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

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Real Estate Broker/Owner
RECENT BLOG POSTS
If 600,000 monthly job losses, a prolonged housing depression, insolvent banks, and a pending GM bankruptcy are not enough to slow down this completely ridiculous stock rally, at least we finally know what will get Wall St.'s attention, the credit rating of the United States. On Thursday credit a...
05/23/2009
Wall Street will be facing "a headwind of continued losses for the better part of five years", that according to Whitney Tilson, the founder of hedge fund T2 Partners during a recent interview on CNBC. Tilson estimates that over $1 trillion in residential and commercial real estate losses are sti...
05/22/2009
Apparently there are not as many "green shoots" as Bernanke had once thought. The latest Federal Reserve forecast which was part of their minutes from April projected higher unemployment rates and a deeper economic contraction than what they had predicted just three months ago. Specifically, the ...
05/21/2009
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the mortgage purchase application index was down -4.4% from last week to a seasonally adjusted rate of 254. I continue to write about this index every week waiting for a signal that demand for real estate is going to pick up for the peak buying seaso...
05/20/2009
For the second time in four months housing starts set a new record low according to the Census Bureau. Housing starts dropped -12.8% month over month to a seasonally adjusted rate of 458,000.  Additionally, housing starts are down -54.2% year over year and are now at the slowest pace on record go...
05/19/2009
If credit card defaults are any indication of future foreclosure activity, the housing market still has a ways to go until it finds a bottom. According to a Reuters report, credit card defaults reached record highs in April.  The following is a comparison of the default rate from March to April o...
05/17/2009
According to Moody's, 15.4 million homeowners are currently under water; this number is up from an estimated 13.6 million at the end of 2008 and it appears that the number will continue to rise over the next couple of years. Contrary to CNBC's Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow, the housing market is no...
05/17/2009
Fannie Mae reported a first quarter loss of $23.2 billion and has submitted an additional request for $19 billion from the Treasury department to keep it afloat according to an article written by Aaron Smith with CNNMoney.com The $19 billion is in addition to the $15.2 billion that had been drawn...
05/17/2009
Every quarter the National Association of REALTORS publishes their metro home price report for over 150 markets across the country.  The report shows the quarterly median home sales price for individual metros as well as the percentage change from last year. Their newest first quarter of 2009 rep...
05/15/2009
The Mortgage Bankers Association released their weekly mortgage purchase application index on Wednesday which showed a modest 0.5% increase from the previous week to 265.7. The 265.7 is an indication of continued weak demand for real estate.  To give you an example, during the four weeks in Janua...
05/14/2009
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