in the market. With the Case Schiller index turning positive YoY, now is a good time to check those indexes again. Do they contradict the Case Shiller turning point, or do they confirm it?

Read the rest here.

“Foreclosure fell in July, but only by a very modest amount compared to the previous month and July 2011, according to research firm CoreLogic.

In its National Foreclosure Report, it issued these statistics:

According to the report, there were 58,000 completed foreclosures in the U.S. in July 2012 down from 69,000 in July 2011 and 62,000* in June 2012. Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 3.8 million completed foreclosures across the country. Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure.”

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“Applications for U.S. home mortgages tumbled last week, with demand for refinancing drying up as mortgage rates jumped to their highest level since late June, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.”

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Yawn…

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“WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Giving homeowners more information on outstanding balances and pending interest rate changes is the aim of new rules for mortgage servicers proposed Friday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The rules, a first for the entire mortgage servicing industry, would also require servicers to respond to homeowners’ calls for information or complaints within 5 days. No such rules exist now.”

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“The U.S. housing market appears to have finally bottomed out, and values are up in some of the worst-hit markets like Phoenix and Miami, Zillow Chief Executive Officer Spencer Rascoff tells CNBC.

“So five years into the housing recession and down 25 percent from the peak, we are finally at a bottom,” he tells CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”

At this stage in the cycle, housing is very much a local story, as prices remain down in places like Atlanta and Chicago, where housing equity remains negative, he says. The trends are very much based on local employment levels and how much housing fell in each region, according to the CEO of the housing-price research website.”

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