Andy's Blog

30-Year Mortgage Rate Tops 5 % Average rates for conventional 30-year mortgages went up to 5.05 percent this week from 4.93 percent a week earlier, according to Freddie Mac. Interest on 30-year fixed loans had been below 5 percent for the past three weeks, close to the all-time low of 4.71 percen...

Get More Mileage from Your Web Site Getting the most from a Web site is increasingly important. At Real Estate Connect, Vanessa Fox, who formerly worked for both Google and Zillow.com, offered easy-to-follow tips for practitioners. Here are a few of her ideas: 1. Use video. Fox says that in Septe...

Freddie Mac Posts More Losses Freddie Mac recorded a loss of $7.8 billion in the last three months of 2009, narrowed from a year-earlier loss of $23.9 billion; and it lost $25.7 billion for all of last year, down from a $50.1 billion loss in 2008. Still, the mortgage financier -- which received $...

Fed: Interest Rates to Remain Low Investors breathed a sigh of relief Wednesday when Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke told Congress that interest rates are likely to remain low for an extended period. The economy, he said, "still requires support for recovery." Investors see these low rates as ...

Mortgage Applications Slide Mortgage applications decreased 8.5 percent last week compared to the previous week on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association weekly survey. Most of the decline was in purchases with the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index declining 7...

New-Home Sales Hit Record Low Sales of new homes declined 11 percent in January from December to the lowest level since the U.S. began keeping records in 1963, according to a report from the U.S. Commerce Department released Wednesday. Sales dropped to an annual pace of 309,000 with the median pr...

Short Sales Rise in Popularity, Survey Finds Short sales accounted for 15.9 percent of home purchases in January, according to a survey by Campbell Surveys for Inside Mortgage Finance. Before January, the peak in short sales had been 15.1 percent in October. They declined substantially in Novembe...

Foreclosure Bargains Getting Harder to Find Home buyers hoping to snag a really good deal on a foreclosed home are finding it increasingly difficult because supply is shrinking. The number of foreclosures that are available for sale nationwide fell to 617,000 in December, down from 845,000 in Nov...

Bankers: The End of Foreclosure Crisis is Near The Mortgage Bankers Association is seeing signs that the foreclosure crisis is ending. "The continued and sizable drop in the 30-day delinquency rate is a concrete sign that the end may be in sight," says Jay Brinkmann, MBA's chief economist, in a ...

IRS Clarifies What's Needed to Claim Tax Credit The Internal Revenue Service has clarified which documentation taxpayers need to submit to claim the first-time and move-up homebuyer tax credit. While the IRS is still requiring the filing of Form 5405, it is not demanding that all parties' signatu...