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House prices increased in March in the U.K. according to Nationwide Building Society. Below is what Nationwide’s Chief Economist Fionnuala Earley had to say about this surprise good news:
“Spring brought a surprise bounce to house prices in March. The price of a typical house increased for the first time since October 2007, rising by [...]

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You might have thought house price declines were slowing. I certainly had hoped so. The latest data from January 2009 from the S&P/Case-Shiller index suggests this is wishful thinking as year-on-year declines hit another record of 19%. The decline was not only steep, but very broad-based.
Data through January 2009, released today by [...]

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This comes from Angus Robertson of Research Recap.  Expect some major writedowns here going forward:
A dramatic rise in delinquencies has led Fitch Ratings to raise its average loss estimates for recent vintage jumbo prime mortgage pools to between 3 and 5 times higher than its previous estimate.
Fitch’s revised average loss estimates as a percentage of [...]

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Make no bones about it, Manhattan real estate prices have been in an extreme bubble.  With stock prices down and Wall Street shedding jobs massively, this has come to an end.
With sales prices of Manhattan apartments having tumbled by perhaps a quarter in just the past few months, pinpointing the bottom has become a [...]

The details on Obama’ new mortgage relief plan are out. The key parts are the following:

The Nationwide has released its latest house price survey, showing a very large 1.8% fall in British house prices between January and February 2009. This brings the yearly decline to a record 17.6%.

Yet, incongruously, the Nationwide revealed this information on its website under the heading “improving affordability helps new and existing buyers.” If this does not smack of cheerleading, I don’t know what does.

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The S&P Real Estate Index is down 60%. This segment gives a good overview of how commercial real estate is doing and what to expect going forward.

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This comes from S&P’s website (pdf):
Data through December 2008, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the prices of existing single family homes across the United States continue to set record declines, a trend that prevailed throughout all of 2007 and [...]

As recession takes hold, European citizens are starting to ask questions about how they were led into this, the deepest downturn in three-quarters of a century. The leading Spanish daily El Pais published a very thoughtful article today asking how things had unravelled so quickly and so spectacularly in Spain, previously one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.

These are the same questions that one must ask in the United States, Britain and Ireland regarding their own property bubbles. And, in view of recent turmoil in astern Europe, I suspect similar answers will be sought there as well.

This first part in a series of articles lays out the statistics of bubble and bust, demonstrating the scale of the bubble in Spain and it also makes a number of suggestion as to how to prevent a recurrence. You should note that this article points out Spain’s helplessness due to its lack of control over interest rates as a key impediment to solving the problem. Below is my translation of the article:

This week’s Barron’s magazine highlights the abysmal state of the Manhattan real estate market. Manhattan was one of the last bubble markets to burst. Now, things are unraveling quickly, particularly at the high end. Some experts see another 30% down before the carnage is over. The trigger for the bubble’s bursting came in the form of Lehman Brothers, making the NY real estate market another reminder of how badly the Lehman situation was handled by Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner.