CR has the scoop on nationwide May foreclosure activity:
“May foreclosure activity was the third highest month on record, and marked the third straight month where the total number of properties with foreclosure filings exceeded 300,000 — a first in the history of our report."(Local Trustee Sales Notices here).
He also has a posting on mortgage rates and the 10 year yield:
"Using their tool, with the Ten Year yield at 3.99%, this suggests that 30 year mortgage rates will rise to 5.8% based on the historical relationship between the Ten Year yield and mortgage rates."6% is where we were at the end of last summer.
26 comments:
It should be noted that the spread between the 10 year note and 30 year mortgage rates has been running under its historical average thanks to the Fed's recent policy of buying Fannie and Freddie's mortgage backed securities. As of last Friday, the spread was about 1.6%.
However, it looks as if they've lost control of the 10 year, thanks in part to due to perceptions that they're spraying dollars at all of our economic problems.
Realty Trac numbers, bank owned properties.
Arlington 245
Loudoun 1431
Fairfax 3464
Prince William 4049
Foreclosure rates per area (in foreclosures per ___ household):
Arlington 1 in 1076 houeholds
Alexandria 1 in 924 households
Fairfax 1 in 373 households
Loudoun 1 in 348 households
PWC 1 in 155 households
DC 1 in 950 households
These rates (per area) are about the same as they have been for the last 12 months now. Theres little here to suggest the lifting of the foreclosure moratorium did anything to increase the amount of future REOs coming on line.
Meanwhile, between counties, the divergance in foreclosure rates (and prices) contininues...
HayfieldGrad,
I'm well aware that there are free and reduced lunch students and ESL students in FCPS. anielarke made a dubious claim -- that McLean HS had a lot of poor students and that the demographics of McLean and Wakefield HS were similar. I was showing that they have wildly different demographics.
I don't have time to look up free and reduced lunch statistics at all FCPS high schools but I doubt more than one (if even one) matches TC Williams's rate of 50 percent.
[Above comment and this one are responding to comments from yesterday]
anielarke,
I'm very happy that I got to go to a highly regarded FCPS high school. And I'm very happy with UVa. I am doing just fine now and can afford to buy a condo in DC or Arlington. I have been able to do so since late 2007. I don't think anyone here (but maybe you) would dispute that I made the right call not buying a condo in DC or Arlington in 2007 and 2008. Some may say I should have bought this year, we'll see.
I think you have quite the chip on your shoulder.
I'm just going to say this and then not touch the topic anymore. Everyone should consider the biases anielarke has -- she has a home in the TC Williams school district, her kids went there, and she wants an inflated reputation in hopes of keeping bubble gains or minimizing bubble losses.
On the other hand, I don't really have skin in the game at the moment. In fact, if anything, I'm harming my future buying opportunities by pointing out how good the schools are in the districts where I'm looking to buy.
I just am trying to help people avoid making a mistake they will regret. I've known many a family to move out of the bad school districts as they get fed up with increasing behavior problems and substandard education in their children's schools.
I challenge anyone to e-mail Jay Mathews of the Washington Post (who put together the ranking anielarke is quoting) and ask him if he thinks McLean and TC Williams are similar. I've e-mailed him before and he is usually good at responding. I am confident he will note that McLean has a better reputation.
future of the tax credit?
(also posted in previous bucket...)
June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Lawmakers are pushing to revive legislation in the Senate that would almost double an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and expand the program to all borrowers.
Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, introduced a bill today that would increase the tax credit to $15,000 and remove income and other restrictions on who can qualify, according to his spokeswoman, Sheridan Watson. The Treasury Department declined to comment on the proposal.
The legislation, co-sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, would extend the homebuyer credit to multifamily properties used as the borrower’s primary residence. It would also eliminate income caps of $75,000 and $150,000 on individuals and couples seeking to claim the credit.
...
shamrock, in FFX County that number rivals the total for sale inventory. Moratoria effect or no, that's still a lot of bank owned property to move.
tbw, you should see the comment she made to me yesterday. She equated renters with people that basically hate their families. Yes, I hate my pregnant wife by renting a nice house at half the cost to own. That's not just a chip on her shoulder, that's delusional misinformation.
no kevin, she was really claiming that pregnant women are consumed by an unstoppable force of mother nature that overwhelms all their meager attempts at holding onto rationality, and against which mere husbands stand no chance.
:)
Though she did aim it squarely at you.
This is the kind of thing that makes me think that if we end up waiting so long that we have to adopt, maybe that's a good thing...
kevin and Cara,
My last youtube video link had mixed reviews but I promise this one has nothing to do with schools.
Instead, it's a video you may all have already seen that is wildly mocked in many bubble blogs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubsd-tWYmZw
It's the infamous "Suzanne Researched This" video. I thought it was partly on point to this whole emotional blackmail debate.
Cara: "no kevin, she was really claiming that pregnant women are consumed by an unstoppable force of mother nature that overwhelms all their meager attempts at holding onto rationality, and against which mere husbands stand no chance."
LMAO
TBW, I'm very familiar with that wretched commercial. It's a must see though.
Yeah, my wife got the nesting instinct something awful. It was really humorous to watch, and something we laugh about now. The cure was to go to open houses, look at the prices, then run through the cost of owning verses renting an equivalent property. That cured her nesting instinct every time. In fact, we came awfully close to renting a house in Vienna, but decided to stick with our month-to-month townhouse.
We came close to buying this spring, but a higher bid came in a few hours earlier from someone with an FHA* loan.
* Or, as my brother-in-law Wall Streeter so succintly put it: "Aren't FHA loans for poor people? WTF is the FHA giving out $700k loans to some $!@#% who can only put down 3%"?
novawatcher,
Well the real difficulty for us is going to be holding to our reserve price. Because there are places that are technically cheaper than renting, and that we can easily afford, and it's my husband's designated job to stop us from overpaying for one of them now while the $8k is still out there distorting the market.
contrarian -
Could you post stuff that's more local -- DC region? Otherwise, go to the national housing bubble blog.
Okay TBW and Kevin: One more attempt to end the TC Williams and pregnant women saga.
I do not have a chip on my shoulder about TC Williams and I am not worried about enhancing the value of my house by inflating anyone's opinion of TC Williams. In fact, I wish the value of my house would go down. A group of new houses was built nearby and sold in the $2 million range and some older houses on big lots sold in the $1.5 to $1.7 range. Because of this my assessment and property taxes continue to go up instead of down. Based on my experience with actual skin in the game (i.e. two children) at TC Williams, I think the school does a good job with a group of children from widely diverse economic, cultural and social backgrounds. My kids did well there and so did many of their friends who were in the free/reduced lunch category. I did not compare TC Williams to McLean High School, I said that Wakefield High School was more like McLean High School DEMOGRAPHICALLY than many thought. I know that McLean has a much lower number of free and reduced price lunches than Wakefield, but I also know that the school is very diverse with children from about as many countries as Wakefield. The difference is that the McLean parents make more money than the parents of the more recent emigres whose children attend Wakefield. As a substitute calculus(mostly AP) and algebra teacher for just about every high school in Fairfax County(lots of time at Hayfield -- Hayfield Grad)and Arlington, I probably know a little more about the high schools than the websites reveal.
For Kevin: I in no way "basically" or otherwise equated renters with people who hate their families. I said that if you had a pregnant wife in a one bedroom apartment, her nesting instinct would probably kick in and you would have already bought a condo/townhouse or house. This was suppose to be humorous. Meshell, Tabitha, VA Investor and even Cara easily understood what I meant. As a matter of fact I meant to note earlier that the place you are renting sounds like it is in Vienna Woods, and I wanted to let you know that my father was a construction foreman for Yeonas and spent many years building Vienna Woods. In fact, one of the streets is named after him -- and many of the other streets are named after long-time Yeonas employees.
Peace out!
I think it's really sweet that the streets were named after the long-time employees!
Ace: In the 1950s and 1960s the whole street naming thing was a big marketing deal in suburbia. The first people to buy on the street could have the street named after them or the builders often gave streets the first names of their children or their pets. Fairfax County (which had a good deal of its development in the 1960s and 1970s) finally had to come up with "themes" for areas so that there would be some type of consistency. One of the first subdivisions to have the "theme" was Camelot (off Rt. 236) and my favorite street name is still Lancelot Lane.
But what I really got on to report is that I just heard from my agent that my offer on a foreclosure in S. Arlington was competing with 7 others and that the bank wants best and final offers by 10 am tomorrow. House came on this morning, and my offer is full price, cash. Not good enough to stop the bank from coming back to everyone for more.
CRT:
I do not like to get into the back and forth on this blog and I enjoy reading everyone’s perspective on what’s going on; however, I want to point out some issues reading this statement:
“Theres little here to suggest the lifting of the foreclosure moratorium did anything to increase the amount of future REOs coming on line.”
First, the foreclosure process takes 60 to 90 days in Virginia; it takes longer than that for foreclosures to actually show up as REO. In addition, if a Notice of Default was not already issued, you need to add an extra thirty days before the foreclosure process actually starts. So, if the moratoria ended on March 31, a Notice of Default was previously issued and the banks had every thing together and were ready to go on April 1, REO still would not show up in the May numbers.
Second, as you know, Realtytrac measures foreclosure activity. Let’s examine May 2009 activity in Virginia:
Notice of Defaults: 3
Notice of Trustee Sales: 4,221
Real Estate Owned: 1,161
Total Activity: 5,385
Now, just for fun, let’s examine Virginia activity for May 2008:
Notice of Defaults: 1,136
Notice of Trustee Sales 2,486
Real Estate Owned: 1,644
Total Activity: 5,266
As you can see, Total foreclosure activity in Virginia went up 2.26%, just as Realtytrac says.
But, what happened with the Notice of Defaults? Well, Realtytrac tells us:
“† Collection of some records previously classified as NOD in this state was discontinued starting in January 2009”
So, when we look at total activity for Virginia, we are not comparing apples to apples.
Let’s look at the change in Notice of Trustee Sales: Up 69.8% from May 2008.
Now look at Real Estate Owned: Down 29.4% from May 2008.
So, it looks like foreclosures are coming that are not yet reflected in REO.
Let’s now compare March 2009 with May 2009.
We have to back into to March, since they only released January, February and 1st Quarter numbers:
Notice of Trustee Sales:
1st Quarter: 9,858
Less: Jan. 3,579
Less: Feb. 3,198
March 2009: 3,081
May 2009: 4,221
Up 37.0% since March, 2009.
Real Estate Owned:
1st Quarter: 4,573
Less: Jan. 1,418
Less: Feb. 1,624
March 2009: 1,531
May 2009: 1,161
Down 24.2% since March 2009.
REO is probably down due to the moratoria, but NTS are up, so . . . we’re likely to see more REO in the future (unless a much larger number of foreclosures start moving at the foreclosure sales).
http://www.realtytrac.com/ContentManagement/PressRelease.aspx
Links:
May, 2009
May, 2008
First Quarter
January, 2009
February, 2009
"reading" in the first paragraph of my post s/b "regarding"
Zerodown - very nicely done. I hadnt really paid attention to that. My remark was a bit flippant and related to an earlier discussion I had with Kevin. To wit, when the moratorium started, it didnt seem to do much to affect the stated inventory trend. As such, I didnt expect it to do anything to stated inventory when it ended. In that regard, see my post in todays bits bucket.
Nevertheless, you are very correct - I had totally missed the way they were counting NOD. I wonder how they are calculating them now - clearly 3 isnt all there is.
Incidentally, thats what I hate about realtytrac. In an effort to improve accuracy keep changing the way they measure things making apples to apples comarisons very difficult.
Personally, I wish they would show us what it would have been under the old wrong way just so we could see how it changed over time.
CRT
yes, they should rename it realty-polaroid.
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