Today is a holiday-shortened session but that doesn’t mean that the markets will be on vacation. The day’s big event is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s speech at the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, WY. Investors will dissect every phrase looking for clues about the economy and housing. More importantly, markets want some advance [...]

Mortgage rates unexpectedly increased yesterday afternoon as the U.S. stock market staged a late rally. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.9 percent, or 247.77 points. This is a typical pattern. When stocks are moving higher, investors want to ride the wave and look for sources of cash. [...]

As mortgage guidelines loosened between 2002 and 2006, homeowners often used their home equity to retire credit card and other consumer debt. They did this by increasing the size of the mortgage and taking “cash out” from their home. As you’d expect, this type of mortgage transaction is called a “cash out” refinance. Well, now [...]

When the National Association of Realtors® releases its monthly Existing Home Sales report, people tend to watch every word, fact and figure in the statement in hopes of decoding the real estate market. It’s all wasted energy. It’s impossible to use the NAR report in everyday living because the NAR report is a national story. [...]

This week is data-heavy so markets will finally get to focus on fundamentals instead of fear. For the past two weeks, uncertainty about the economy has led to psychologically-driven mortgage interest rate movements. Rising defaults devalue mortgage holdings and many investors are now expecting the defaults levels to rise even more. When defaults exceed expectations, [...]

In light of today’s New Homes Sales data and Monday’s forthcoming Existing Homes Sales report, let’s review a term that real estate professionals use to describe housing inventory. Absorption Rate is a real estate term for the length of time required to sell all of a given stock in a given area. We can use [...]

With tomorrow morning’s New Home Sales report, markets will get a look at the number of newly-constructed homes sold in July. The figure is expected to be in the 825,000 range. This is lower than June’s 834,000 figure. But — as always — there is more to the story. When the Census Bureau reports on [...]

Suddenly, Private Mortgage Insurance is back in vogue. If only by default. The story background is well-documented in this Bankrate.com article from 2002. The article is five years old, but it still raises some salient points. What the article doesn’t highlight is that second mortgages such as home equity loans are typically sold to Wall [...]

Friday, the Federal Reserve lowered its Discount Rate by 0.50% in an effort to preserve liquidity among our nation’s banks. This has nothing to do with mortgage rates that people like you and I get for our homes. Well, not directly at least. The Discount Rate is the rate at which banks borrow money from [...]

Again last week, financiers failed to answer the major question dogging Wall Street: What is the “right” risk model to use for mortgage lending? The models of the past are being proven to have been wrong. So, why do risk models matter? Because the basic tenet of lending states that the riskier the loan, the [...]