Mortgage and Real Estate News: September 2014

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Despite Builders’ Optimism, Housing Starts Tumble 14%

Nationwide housing starts plunged in August, mostly attributed to a 31.7 percent decline in the multifamily market, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Census Bureau reports.

Overall, housing starts – reflecting both multifamily and the single-family construction – were down 14.4 percent in August, reaching a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 956,000 units.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Fed Policy: From Tapering to Tightening | ETF Trends

Over the past nine months, the Federal Reserve (Fed) has gradually reduced the pace of its asset purchases in conjunction with an improvement in the strength of the U.S. economy. With "tapering" expected to end October 29, we believe that investors should now look beyond 2014 and start to focus on when, not if, the Federal Reserve will raise the Federal Funds Rate.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Credit scores to improve with settled debt, bills under FICO revamp

Many consumers who have been denied credit or charged higher interest rates due to a low credit rating could soon be in a better position as the nation's most widely used credit scoring agency is revamping how it computes credit scores.

Fair Issac Corp., creators of the FICO score, announced its calculations will no longer include any record of a consumer failing to pay a bill if the bill has been paid or settled with a collection agency. The new FICO score also will give less weight to unpaid medical bills that have gone to collection agencies.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Fed Weighs Change to Rate Guidance for Added Flexibility

Federal Reserve officials are considering whether to alter their guidance on the likely path of interest rates to give them more flexibility to react to changes in the economy.

The Fed has said since March that its benchmark rate would stay low for a "considerable time" after it completes monthly bond buying intended to boost growth. With purchases set to end late this year and the Fed nearing its full-employment goal, that assurance will soon become obsolete.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

ECB's Draghi Takes a Gamble on QE-lite - WSJ

It was a watershed moment. All year, the European Central Bank has faced growing pressure—from governments, markets, the mainstream economics establishment, the International Monetary Fund—to embark on a large-scale government bond-buying program. And all year, the ECB had resisted, arguing repeatedly that quantitative easing would yield little benefit in the eurozone's bank-centric, structurally challenged economy and warning of the political and moral hazard that would arise as a result of exposing the ECB balance sheet directly to sovereign credit risk.

World Bank warns of global jobs crisis

Sydney (AFP) - The world is facing a global jobs crisis that is hurting the chances of reigniting economic growth and there is no magic bullet to solve the problem, the World Bank warned on Tuesday. In a study released at a G20 Labour and Employment Ministerial Meeting in Australia, the Bank said...

A Penny Saved Is Far Easier Than a Penny Earned

The saying "A penny saved is a penny earned" has often been misattributed
to Benjamin Franklin." He didn't say it quite like that, but whomever first
coined the now-famous version of the phrase is even more on the money
today. These days, the reality is that you need to earn far more than a
penny.

Read more...http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/09/06/a-penny-saved-is-far-easier-than-a-penny-earned/

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

How to effortlessly use online reviews to grow your real estate business | Inman News

Consumers have always relied on the opinions of others to help make their buying decisions, but where they find those opinions has migrated online over the last decade. Increasingly, consumers are searching online to find service providers, the best products or reputable businesses.

This research, of course, includes reading customer reviews from all kinds of sources, including a business's own website, review sites (like Yelp) and large online portals dedicated to the real estate industry. Today, 85 percent of consumers use online reviews to evaluate local businesses.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

China’s Property Market: The Risks for Banks | Pragmatic Capitalism

Despite worries about a collapse in China's property market, we think the financial system will navigate the coming credit cycle if banks can buy time to resolve loan problems—and receive government support if needed.

As we've noted, fundamentals in the property market remain strong. But what about the risks from the standpoint of banking and finance? Among China's financial institutions, banks lend the most to the property sector: by 2013, they had provided RMB9 trillion (US$1.46 trillion), compared with RMB5.4 trillion from the shadow-banking sector. For property developers, though, banks aren't the main source of liquidity. Nearly 70% of their liquidity comes from nonbank sources, 39% from their own cash and 28% from customer deposits, so they don't rely too much on bank funding.

Countrywide’s Mozilo speaks: “We didn’t do anything wrong”

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Countrywide's Mozilo speaks: "We didn't do anything wrong"
//All HW content

Six years after the financial crisis and the government is still seeking justice for the financial crisis, targeting Countrywide Financial co-founder Angelo Mozilo. But to Mozilo, he did nothing wrong.
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