Tag: #mortgagerates #mortgagenews # mortgage

Consumers felt a little better about the wisdom of buying a home last month than they did in July, although that isn’t saying a lot. Fannie Mae says 32 percent of respondents to its August National Housing Survey (NHS) said it was a good time to buy, up from 28 percent in July. Those who said it was a bad time declined by 3 percentage points to 63 percent, leaving net positive responses at a negative 31 percent, 7 points higher than the prior month but down by 55 points year-over-year.

Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said it was a good time to sell, but this was down from 75 percent in July and marked the second monthly decline. Net positive responses declined to 54 percent, down 1 point from July and 8 points compared to June.

The six questions from the NHS that are used to construct the Home Purchase Sentiment Index (HPSI) split evenly between gainers and losers last month and the Index remained flat at 75.7, a 1 point dip from July, and 1.8 points lower than in August 2020.

Americans are continuing the trend started at the beginning of the pandemic 19 months ago, seeking larger homes in areas with lower density and prices continue to skyrocket for unattached dwellings in those areas. That’s not to say that price gains are moderating in other areas as demand outstrips supply. The company’s Home Price Index (HPI) set another record in July. Over the 12 months ended in July, the HPI increased 18 percent. the largest annual growth in the U.S. index since the series began with the year ended in January 1977 and was 0.8 percentage point higher than in June. The July appreciation of detached properties (19.7 percent) was again the highest measured in the history of the index and was nearly double the 11.6 percent increase in attached properties.

Black Knight estimates that nearly 630,000 forbearance plans, more than one-third of those currently active, are slated for review this month. Of those, 400,000 will have reached the end of their 18 months of forbearance eligibility unless the maximum term is extended again. The end of August saw a significant decline in forbearance numbers as servicers worked through the month’s crop of three-month reviews. Plans declined by 53,000 over the week ended August 31 with more than 23,000 from FHA or VA portfolios. The number of GSE (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) loans dropped by 20,000 and loans serviced for bank portfolios or private label securities (PLS) saw a 10,000 unit decline. The number of plans is down by 9 percent since the end of July.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are running away with new home financing. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that conventional loans were behind 76.3 percent of all new home sales in the second quarter of the year. David Logan, writing in the NAHB Eye on Housing Blog, says this is the largest share those loans have held since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008. It was 5.1 percentage points higher than the conventional loan share in Q1 and 9.5 points more than in the second quarter of 2020. The growth in conventional lending was largely at the expensive of FHA. Those loans financed 12.1 percent of new home sales in Q2, down 6.7 points from the previous quarter and 8.3 points year-over-year. Logan said that the four-quarter moving average in the FHA share had been moving higher since Q3 2018, however, the second quarter data depressed that average by 1.1 point.