If you thought house prices were about to show some price gains, think again.  The Case-Shiller Home Price Index for March 2009 was released this morning and it paints a fairly grim picture.  The Composite-10 index shows an18.6% decline in prices over the last year, while the Composite-20 registered a 18.7% drop in that time.  [...]

When you think about property, you should really be looking at its worth as the present value of future cash flow streams.  This is true for residential, commercial, rental or travel property.  One reason is that property is fungible, meaning what is a owner-occupied primary residence ca just as easily be a rental accommodation. It [...]

This video seems to be making the rounds. I saw it over at Calculated Risk first. The video shows new homes in Victorville, CA, just south of LA, being destroyed because it costs more for the banks to keep them up than to demolish them. That’s one way to pare the housing inventory glut.

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After a blip in the data last month, Nationwide is reporting that U.K. house prices have resumed their fall.  However, for the second month in a row, the annual price fall has slowed.  In March, the fall was 15.7%. This month we see only 15.0% compared to prices in April 2008.
Fionnuala Earley, the Nationwide’s Chief [...]

You might find some analysts looking for some green shoots in the just released Case-Shiller Home Price Index.  For instance, the year-on-year change in house prices showed a slower decline in the latest month (February) than in the previous release.
So, this report is better for homeowners than the last one which I surveyed in a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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: