Arizona Real Estate Notebook

Whoo Hoo! Phoenix only has 16 months of housing “shadow” inventory. Er… 16 months? That’s the lowest shadow inventory of any of the cities Standard and Poors studied? Yikes! S&P found the largest shadow inventory in New York City. There, it would take 103 months to clear the distressed properties, or more than 8 years. [...]

Last week Fannie Mae started; … requiring servicers to verify income, liabilities, and monthly expenses for all borrowers prior to granting a permanent standard Fannie Mae mortgage modification. Previously, servicers were allowed to evaluate borrowers for standard mortgage modifications using stated information from the borrower. It’s hard to believe that previously all you had to [...]

I don’t know if the lower rate compensates for the loss of the $8,000 home buyer tax credit but it certainly lowers the cost of owning a home. The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage dropped to 4.69 percent this week from 4.75 percent last week, Freddie Mac reported Thursday. That marks the lowest [...]

“Fast” is a term or art here. The fastest doing short sales was GMAC averaging 6 months after a home became 60 days delinquent. Citigroup (7.5 months) and Wells Fargo (8 months) were second and third fastest in completing short sales of prime mortgages. For Arizona home sellers, starting the clock when 60 days delinquent [...]

What could possibly go wrong? $353 million to pay up to nine months of a struggling homeowners’ mortgage if the lender or bank agrees to forgive up to nine months of payments. This is meant to help an unemployed or underemployed homeowner. The real problem is their homes are worth less than half of what [...]

Do these U.S. GDP numbers ever get revised up? There’s some political shenanigans going on there. So inventory adjustment accounted for over two-thirds of the GDP growth in Q1 – and the inventory adjustment appears over. Bummer.

This won’t have much affect on Arizona real estate other than making the pool of potential Arizona home buyers smaller. I doubt Fannie Mae’s 7 year “lockout” of strategic defaulters will have any significant impact on the number of strategic defaults in Arizona. The incentive is just too big. If your mortgage is twice the [...]

Tip of the iceberg. We identified 4,608 prisoners listed on the IRS 2009 Prisoner File8 who attempted to claim the Homebuyer Credit on their Tax Year 2008 returns, despite the fact that they were in prison at the time their qualifying home was reportedly purchased (951 of these claims were filed by paid preparers). Via [...]

I had a few posts mulling over the end of the Fed buying of mortgage-backed securities and whether it would cause mortgage interest rates to rise. See here, here and here. They haven’t. Here’s a good quick play-by-play from PMI about how interest rate spreads have fared since the end of the Feds program to [...]

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Calculated Risk on apartment rent trends; Just something to be aware of … rents could start falling again, but it does appear the slide has stopped for now – at least for the large apartment complexes. Wall Street Journal on apartment leases and rents; For the first time since the downturn, some of the nation’s [...]

Mortgage fraud crackdown in Arizona; The criminally accused include a former Countrywide loan officer who prosecutors say conspired with another man to take out more than $38 million in bank loans by recruiting strangers to fill out the applications. According to prosecutors, the pair held seminars to attract willing “straw buyers,” disinterested parties who would [...]