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

According to a recent AP report, consumer confidence fell to 46.6 in July from a reading of 49.3 in June.  It is the second consecutive month of declines in confidence.  A reading of 90 would indicate a "healthy" outlook on the economy. The recent decline in confidence appears to be reflected in ...

With so much continuing to be made of a housing recovery being contingent upon historically low mortgage rates and a cheap Fed funny money monetary policy, I thought it would be worth revisiting the ongoing relationship between existing home sales and mortgage rates that continues to defy some of...

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the rate of mortgage purchase applications for the week ending July 24th remained unchanged from the previous week at 262. The problem is that an index of 262 indicates continued weak demand for real estate.  After hitting a 12-week high of 285.6 for...

With all of the headlines being thrown around, often times things are taken out of context, this is one of those times. CNNMoney.com is reporting today that according to the S&P Case Shiller home price index that home prices are up.  And they were...month over month. Home prices were also up mont...

The Commerce Department announced on Monday that new home sales jumped 11% in June from May to a 384,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate.  Compared to June of 2008, new home sales are still down -21.3%.  When compared to 2007, new home sales are down nearly 50%.  I want to bring the current numbe...

The Census Bureau recently published their second quarter report on residential vacancies and homeownership rates which showed that the homeownership rate slipped from 68.1% from last year to 67.4% this year. While the year over year decline in homeownership rate should not come as much of a surp...

The NAR announced that home values fell -15.4% year over year from June of 2008 to June of 2009.  While bulls would blindly taut that the "pace" of home value declines has slowed from last month's year over year decline of -16.8%, there is still significant systemic risk in the housing market tha...

The NAR announced this week that existing home sales rose 3.6% to a 4.89 million seasonally adjusted rate, the strongest pace since October of 2008.  The rate of sales while encouraging, is still off -0.2% from last year despite an $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit and record housing afford...

After falling 9.4% last week to a 7-week low, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, mortgage purchaseapplications moderated and rose 1.3% to 262.1.  This was despite the fact that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage jumped from 5.05% to 5.31% for the week ending July 17th. The 262.1 reading ...

The Bank of Wyoming was shuttered by the FDIC on July 10th making it the 53rd bank failure this year. The concern for local banks is that many of them are hard-wired into the commercial property market, specifically commercial property values.  While most of the residential mortgage loans were se...