Good real estate and mortgage news today

Posted by admin - March 13th, 2008

Some good news on the subprime and foreclosure front today.

Standard & Poor’s sent the stock market up today when they announced that they believe the subprime mess has peaked and that the worst is behind us.

I’m not too surprised by this, despite the media fervor over the alleged “mortgage meltdown” and the doom and gloom headlines we all see nearly every day, the actual data simply do no bear these allegations out. If you actually read some of these articles, by the way, instead of just the headline, there is often a lot of important news within the article that actually contradicts the headline!

Of course the S&P didn’t say it was over, it just said the worst was behind us which is still an important indicator.

RealtyTrac also released their foreclosure news for February which shows a 4% decline in foreclosure filings from last month. Good luck locating that on a search using “foreclosure news.” The headlines are mostly pointing out that foreclosures are up 60% from a year ago.

It also points out that .003% of Colorado households received a foreclosure filing last month. Okay, it didn’t say it that way, it said 1 out of 305 households which equals .003% but that’s not as dramatic or interesting.

I’m beginning to suspect that a lot of folks out there are simply waiting for this whole thing to just end. All of a sudden, at some point it will just end and that will be that, but until then there can be no good news in the real estate industry.

That’s definitely not how it will happen. What we’ll see first are a flattening of price declines as we saw last month, then we’ll see a gradual decrease in foreclosure filings, and after a while, prices will actually start to rise and foreclosure filings will begin to decrease in ever-increasing numbers.

Those who view home buying as a long term investment, and not a get rich quick scheme, and who buy when the price is right - eventually - even a couple of years from now, when prices are steadily increasing, will be very glad they did so.