Tag Archives: Housing Recovery

To better serve areas impacted by weather-related disasters, HUD forms new office focused on disaster recovery, with an injection of $3.3 billion in funding to help communities across the country recover and rebuild.

Even as businesses begin to reopen, the unemployment rate remains a cause for concern among economists. That makes for much fiscal uncertainty. But despite weakness in the labor market, the housing sector remains robust—it has been reported over the past ...

Housing values plummeted during the recession. But that was a long time ago. Valuation has been restored overall. Just not everywhere.

Recovery in housing markets across the country has varied widely when other factors enter the equation, such as how much economic growth the area has seen (particularly in employment and wages) and how much housing prices have appreciated.

Counsel's Corner is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with default servicing attorneys around the country about the most pressing issues facing the default servicing industry. This installment features Kristin Schuler-Hintz from the Nevada office of McCarthy Holthus.

Economists at both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have stuck to their predictions that housing will recover in 2015 despite receiving recent reports of slower-than-expected economic growth in the first quarter, including job gains that fell well short of expectations in March. "We remain comfortable with our call that the Fed funds rate lift-off will occur in September," Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said last week. "The setback in the hiring picture is in line with consumer sentiment regarding the housing market from the Fannie Mae National Housing Survey."

The temporary factors that slowed economic growth include a drawdown in inventory, unusually high snowfall in some parts of the country, and the West Coast port slowdown. Fannie Mae expects the reducing of those factors in the second quarter combined with upbeat labor market conditions and positive consumer and business fundamentals to push GDP growth to 2.8 percent in 2015, ahead of 2014's pace of 2.4 percent.

While the Obama Administration is touting monthly job gains consistently averaging more than 200,000 and a labor market that they say is at its healthiest level since the turn of the century, at least one analyst says that the recently reported national unemployment rate of 5.6 percent may not be telling the complete story.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julián Castro will answer questions about a variety of housing topics in a fireside-chat style event on the morning after President Obama's state of the union speech on Wednesday, January 21, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

While housing recovery has generally been uneven for the last few years, the housing market experienced substantial growth in the fourth quarter of 2014 for all five indicators of Trulia's Q4 2014 Housing Barometer, which was released on Thursday. Three of the five indicators – existing home sales, excluding distressed sales; home price level; and delinquency plus foreclosure rate – are all more than three-quarters of the way "back to normal" as of the end of 2014, according to the barometer.