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Now let us look at hosing, the thing that started all of this…the pin that pricked the bubble….how is that doing after all this…are there any greenshoots in housing ?

And what can I say about housing. Writing is on the wall, have the prices gone up in your neighbourhood ? will your house sell for the same or more price than what you paid for it ? you know answers to all these question better than anyone. So ignore what the media is telling you. You know the truth and you don’t need me for that. I can only bring much broader news to you regarding housing.

The $4 trillion housing headache
House prices have returned to 2002 levels, but mortgage debt hasn’t deflated from its bubbly highs.
By Colin Barr, senior writer
May 27, 2009: 4:05 PM ET

Option ARMs Threaten Housing Rebound as Resets Peak (Update1)
By Brian Louis

June 11 (Bloomberg) — Shirley Breitmaier’s mortgage payment started out at $98 when she refinanced her three-bedroom home in Galt, California, in 2007. The 73-year-old widow may see it jump to $3,500 a month in two years. Breitmaier took out a payment-option adjustable rate mortgage, a loan popular during the housing boom for its low minimum payments before resetting at higher costs later.

About 1 million option ARMs are estimated to reset higher in the next four years, according to real estate data firm First American CoreLogic of Santa Ana, California. About three quarters of those loans will adjust next year and in 2011, with the peak coming in August 2011 when about 54,000 loans recast, the data show.

U.S. Home Prices to Fall Through 2011’s First Quarter, PMI Says
By Dan Levy

July 7 (Bloomberg) — Home prices may fall in more than half of the largest U.S. cities through the first quarter of 2011 as unemployment and foreclosures rise, mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc. said.

Thirty of the 50 biggest metropolitan areas have at least a 75 percent chance of lower prices through March 31, 2011, Walnut Creek, California-based PMI said in a report today. The decline is likely to spread to “all regions of the nation” from California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, the states most affected by the housing slump, PMI said.

“The housing market has been hit by a demand shock of high unemployment and a supply shock of distressed foreclosure sales,” LaVaughn Henry, senior economist at PMI, the fourth- largest U.S. mortgage insurer, said in an interview.

Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent in June, bringing the total number of jobs lost to 6.5 million since December 2007, the Labor Department said July 2. Foreclosure filings may hit a record 1.8 million in the first half of the year as more jobless homeowners default on their loans, real estate data service RealtyTrac Inc. said last month.

Unemployment: Big factor in home defaults
Report indicates unemployment is a major driver of missed mortgage payments, and raises concerns that Presidential plan to modify loans may miss the mark.
Last Updated: April 13, 2009: 1:04 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) — Unemployment is a bigger reason for missed mortgage payments than high interest rates, according to a study from the Boston Federal Reserve that raises questions about President Obama’s plan to stem foreclosures by modifying loans.

Borrowers are more likely to default on their payments because they have lost their jobs or because the price of their homes has plummeted than because of tough terms on their mortgages, the study found.

Foreclosure filings jump 24%
March and first-quarter total filings were the highest monthly and quarterly totals on record. Repossessions fall 3%.
By Julianne Pepitone, CNNMoney.com contributing writer
Last Updated: April 16, 2009: 7:32 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Foreclosure activity skyrocketed in March and the first quarter of 2009 to their highest levels on record as banks lifted moratoria on filings. Total foreclosure filings - which include default papers, auction sale notices and repossessions - reached 803,489 in the first quarter, according to a report released Thursday by RealtyTrac, on online marketer of foreclosed properties. That is a 24% jump over a year earlier and a 9% increase compared to the previous quarter.

Next Segment of the Housing Market to Crash: $1+ Million McMansions
Posted Jun 30, 2009 12:58pm EDT by Henry Blodget in Investing, Recession, Housing
Related: dia, spy, hd, len, kbh
From The Business Insider, June 30, 2009: he new hallucination for most strapped McMansion owners is that they’ll “rent the house for a year and then sell when the market comes back.”  The happy theory here is that, yes, prices are temporarily depressed, but when the green shoots really take hold, we’ll go roaring right back to 2006 levels again.
Most real-estate agents will be eager to tell you that they agree with this theory. What they won’t be able to tell you, as Mark Hanson of the Field Check Group points out, is why. Even after a 30% fall from the peak, house prices are still too high. Meanwhile, millions of homeowners are losing their jobs, consumers are still saddled with truckloads of debt, banks are still tightening credit, foreclosures and delinquencies are still soaring, mortgage-mods are a failure, there are still too many houses on the market, wages are declining, taxes are likely to go up, and the economy is likely to struggle for years.
Mark Hanson thinks the next segment of the real-estate market to crack will be the mid-to-high end (big houses in prime locations). Why? Because so far, those who forked over more than $1 million for their houses have resisted reality more successfully than the folks in lower-end housing brackets, where rampant foreclosures have driven prices down. But that, Mark says, is about to change.

Manhattan Apartment Prices Drop as Lehman Effect Hits Home
By Oshrat Carmiel

July 2 (Bloomberg) — Manhattan apartment prices dropped for the first time since 2002 in the second quarter as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.and Bear Stearns Cos. caught up to property owners in the nation’s most expensive urban market.

The median price fell 18.5 percent from a year earlier to $835,700, New York appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estatesaid today. The number of sales plunged by half, the most since Miller Samuel began keeping data in 1989.

“The standstill that existed after Lehman Brothers has been broken, and it was the sellers that cried ‘Uncle,’” Pamela Liebman, chief executive officer ofNew York-based property broker the Corcoran Group, said in an interview.

Mortgage Delinquency Reaches Record High Job Losses Offset Government Efforts
Washington Post Staff Writer,
Friday, May 29, 2009

Rising unemployment levels helped push record numbers of homeowners into delinquency or foreclosure during the first quarter, according to industry data released yesterday.

Desperate times call for deperate mesures….and if housing was doing so well or was recovering we won’t need these credits.

Senators Want Homebuyer Tax Credit to Rise to $15,000 (Update2)
By Dawn Kopecki

June 10 (Bloomberg) — Lawmakers are pushing to revive legislation in the Senate that would almost double an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and expand the program to all borrowers.

Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, introduced a bill today that would increase the tax credit to $15,000 and remove income and other restrictions on who can qualify, according to his spokeswoman, Sheridan Watson. The Treasury Department declined to comment on the proposal.

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
By Tom Leonard in Flint, Michigan
Published: 6:30PM BST 12 Jun 2009

–All though news seems to be bank related but this will tell you exactly where housing is….

Economist: FDIC gearing up for bank closures
Wednesday, July 8, 2009, 1:00am EDT
Washington Business Journal - by Janet Leiser Contributing Writer
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is gearing up to handle a large number of bank failures expected as a result of bad mortgages, both in residential and commercial real estate, an economist said Tuesday.

“They know they’re going to take down a large number of banks and they can’t do it until they’re staffed up,” said Mark Dotzour, chief economist and director of research for the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

Dotzour expects federal regulators to establish an agency, similar to the Resolution Trust Corp. that disposed of assets belonging to insolvent S&Ls in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Once they start to sell [foreclosed real estate], we’ll find out what the market really is,” Dotzour told attendees at an economic summit hosted by a handful of real estate groups in Tampa, Fla.

–And that is exactly where housing is………did you notice any greenshoots in this sector ?

Foreclosures rise 15 percent in first half of 2009
Foreclosures keep soaring as unemployment becomes main cause of housing woes

* By Alan Zibel, AP Real Estate Writer
* On Thursday July 16, 2009, 7:17 am EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of U.S. households on the verge of losing their homes soared by nearly 15 percent in the first half of the year as more people lost their jobs and were unable to pay their monthly mortgage bills.

1.5 million homes in foreclosure in ‘09
Homeowners fell behind on mortgage payments in record numbers during the first six months of 2009. The future doesn’t look much better.
By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com staff writer
Last Updated: July 16, 2009: 8:40 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The foreclosure plague is not going away — it’s only getting worse.

A record 1.53 million properties were in the foreclosure process — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — during the first six months of 2009. That was 9% more than the previous six months and 15% more than the same period of 2008, according to a report released Thursday by RealtyTrac.

There were a total of 1.91 million filings resulting in 1 out of every 84 U.S. properties receiving at least filing in the first half of the year. Banks repossessed 386,800 properties.

“What this means is, despite the intensity of the efforts on the part of government and lenders we don’t have a handle on foreclosures yet,” said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac.

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