Realty Check

CNBC.com One point 1 million, or 22.8 percent, of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new report from CoreLogic.

As home sales begin a slow recovery and potential buyers dip their toes back in real estate's still-troubled waters, many of them face a huge barrier to entry: Negative equity, that is, borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are currently worth.

One point 1 million, or 22.8 percent, of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new report from CoreLogic.

This is up from 10.7 million properties, 22.1 percent, in the previous quarter. Worse yet, another 2.5 million borrowers have less than five percent equity, referred to as near-negative equity, in the fourth quarter.  » Read More

Despite huge delays in foreclosure processing last year, following the so-called "robo-signing" paperwork scandal, sales of foreclosed properties still managed to account for nearly one in four home sales in the fourth quarter of 2011, up from one in five in the previous quarter.

Getty Images

In all of 2011, just over 907,000 homes in the foreclosure process or repossessed by lenders were sold to third parties, according to a new report by RealtyTrac.

"We expect to see foreclosure-related sales increase in 2012, particularly pre-foreclosure sales, as lenders start to more aggressively dispose of distressed assets held up by the mortgage servicing gridlock over the past 18 months," said RealtyTrac CEO Brandon Moore in a press release.

 » Read More

David Papazian | Brand X Pictures | Getty Images Is now the time to buy a house? Donald Trump says housing is one of the best investments right now.

Nobody wants to catch a falling knife. It is as simple as that. If potential buyers see continued home price erosion, they will stay parked on the sidelines. But as with everything else in this unique and historic housing market, perhaps the usual logic doesn’t apply.

“Housing is one of the great investments right now. I tell people all the time when they come up to me, they say, "What should I do, Mr. Trump?" I say go buy a house,” said Donald Trump earlier today on CNBC.

“It wouldn’t be an obvious mistake to buy a house now,” hedged Robert Shiller, barely a few hours later.

Perhaps they were just jumping off Warren Buffett’s declaration yesterday that if he had a way to manage them, he would buy a couple of hundred thousand single family homes and rent them out.  » Read More

Getty Images

Barely six hours after billionaire investor Warren Buffett said that if he could he’d like to buy “a couple of hundred thousand single family homes,” the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac put about 2,500 of theirs up for sale.

It is the next step in the government’s REO (bank-owned) to rent program; the plan, announced earlier this month, is designed to help Fannie and Freddie unload thousands of foreclosed properties weighing on their books. Fannie Mae alone owns more than 100,000 repossessed properties.  » Read More

Lane Oatey | Getty Images New U.S. single-family home sales fell in January, but an upward revision to the prior months' data and a drop in the supply of properties on the market added to growing signs of a budding recovery in the housing sector.

Sales of newly built homes are still stumbling along at historically low levels, but builders claim they are beginning to see the light at the end of a very long tunnel.

Sales may not be surging back, but in some of the better local economies, buyer interest is.

We saw it at open houses over the President's Day weekend, and it's starting to show up on line even more dramatically. Virginia-based NewHomesGuide.com, the website of New Homes Guide magazine, saw a 46 percent jump in unique visitors from December 2011 to January 2012 and a 47 percent jump from one year ago. Page views were up 59%.

"We always see a seasonal jump in January," said Publisher, Leslie Stritmatter in a press release, "but the increases from the same period last year show this to be a much more significant bounce. I'm very hopeful that this is a sign of consumer confidence returning to the markets.  » Read More

Last week I wrote about how fewer foreclosures up for sale in the housing market could actually mean lower overall home prices.

Getty Images

That may sound counter-intuitive, given that we always talk about how distressed sales deflate comparable home prices.

My reasoning is that foreclosures are in high demand right now, and organic, non-distressed sellers are still not coming back to the market. Without the foreclosures, there really is no competitive market.

I hate to say, “I told you so,” but … today the National Association of Realtors reported that inventories of homes for sale in January fell to 2.31 million, the lowest supply since March, 2005. Rather than pushing home prices higher, they are still down, 2 percent, from a year ago.

The Realtors noted that 35 percent of all home sales were distressed (either foreclosures or short sales). Investor demand is high, they say, even claiming that a recent program initiated to sell the foreclosures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in bulk to investors is unnecessary.

 » Read More

This post is from Stephanie Due, CNBC real estate producer.

I spent Sunday afternoon at a Toll Brothers 

TOL loading...

Quote  |  Chart  |  News  |  Profile

[TOL  Loading...      ()   ] neighborhood in Northern Virginia called “Dominion Valley.” It’s a planned community about 45 miles from the heart of DC that sprung up in 2000 and has sold 2500 homes, with another 1,000 still planned.

My mission was to get a sense of buyer traffic as the President’s Day weekend unofficially kicks off the spring home selling season.

As I was driving back toward DC, I noticed the price of gas (for the cheap stuff) was $3.75 a gallon. Ouch. (They're higher in other parts of the country)

That can’t be good for sales.

Some of the potential buyers I spoke with worried about the drive time, but hadn’t seem to give gas prices as much thought.

Many people who live in Dominion Valley commute into the city, or just outside to the Pentagon and surrounding contractor base in Crystal City. Commutes in this area are often long, but when gas prices spike they become more costly, too.

The sales center and model homes bustling with potential buyers. With a weather forecast for snow and the “National Sales Event” advertised by Toll Brothers was mostly discounts on upgrades, I was surprised to see a steady crowd. John Elcano, Toll’s VP for Virginia Sales, told me they’ve raised prices four times since October.

 » Read More

For years now we have been harping on how distressed home sales put downward pressure on home prices all around them.

Getty Images

Close to twelve million borrowers are now in a negative equity position on their homes because so many other borrowers were unable to afford their mortgages. The logical assumption would then be that as foreclosures ease, organic home prices will rebound.

But what if the current, unique state of the housing market turns that assumption on its head?

 » Read More

After a year-long reprieve from rising foreclosures, the numbers are going up again.

One in every 624 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing in January, up 3 percent from the previous month, according to a new report from RealtyTrac.  Foreclosure activity froze in many states in 2011, due to processing delays after fraud, or so-called "Robo-signing," were uncovered in the fall of 2010.  The thaw is now on.

"We expect the pattern of increasing foreclosures to continue in the coming months, especially given the finalized mortgage and foreclosure settlement reached in early February between 49 state attorneys general and five of the nation's largest lenders," said RealtyTrac's CEO Brandon Moore in a written release.  "Foreclosure activity increased on a year-over-year basis for the first time in more than 12 months in Florida, Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania, following a pattern we saw in late 2011 in states such as California, Arizona and Massachusetts."

 » Read More