Realty Check with Diana Olick
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Now that's a shot of confidence: Home builder sentiment hit a 7-year high in June.
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Starting to Defy Logic
Posted By: Diana Olick
Housing starts stopped traffic on the street again, especially after the street predicted a drop and once again, the numbers chose to take another path. Housing starts jumped up two and a half percent in April, despite a bevy of bad indicators: bad weather, high inventories, increased cancellation rates, a credit crunch, the lowest builder confidence in 15 years and low overall confidence among investors about putting their money in housing period.
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Stabilizing Instability
Posted By: Diana Olick
Stabilization. That’s the buzzword today from the number crunchers/housing prognosticators at the National Association of Realtors in its quarterly metro home price report. “Essentially, we see that the existing-home market is stabilizing in a broad cyclical trough and moving in the right direction, with a modest gain from the fourth quarter,” says NAR senior economist Lawrence Yun (yes, the exalted David Lereah is gone).
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Saving the Subprimes: the Brochure
Posted By: Diana Olick
I received a curious press release in the email today from the National Association of Realtors that I thought I might share. Headline: NAR Partners with the Center for Responsible Lending and Neighborworks America to Keep Families in Their Homes.My immediate reaction: Come on! So here are all the realtors, who made enough money during the housing boom to put themselves in corporate branded HumVees (I actually saw this in some small market in Florida… made me slightly ill), partnering with genuine community activist groups to help "save" the same people that they played a part in getting into deep water in the first place (how's that for a run-on runoff at the mouth!).
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Sex Sells
Posted By: Diana Olick
Forgive me for being a total femme today, but an actual statistical survey forces the point: What is UP with the real estate business? A new study from the National Association of Realtors has me fuming.
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Green is the Color of Money
Posted By: Diana Olick
Since we're all talking about "keeping America great" today on CNBC, I think we should start at the heart, and by that I mean in the bathroom -- okay, the kitchen; I mean at home. Americans will spend nearly $233 billion on home remodeling this year, according to a press release I got yesterday from the National Association of Home Builders. A key driver in this trend is green remodeling.
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Hard Landing & More Mortgages
Posted By: Diana Olick
I almost didn't want to do the Toll Brothers earnings report today on TV, because frankly, I feel like a broken record. Oh look, there's a homebuilder reporting poor earnings, missing the Street's expectations and lowering full-year earnings outlooks. And guess what? It's those tighter lending standards and that buyer skittishness that has everyone running for the hills of suburbia.
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Subprime or About Time
Posted By: Diana Olick
I'm getting a little annoyed with the premise that the subprime mortgage crisis and tightening lending standards are wholly to blame for the current headwinds in housing. Of course, they are contributing to the problem, and of course, it's important for us to keep on top of regulatory and institutional changes in the mortgage market. But here's the thing: I think we might be missing one of the boats in the blame game -- specifically, greed.
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The Doctor is In
Posted By: Diana Olick
I was struck by a line toward the end of Hovnanian Enterprise Inc.'s very dour Q2 forecast. After detailing how earnings losses would be more than double expectations, including all those land losses of course, and how the "results reflect a continued challenging operating environment in most of the company's markets," the conclusion was as follows: "The adverse publicity surrounding the sub-prime market has further damaged home buyers' psychology."
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Tip of the Iceberg
Posted By: Diana Olick
As lawmakers on Capitol Hill stand in front of brightly colored placards, touting their 'Save the Subprimer’ proposals (witness Sen. Charles Schumer today), and banks get together with community groups in aggressive campaigns to seek out those in danger of default and save them from ultimate foreclosure (witness EMC's "Mortgage Mod Squad"), I fear something is getting lost. We're not in the thick of the crisis; we're right at the start.
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Couture-Ready Real Estate
Posted By: Diana Olick
As part of CNBC's "Rich and Richer" day, I contributed a piece on something called "Couture-Ready Real Estate." Ok, that's the fancy-brand ballyhoo that the PR rep invented; what it means is simply that you buy a huge stone mansion that is supremely lovely on the outside. Inside, it has every electrical outlet and air vent and steel beam and plumbing drain in place, but literally nothing else.
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About Realty Check with Diana Olick
Realty Check takes you from the housing boom to bust and beyond. Led by Diana Olick, we were here when the house came crashing down and we have the singular expertise to explain how it will be rebuilt. The goal of this blog is to bring the market, the rescue plans, the politics and the pontification home to you, with clear concise explanations of the wildly complicated issues in all facets of real estate today and tomorrow. Realty Check is read by leaders in the real estate industry: Investors, Realtors, Big builder CEOs, Mortgage Bankers, Wall Street Analysts and Administration Officials to name a few.
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Olick serves as CNBC's real estate correspondent as well as the author of the "Realty Check" blog on CNBC.com.
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Real Estate Explained
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The housing market is one of the pillars of the U.S. economy and there may be no better indication of how the market is doing than housing starts.
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You may have heard this term in the aftermath of the real estate bubble. So what is an underwater mortgage?
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Sometimes financial terms sound exactly like what they are. CNBC explains jumbo mortgages.
Real Estate
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As homes gain more value nationwide, banks are acting faster on delinquent loans and repossessing more homes.
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Applications for mortgage refinances finally swung to the positive last week despite the steady rise in mortgage rates.
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Carlyle Group is preparing to launch a U.S. real estate fund and hopes to raise as much as $4 billion, the WSJ reported.
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