Housing

The website You Walk Away has become pretty popular because it teaches mortgage holders how to dump their properties on banks and get out from under their mortgage without losing everything. Apparently, banks are getting into the act too…

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…

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…

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

Below is an interview with an expert on the issue of mortgage cramdowns. Basically, this issue is all about debt forgiveness for borrowers and writedowns for lenders. Lenders do not like cramdowns for that reason. See below for a view on…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…