House Prices Decline 2.0% in February + Homeownership Rate Lowest Since Q1 2000

[mEDITate-OR:

not see that we are being "driven" out of our homes...
and, since the price of gas is going up, again...
we may not be able to drive ourselves...
to get to our homes or to work
or out of town before we turn the lights out.

In the first article:

CR points out to U.S. this is NOT they home buying season...

so these numbers are probably skewed by the home buyer credit.

Nevertheless, they show U.S. that prices are NOT going up.

As we pointed out, within the last month we have only JUST begun to see ANY Jumbo RE loans being offered to U.S.

That is critical to the homes that DID have a value over the FMae&FMac lending limits. Those home CAN now be sold - unless you could get cash OR hold your own paper.

What prices those home will now bring is anyone guess.

In AZ what we are seeing is that the least priced foreclosures has stabilized in both price and volumes - they appear to have bottomed out.

But, any and all homes above that are still declining in price.

Oddly, the most expensive home appear to AZ to decline more.

However, it must be noted that upper income homeowners appear to be more willing and able to hang on to their homes.

However, doubled, the rate of pre-foreclosures in AZ has exploded, once again.

Lots more home incoming, lots less buyers/investors with cash.

In the second article,

CR points out to U.S. that "homeownership" for U.S. is in decline.

That has immense impacts on BK's, DWI's, unemployment, crimes, domestic abuse and divorce...; and vice versa.

NOTE:

We do not show U.S. all of the CL article and/or charts.

IF you do not visit their blog, or get their daily e-mail...

you should consider that.

CR is quite simply the best place to find informative charts & graphs.

Note:

also at the CR site you can open "Larger" views of all of their charts.

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First American CoreLogic: House Prices Decline 2.0% in February

National home prices, including distressed sales, increased by 0.3 percent in February 2010 compared to February 2009, according to First American CoreLogic and its LoanPerformance Home Price Index (HPI). This was an improvement over January’s year-over-year price decline of 0.5 percent. Excluding distressed sales, year-over-year prices increased in February by 0.6 percent; an improvement over the January non-distressed HPI which fell by 1.1 percent year-over-year.

On a month-over-month basis, the national average home price index fell by 2.0 percent in February 2010 compared to January 2010, which was steeper than the previous one-month decline of 1.6 percent from December to January. Prices are typically weak in the winter months, so seasonal effects may be driving this one-month change.

This graph shows the national Loan Performance data since 1976. January 2000 = 100.

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Q1 2010: Homeownership Rate Lowest Since Q1 2000

The Census Bureau reported the homeownership and vacancy rates for Q1 2010 this morning. Here are a few graphs ...


The homeownership rate declined to 67.1%. This is the lowest level since Q1 2000. 

The rental vacancy rate was 10.6% in Q1 2010.



It's hard to define a "normal" rental vacancy rate based on the historical series, but we can probably expect the rate to trend back towards 8%. According to the Census Bureau there are close to 41 million rental units in the U.S. If the rental vacancy rate declined from 10.6% to 8%, there would be 2.6% X 41 million units or over 1 million units absorbed.

This suggests there are still about 1.7 million excess housing units, and these excess units will keep pressure on housing starts, rents and house prices for some time.

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