Positive news expected in housing reports

[cal04]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/positive-news-expected-in-housing-reports-2009-10-18

The U.S. housing market is coming off of its worst downturn in more than 60 years, boosted by a combination of market forces and government assistance, economists say.

Major housing indicators should rise again in September, according to a survey of top economic forecasters ahead of a relatively light week for economic data. Data on housing will dominate the headlines this coming week.

"We expect to see some positive news" on the housing market, wrote economists Brian Bethune and Nigel Gault of IHS Global Insight.

(snip)
Congress will be looking at legislation this coming week to extend or expand the tax credit, at the urging of the usual real estate lobbies: mortgage bankers, real estate agents, and home builders.

[flyarm]

1. sure some are selling..at bargain basement prices then fucking the rest of us in the

neighborhood!

hmm how do i know..one condo sold above me in forclosure..1 million under the price the rest of us paid!

[Warpy]

2. Rubbish! More Mary Sunshine hogwash

for most markets that were hardest hit, like boom towns out west, California and Florida. The problem is that there is a huge "shadow inventory" of housing being kept off the market by banks and other institutional owners in order to support prices and keep them from falling down into the basement in those areas.

While that stopped the real estate freefall, the banks won't hold those properties forever and will start offering them for sale, insuring a buyer's market for some time to come with no rebound in housing sale prices in those areas.

There might be a price rebound in cities like Boston that didn't share in the bidding war madness of the early 00s, but most other areas won't see it.

[girl gone mad]

5. Shadow inventory, foreclosure moratorium ending,

more shenanigans going on at the low end right now thanks to the first time buyer stimulus (which amounted to somewhere around $40K per buyer), workouts starting to fail. Barney Frank recently admitted that it's now FHA policy to knowingly hand out loans that buyers can't afford in an effort to prop up housing prices. This can't possibly end well.

[Robb]

3. Ha ha ha!

That's hilarious. The ONLY "positive news" housing could expect is another/extended tax credit. It must be in the bag.

[Po_d Mainiac]

4. Standing behind the bovine..recycled green shoots...bad odor..n/t

[wuvuj]

6. The OTHER side of the coin?

http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc091019.htm

Several facts are worth noting. In September 2007, about a month before the stock market peaked and well before credit strains were obvious, the CRL testified to Congress about the wave of coming subprime foreclosures, encouraging Congress to act before the crisis escalated. “As it turned out,” the CRL noted in its latest testimony, “our predictions – dismissed by some as pessimistic – actually underestimated the dimensions of the crisis.”

This is important, because here is what the CRL is saying now. First, over 1.5 million homes have already been lost to foreclosure in the sub-prime category, and another 2 million subprime mortgages are currently delinquent.

But even this figure pales in relation to their data on projected foreclosures of all types. For 2009, total foreclosures are estimated to be 2.4 million. But coupling state-by-state delinquency rates and foreclosure starts (as reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) with other data, the CRL projects that for most states, foreclosure totals will more than triple over the coming 4 years, for a total of 8.1 million foreclosures, with only about one in ten of these being saved thanks to court-supervised modifications. These figures are consistent with the reset data I've repeatedly presented - it appears to be wishful thinking to believe that the credit crisis is over. Most likely, what we've witnessed in recent months is little more than the combination of a lull in the reset schedule coupled with a wholly unsustainable burst of deficit spending amounting to over 7% of GDP.

My impression of the U.S. banking system is that it is quietly going insolvent, in a manner that will become evident only when the slack for “significant judgment” (provided by the FASB earlier this year when it altered mark-to-market rules) is taken up so tightly that the rope snaps.

[notesdev]

7. Positive news manipulated for political purposes

The cost of this "positive news" is going to be on the order of hundreds of billions in losses, like the rest of the completely manufactured "green shoots" horsepuckey.

OK we know now that if you sink an obscene amount of PRINTED money into a sector, its numbers will improve while that is going on. This is all bullshit since that improvement goes away the moment you stop shoveling dollars into the hole. Just look at the brilliance of Cash for Clunkers and the numbers for the month after (auto sales cratering).