The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

With the New Year fast approaching, and with uncertainty clouding our economic future, I was glad to see Jason Sardi say what needed to be said in a recent blog post of his - and I wanted to take a moment to try to echo his thoughts. The title of his blog post was, "Are we going to be okay?" And ...

According to an article put out by Reuters, the S&P/Case Shiller home price index was published today and to no surprise, home values were down significantly by -18% from October of 2007 to October of 2008. This decline in home values is more precipitous than that of the data published by the NAR...

As the housing market continues to deteriorate and as the prognosis for the market remains glim for the next three to five years, I am still trying to make sense of the NAR "Four Point Plan" for stabilizing the housing market. Call me pessimisitc, but I don't see how any of these four points, esp...

In 1986 Congress passed a tax reform act (TRA 1986) whichin addition to simplifying the tax code, also eliminated and restricted the tax benefits associated with investment real estate. The tax reform did three things: 1.)  It limited the adjusted gross income to $100,000 for those individuals th...

For the past couple of months I have been watching the housing market continue to deteriorate while at the same time I am being told by scores of agents that the market is improving, that "all real estate is local", and that all we need is for home prices to fall further and everything will be ok...

For the past several weeks there has been a lot of exposure about the "next wave" of foreclosures that will be a result of Alt-A and Option ARM loans resetting.  I was glad to see that 60 Minutes did a feature about this as the volume of loans that will reset and are at risk of foreclosure over t...

I know this post may get some negative feedback from people telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about; and those people will be right, because I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know much about p/e ratios and market technicals, but "hockey stick" shaped charts grab my attentio...

For several months I have been listening to economists and bloggers advocate for declines in home values because homes are simply unaffordable and unsustainable, and that once home values come down, buyers will enter the market and the market will correct itself and everything will be ok. And as ...

The mortgage bankers association published their weekly mortgage applications survey today and the data was not what you may think. The good news is that refinance applications surged 62.6% from last week as the 30-year fixed rate mortgage dropped from 5.18% to 5.04%.  Not much of a surprise here...

Tony Crescenzi, a bond market strategist, wrote a guest blog on CNBC.com today about a "plunge" in new home inventory and what it means for the real estate market. He talks about how there are only 372,000 new homes for sale, which is a reduction from last year and last month.  Tony also acknowle...