More Americans are optimistic that home prices will inch up over the next year, with expectations that prices will rise at least 1.4 percent in that timeframe. That marks the highest amount ever recorded in Fannie Mae’s monthly National Housing Survey.
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For the sixth-consecutive week, average fixed mortgage rates set new record lows, pushing home buyer affordability even higher, according to Freddie Mac’s weekly mortgage market survey.
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Seventy-five percent of Americans still aspire to own a home and consider home ownership a major life goal, according to a new poll of non-home owners aged 22 to 50 conducted by Integra Realty Resources, an independent real estate valuation firm.
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High unemployment persists and the European debt crisis continues to threaten the economic recovery, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Congressional Joint Economic Committee yesterday. The real estate market also continues to serve as “another drag” on recovery, he noted.
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The apartment and condo market showed big improvements in the first quarter, the National Association of Home Builders reports. NAHB’s latest Multifamily Production Index, which measures builder and developer sentiment over the multifamily markets, reached its highest reading since the third quarter of 2005.
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The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) is urging HUD to end its moratorium on allowing investors to take part in the agency’s Section 203(k) rehabilitation loan program. The association concedes that the moratorium was the right course of action when it was implemented in the mid-1990s, but notes that today’s housing market is vastly different.
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