All the Real Estate News That’s Fit to RE-Print™

Welcome to our weekly edition of Real Estate Investing News This Week. Highlights this week include:

• CoreLogic: Home Prices up 8.8%

• Pending Home Sales up in May

• Foreclosure Inventory Down 37%

• Foreclosure Starts Rise for the First Time in 8 Months

• Foreign Buyers up Their Stake in U.S. Housing Market

• Nobel Prize Winner in Economics: “Housing market is a crapshoot”

We hope these real estate news items help you stay up-to-date with your real estate investing strategies and inspire some profitable real estate deals for you.
 

CoreLogic: Home Prices up 8.8 Percent

On July 1, Corelogic released its May Home Price Index report. Home prices nationwide, including distressed sales, increased 8.8 percent in May 2014 compared to May 2013.
This change represents 27 months of consecutive year-over-year increases in home prices nationally.
Highlights from the Report:

• Including distressed sales, the five states with the highest home price appreciation were:  Hawaii (+13.2%), California (+13.1%), Nevada (+12.6%), Michigan (+11.8%) and New York (+11.0%).

• Including distressed transactions, the peak-to-current change was -13.5%.

• Including distressed sales, the U.S. has experienced 27 consecutive months of year-over-year increases; however, the national average is no longer posting double-digit increases.

Get your copy of the complete Home Price Index Report >>>

Pending Home Sales up in May

Pending home sales rose in May, according to the National Association of Realtors^®. All four regions of the country saw increases in pending sales, with the Northeast and West experiencing the largest gains.
The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, increased 6.1 percent to 103.9 in May from 97.9 in April, but still remains 5.2 percent below May 2013 (109.6).
 

Foreclosure Inventory Down 37 Percent

–47,000 Completed Foreclosures in May–

According to CoreLogic, for the month of May 2014, there were 47,000 completed foreclosures nationally, down from 52,000 in May 2013, a year-over-year decrease of 9.4 percent.
On a month-over-month basis, completed foreclosures were up by 3.8 percent from the 45,000 reported in April 2014. As a basis of comparison, before the decline in the housing market in 2007, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006.
Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure. Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 5 million completed foreclosures across the country.
As of May 2014, approximately 660,000 homes in the United States were in some stage of foreclosure, known as the foreclosure inventory, compared to 1 million in May 2013, a year-over-year decrease of 37 percent.
The foreclosure inventory as of May 2014 represented 1.7 percent of all homes with a mortgage, compared to 2.6 percent in May 2013. The foreclosure inventory was down 4.8 percent from April 2014, representing 31 months of consecutive year-over-year declines.
 

Foreclosure Starts Rise for the First Time in 8 Months

By Derek Templeton, DSNews.com
“Foreclosure starts rose for the first time in eight months in May, but there is still reason to be optimistic about the United States housing market, according to the latest Mortgage Monitor Report of the latest available data released by Black Knight Financial Services. The report indicated that foreclosure starts nationwide rose by 9.5 percent.
The rise in May reverses the eight month trend of continuing decline in starts. However, the outlook for the housing market is still trending upward compared to years past and Black Knight cautioned against reading too much into the backwards step.”
 

Foreign Buyers Up Their Stake in U.S. Housing Market

International buyers continue to flock to the U.S. to purchase and invest in properties. Favorable exchange rates, affordable home prices, and rising affluence abroad is driving interest, according to the 2014 Profile of International Home Buying Activity conducted by the National Association of REALTORS®.
From April 2013 through March 2014, total international sales are estimated at $92.2 billion, a rise from $68.2 billion from the previous period, NAR reports. Twenty-eight percent of REALTORS® reported working with international clients this year.
 

Commentary: Housing market is a “crapshoot”

By Heather Long, CNNMoney
“The housing market is a ‘crapshoot’ now, according to one of America’s leading real estate experts.
Karl ‘Chip’ Case is an economist whose name is synonymous with home prices. He is co-creator of the much watched S&P/Case-Shiller home price indexes with Bob Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year.
You’ve got much more negative vibrations in the housing surveys about homeownership than we ever had before, Case told CNNMoney. I think it’s because people got hosed. They thought that housing prices will never go down. That’s just bull — you know what.
For Case, the key metric to watch is housing starts, a measure of new residential home construction.”

Watch the complete video here >>>