Real Estate Posts

By July 1, 2010 all mortgage service providers participating in the Making Home Affordable Program will offer extra help for homeowners struggling to make their monthly mortgage payments because of unemployment. The Unemployment Program will offer homeowners a forbearance period to temporarily reduce or suspend their monthly mortgage payments while they seek re-employment.

The minimum forbearance period is three months, although a mortgage service provider may extend it depending on the investor and regulator guidelines. If a homeowner becomes re-employed in that time, the forbearance period will end and the homeowner will be evaluated for a mortgage modification under the Making Home Affordable Program.

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House prices increased modestly in March but the positive figures are unlikely to mark the beginning of a strong upturn for the market, Nationwide said today.

The 0.5% increase, which marked the third monthly increase within four months, left the average home costing 164,751.

Meanwhile, the three-month-on-three-month measure of house prices, which is regarded as a better measure of the underlying trend, also showed a modest rise of 0.6% in March.

But Nationwide found little cheer in the figures and warned that prices were likely to move modestly lower through 2011.

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by Jodi Summers

The news is slowly improving for the office real estate market…but not so much here in Los Angeles. National figures indicate that the fundamentals of the commercial real estate industry are slowly improving past the bottom of the cycle…ever so slowly.

In February, national unemployment had dropped to 8.9%  and we dropped again to 8.8% in March. This is stellar news, as the United States has not seen unemployment in the 8%+ range during the entire Obama administration. Twenty Seven states and the District of Columbia recorded unemployment rate decreases, 7 states registered rate increases, and 16 states had no change, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Fort

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Mortgage rates shot up last week, as global markets settled down from their earlier agitation over events in Japan and Libya.

Both 30- and 15-year fixed-rate mortgage rates showed significant increases, according to the weekly survey from the Mortgage Bankers Association. Average interest rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to 4.92 percent, up from 4.80 percent the week before, while average rates on 15-year loans rose to 4.16 percent, up from 4.02 percent the week before.   As a result, demand for refinancing dropped sharply, with applications to refinance an existing mortgage down 10.1 percent compared to the week before. Applications for mortgages to purchase a home were also down, by a seasonally adjusted 1.7 percent. Read more…