What's Going To Happen To Freddie And Fannie? What Does It Mean For Mortgage Rates?

Yesterday RealtyTrac published a good article talking about the debate currently going on in Washington D.C. about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. There are several moving parts in this whole ordeal that investors should be aware of. Rather than trying to regurgitate those for you here, we suggest you read the article from RealtyTrac.

It's mind boggling how much money the government is pulling in from Frannie and Freddie now. However, at the same time it feels like we've been down this road before. Mortgage rates can't stay this low forever, can they? Everything is rosy now, but what happens if this new real estate bubble that seems to be forming pops? As soon as mortgage rates start to go back to a normal range, what's going to happen to the housing market?

Housing values are being inflated thanks to historically low interest rates. When that 3.75% 30 year fix mortgage goes to 5%, all the sudden instead of being able to afford a $300,000 house, that same homebuyer will only be able to afford a $260,000 home. The housing market simply won't be able sustain current values once this rate increase happens. Then, just like we saw before, the snow ball effect will come into play and things will get exponentially worse.

If the government shuts down Freddie and Fannie, you can be that rates are going to increase a lot faster than they would otherwise. At the same time, though, this current model is not sustainable either, at some point it is going to crash, and the government is going to be on the hook. I suppose at least this time around the government gets to participate in the upside. Too bad they don't do a a better job of managing the profits.

Housing Stats Show Middling Performance

U.S. real estate analysts have been busy making positive prognostications for the struggling housing market these past few months, but a look at the 20 cities Case-Schiller tracks for its Home Price Index reveals a more modest truth. More reserved pundits who have eyed the most recent graph note that the uptick in prices could be explained away by seasonal trends that are likely push values higher. Harsher critics say slower foreclosure processes and low mortgage rates that may vanish overnight threaten to erase what little gain is causing the celebration. For more on this continue reading the following article from Iacono Research. 

The U.S. housing market has had a good few months or so with more and more pundits noting that this sector will finally, again make a positive contribution to economic growth rather than being a drag, however, when looking at the Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes for the 20 cities it tracks, the recent gains don’t appear all that impressive – so far, just another small move higher that occurs regularly at this time of the year.

Diana Olick throws a little cold water on the housing party in this story at CNBC, citing a temporary slowdown in foreclosures that has limited inventory and freakishly low mortgage rates that may not last forever.

I guess we’ll find out in a few months whether the housing recovery is real…

This blog post was republished with permission from Tim Iacono.

US Housing Market Finding Bottom?

Economy watchdog Tim Iacono touts Bill McBride’s blog, Calculated Risk, as a reliable resource for housing market predictions, and McBride’s latest post – “The Housing Bottom Is Here” – has Iacono’s attention. Iacono notes that McBride’s blog was one of the few that identified and provided warning for the 2004-05 housing bubble that lifted Southern California home prices only to watch them plummet, giving supposed credence to more current predictions. Much like McBride in his own blog, however, Iacono stops short of suggesting that he, McBride or anyone else can predict what will happen in today’s U.S. housing market. For more on this continue reading the following article from Tim Iacono.

While the debate about whether the U.S. housing market has hit bottom is certainly heating up, hopefully it won’t rise to the current temperature of the brouhaha over whether last Friday’s labor market report was good, bad, indifferent, or just an outright fabrication by the Obama administration in an increasingly contentious election year.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell the politics from the statistics when trying to make sense of last Friday’s monthly jobs report and, at this point, I don’t care anymore.

As for the housing market, none other than Bill McBride at the wildly popular Calculated Risk blog weighed in on the subject yesterday declaring The Housing Bottom Is Here, a view that you find out at the end of the article isn’t quite as strongly held as you might think from just reading the title.

Bill notes there are two housing markets – new home construction and existing home sales – and, while the former has clearly made a bottom, the latter is likely to do so next month, though he qualifies that prediction with words like “I think that house prices are close to a bottom” and there being “a reasonable chance that the bottom is here”.

Now, caveats notwithstanding, this is still a big deal since Calculated Risk isn’t just an ordinary offering out there in the blogosphere. This particular blog happened to be calling the US housing market a bubble back when few had an inkling of the trouble to come and, for that reason alone, his is an opinion worth listening to.

It was back in late-2004 and early-2005 that a few people in Southern California – one of the many “ground zeros” for the late, great housing bubble – started writing about the remarkable rise in home prices and how it could not be sustained.

Yours truly was one of them and I’ve learned much from Bill over the years.

I recall reading commentary by Bill and Mish over at Silicon Valley insider as they set about creating what are two of the most influential financial blogs in the country today, so, it’s not as if any of us are “Johnny-come-latelies”.

Another of the original housing bubble bloggers was Rich Toscano at Piggington.com and, as long as we’ve begun to gather data points, it’s worth noting that Rich is in the process of buying a home in the San Diego area, something he characterized as Jumping the Shark.

Recall that San Diego was ahead of the crowd, housing-bubble-wise, over last decade and, today, it’s certainly no Las Vegas, where home prices just keep falling month after month, year after year.

According to the latest data from Case-Shiller, San Diego home prices are four or five percent above their recession lows in early 2009, and, when factoring in the Federal Reserve’s freakishly low interest rates and the reality that, to most people, it’s not the house price, but the monthly payment that is most important, a home purchased there at this time would seem to make good sense.

Of course, my wife and I purchased a home here in Montana just over a year ago, so, actions normally speaking louder than words, you have a pretty good idea about how we feel about property prices in this part of the country.

And if you go a few hundred miles or so east of here to where the shale energy boom is underway in North Dakota, you’d think it’s 2005 again.

In the Bay area, there’s Patrick Killelea of Patrick.net fame who has yet to fall in line with some of the other capitulating 2005-era housing bubble bloggers and, given his proximity to what appears to be another inflating Silicon Valley tech bubble, I wouldn’t expect him to do so anytime soon.

It’s funny to think back to about 12 years ago when I was working in Southern California and was visited by co-workers from Northern California who told tall tales of run-of-the-mill 1,000 square foot homes selling for a half million dollars.

Little did we know that large portions of the rest of the country would experience that same phenomenon just a few years later. As it turns out, Northern California seems to get a new bubble every five years or so, something that makes it particularly hard to call a housing market bottom there due to the spill-over effect of these non-housing bubble bubbles.

I don’t know – conditions are different depending on where you are and, in most cases, national home price trends have little meaning for an individual contemplating a home purchase.

Surely, with a couple years of home price history now in the books, housing bubble spotter Dean Baker was right to buy a house near Washington D.C. a few years back since the market there seemed to make a bottom just as the freshly printed and borrowed money started gushing from the nation’s capital.

One thing is certain, I’d much rather be writing about whether the housing market has hit bottom than whether the labor market has turned a corner as the November elections draw nearer because that discussion has become way too toxic for my tastes.

This blog post was republished with permission from Tim Iacono.

US Housing Market Bottom Not Panacea

Many real estate forecasters tend to speak about the arrival of a bottom in the U.S. housing market as an answer to everyone’s woes, but a look to the past shows that may not be the case. Analyst Tim Iacono references economists Robert Shiller and Barry Ritholtz in a discussion about the dip in Los Angeles home prices in 1996. He notes that prices stayed low for four years following the dive, suggesting that any bottom that may come in 2012 will likely not be the answer everyone hopes it will be – at least in the near term. For more on this continue reading the following article from Tim Iacono.

Not surprisingly, I’m going to have to agree with both Yale Economist Robert Shiller in this Business Insider interview and Barry Ritholtz at his Big Picture blog in arguing that a housing bottom – if it does indeed arrive in 2012 – will prove disappointing for those expecting gains on their real estate investment in 2013 or 2014.

We happened to be living in Southern California at the time and had the good fortune to buy a house there in 1995, though, we were just looking for a place to live, not thinking of it as an investment.

I remember the price actually declined by another five percent or so in the year after we bought it and it wasn’t until five or six years later that we began to hear about rising home prices, a bit surprised to learn that the value of our place had increased by $100,000 or more.

But, for the first few years, you were better off not even thinking about home values.

Using the broad Los Angeles price index as an example, even if you had bought at the absolute bottom in February 1996, you’d have had less than a one percent gain a year later.

The index spent a full four years within five percent of the February 1996 low!

Anyone thinking that a housing market bottom in 2012 means that home prices will be higher next year or the year after that will probably be disappointed.

Moreover, given the size of the recent boom and the likelihood of the bust being of similar magnitude, I wouldn’t be surprised if home prices don’t post a substantive advance for the rest of the decade.

This blog post was republished with permission from Tim Iacono.

Solving the Foreclosure Crisis: Should We Use the Band-aid Principle?

The foreclosure crisis – the record-breaking glut of foreclosed homes that began in 2006-2007 – has rocked the nation’s economy and littered entire city blocks with vacant and/or abandoned homes due to delinquent home loans. These foreclosures act like a black hole on the surrounding property values of nearby properties, further contributing to financial hardship and blighting entire communities.

Now, four years after the crisis kicked off, we are still dealing with a foreclosure market that is far from fading.

News released recently revealed that approximately 31% of all home sales in the second quarter of 2011 were foreclosures or short sales. Year over year, that represents a 7% increase. Additionally, the average loan in foreclosure has been delinquent for a mind-numbing 599 days. Factor in the well-documented trend of lenders putting a screeching halt to their foreclosure processes due to nasty legal fights that still aren’t over and you have a troubling foundation for the housing market.

This leads some to ask the question: Do we invoke the “Band-aid Principle”?

Solving the Foreclosure Crisis Slowly Vs. Quickly

We all know the analogy. If you have a Band-aid on a wound, do you pull it off slowly, or do you rip it off quickly and limit the pain to just a second or two?

Each philosophy has its advocates for the foreclosure crisis. Proponents of the first approach – keeping as many foreclosures from entering the market as possible through loan modification programs like HAMP and loan programs like EHLP while creating tough, anti-foreclosure legislation – point to the sheer number of underwater homes on the market and say that any solution needs to slow the impact of so many foreclosures so the fragile market doesn’t collapse further.

Opponents of this approach disagree, stating that it is far more important to get it over with quickly by processing foreclosures as rapidly as reasonably possible and remove these unproductive and burdensome properties from bank ledgers – so that banks, in turn, can resume residential lending to qualified applicants. The faster foreclosures are sold, they argue, the faster home prices can stabilize.

Where to Go From Here

The argument over solving the foreclosure crisis is more complicated than just whether or not to rip the Band-aid off. Even if loan modification programs work – and many believe they don’t – you still have 4.1 million loans either in foreclosure or seriously delinquent that you have to resolve.

One solution is to aggressively push serious principal loan modifications that essentially “reset”, to an extent, the value of a mortgage loan by cutting the principal owed on the balance. That plan has its merits – some kind of loan modification has to occur – but there is nothing to suggest that banks will participate unless forced.

What needs to happen is to speed up foreclosure processing so that more foreclosures can be sold as fast as possible – a variation of the Band-aid principle. Home loans valued at pre-bubble values are unsustainable, and as long as they persist, home values will suffer and it will be more difficult for homeowners and lenders alike.

One immediate step we can take to speed up these processes and unclog the blocked foreclosure pipeline is to resolve the foreclosure settlement that is currently mired down in squabbling over legal immunity from further lawsuits against four of the nation’s largest banks. While making sure foreclosures are conducted properly with the correct paperwork is vital – legally and morally – we can’t go to the extreme and believe that foreclosures should never happen.

A healthy market depends on the ability to correct deficiencies, and foreclosure is one tool to do just that. The Band-aid principle may be in effect after all, at least when it comes to dealing with foreclosures that are waiting in line.

This was a guest post by John E. Miller:

Miller is a Real Estate Professional who has spent the last 10 years writing for several magazines and online publications. Miller is a regular contributor to Businessinsider.com as well as being the team leader of Content Acquisition and Analysis of new business development for Foreclosure Deals, where he also serves as a real estate agent expert.

What Really Caused The Real Estate Bubble?

What exactly caused the collective irrational behavior that led to real estate prices rising to unsustainable levels? That is the question that Harvard economist Ed Glaeser and University of Oregon economist Mark Thoma attempt to answer. See the following post from Economist's View for their hypotheses.

Ed Glaeser says that if people were as smart as he is, they would have realized housing price increases were unsustainable and there wouldn't have been a housing bubble:

In Housing, Even Hindsight Isn’t 20-20, by Edward L. Glaeser: ...[Is] the housing market ... starting to hit bottom? ... One major point of economics is that predicting asset prices is extremely hard... Moreover, the last seven years should make everyone wary about predicting housing price changes. ...

The housing price volatility of the last six years has been so extreme that it confounds conventional economic explanations. Over a four-year period — from February 2002 to February 2006 — the Case-Shiller index increased ... about 50 percent in constant dollars.

Certainly, those price increases cannot be explained by increases in average income. Income growth was quite modest from 2002 to 2006. Nor can the boom be explained by a dearth of new housing supply. Construction rose dramatically during the boom...

A number of pundits place the blame for the bubble on ... Alan Greenspan. They argue that loose monetary policy caused housing prices to rise. While lower interest rates are correlated with higher prices, the relationship is far too weak to explain the price explosion that America experienced. ... To get a 50 percent real increase in housing prices, real interest rates would have had to decline by more than ...10 percentage points..., which is not what happened. ... Real rates actually rose slightly between 2002 and 2006.

While low interest rates, on their own, cannot make sense of the bubble, perhaps the increased availability of credit to subprime borrowers has more explanatory power. ... Yet the correlation between housing price growth and subprime lending across markets is as likely to indicate that lenders took more risks in booming markets as that those risks caused markets to boom. ...

The most plausible explanations of the bubble require levels of irrationality that are difficult for economists either to accept or explain.

For many years, the creators of the housing index, Chip Case and Robert Shiller, have argued that housing bubbles were fueled by irrationally optimistic beliefs about future housing price appreciation. More recently, Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider have documented the rise in optimistic beliefs about housing price appreciation over the recent boom. Using some elegant algebra, they suggest that overly optimistic beliefs could cause a boom even if those beliefs were held by only a small share of the population.

It is hard to argue with this view. The only way that anyone could justify spending bubble-level prices in Las Vegas was by having the incorrect belief that those prices would increase.

I once thought that the Las Vegas housing market was so straightforward (vast amounts of land, no significant regulation) that no one could be deluded into thinking that prices could long diverge from construction costs, but I was wrong. I underestimated the human capacity to think rosy thoughts about the value of a house.

Yet even if ridiculously rosy beliefs are a major part of bubbles, we cannot say that we understand those bubbles until we understand the sources of such beliefs. Economists like to link beliefs to reality, but these views weren’t grounded in sound statistics. The housing boom was a great wildfire that spread from market to market, but it is hard to make sense of its flames. ...

I don't think people believed that housing prices would never, ever go down, what they thought is that housing prices would go up in real terms, on average, over time - that housing was a good long-run investment. They knew there would be variation around that trend, but they expected the variation to be relatively mild, they didn't expect the severe variation in prices and associated problems that actually occurred.

But as Shiller argues, the belief that real housing prices rise over time is false, the evidence suggests that real housing prices are relatively flat over the long-run. Because people expected prices to rise on average when they should have expected them to remain flat, the correction - the variation in prices - was far larger than anticipated and many homeowners weren't able to simply ride out the short-run variation like they thought they would be able to do.

But this still leaves a question unanswered. Why did people have this false belief about the long-run trajectory of prices? Shiller explains that this happened because people believed that both land and building materials were becoming relatively more scarce over time, a belief he says is false, but that just pushes the "but why did they believe that" question back one step from housing prices to the prices of land and raw materials.

So let me take a quick stab at an explanation (I'm not pushing this, it's just a quick thought). People are told (or were at that time) that stock markets are a great long-run investment. If you have the time to ride out the short-run fluctuations you can earn 8% per year. Just dump your money in an index fund that duplicates the market portfolio, and forget about it until many, many years later and you will do fine. Risk adjusted real returns on assets ought to equalize across markets through arbitrage, so shouldn't housing yield a real return similar to stocks (adjusting for risk)? Shouldn't there be a real return on housing just like in stock and other asset markets, and if so, doesn't that mean real prices will rise on average over time? This still requires beliefs about long-run prices at odds with (Shiller's) evidence though.

One more note. I may be wrong to assert that people thought that housing prices would rise forever. If you know that there is a bubble in an asset market, but you believe you can sell fast enough once the market hits a turning point to still make a profit, or at least not lose much in any case, then you may be willing to make an investment that tries to exploit the short-term surge in prices. But while I think that may apply to stock markets, or other markets where assets can be sold quickly (the belief that is, the reality is quite different when everybody tries to sell at once), I'm not sure this applies to housing where sales can be notoriously slow. But it's still possible that people would know there is a bubble in housing prices, but still be willing to make an investment because they believe that housing prices would fall so slowly that, if necessary, they could sell their house before taking a loss. It just doesn't seem to me that this explanation works as well in housing as it does in stock markets.

This post was republished from Mark Thoma's blog, Economist's View.