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

The new home sales report that was published today by Commerce Department showed improvements in inventories but declines in demand. The number of new homes for sale, the inventory, dropped -7% from last month and -25.5% from last year to a seasonally adjusted 374,000 units in November.  While th...

The National Association of REALTORS published their monthly existing home sales report today, and for the first time since this economic and credit crisis began, the numbers revealed that the housing market is not immune to the recent events. For the past year, each month the seasonally adjusted...

The AP published a report today revealing that of the 21 banks that received at least $1 billion from the government, none of them are providing any accounting for where they money was invested or spent, nor do they plan to. At first glance, when you read the article it's easy to get upset with t...

The psychology of making investments, including purchasing a home, is a funny thing. The perception during a boom, stock or housing, is that values and prices will always go higher.  In other words, "You can't lose." And by this same reasoning, during a bust or contraction, there is always the li...

The National Association of REALTORS will be publishing their monthly existing home sales report on Tuesday, December 23rd. Briefing.com is projecting existing home sales to decline modestly to a level of 4.95 million seasonally adjusted home sales.  This would be less than a 1% decline from the ...

Everybody has a security blanket right? For our middle baby, Carter (2 - featured left), he has his blanket and binky. Our oldest, Jackson (3), has surrendered his binky, but still has his blankets. And our youngest, Madison (8 months), has a little burp cloth that doubles as a blanket.  She hasn...

There are plenty of sources to determine how far home values have fallen over the past two years.  The NAR, OFHEO, and even Case-Shiller all have their own methodologies for determining price declines. The monthly NAR existing home sale report shows an -11.3% decline from October of 2007 to Octob...

Typically I try to keep my comments exclusively related to the housing and mortgage industry, but the events related to TARP and the Big 3 automakers is something that I can't keep quite about.  It is simply too troubling and simply unprecedented in how it has been handled - it has been a failure...

As I have commented before, I don't think the decline of the home builder industry and new home sales is a good thing for our economy.  Yes, I do realize the broadest challenge facing the housing market is that there are simply too many homes for sale and not enough demand for them.  However, a s...

The mortgage bankers association publishedtheir weekly mortgage applications survey data for the week ending December 12, of 2008. As an aside, I discovered today as I wanted to get some historical perspective about this data, that the mortgage bankers association does not publish any historical ...