As the President and Congress attempt to avoid the "fiscal cliff" scheduled to take effect a week from today, most leading housing economists and housing experts believe housing prices won’t suffer if the mortgage interest deduction were limited to mortgages of $500,000 or less and eliminated for interest paid on second mortgages for second homes, a possibility in the final negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff. Read More »

The national average discount on foreclosures has shrunk by 1.4 percentage points over the past year as competition for foreclosures as inventories tighten is driving prices closer to full-price properties. Read More »

The continuing decline in listing inventories that is choking home sales this fall inspired one of the Internet’s leading real estate Web sites to take a fresh approach. Read More »

Nominal house prices will continue to rise for the UFA 100, a broad based composite index of 100 US cities. Under current economic conditions commonly used house price indices will rise between 8.5 and 22 percent cumulatively over the next five years, but recovery will be slow for the larger metro areas in the Case-Shiller 10 city composite. Read More »

Nonprofits are flush with federal stimulus funds to purchase foreclosed properties. Faced with fierce competition for REO properties in hot markets, Neighborhood Stabilization Project (NSP) managers are adopting multiple property acquisition strategies. Read More »

Mortgage lenders have raised standards on credit scores so high that nearly one-third of Americans are unlikely to qualify for a mortgage because their credit scores are too low. Read More »

Homeowners have turned more pessimistic about near-term prospects for home values in their local housing markets than they have been in the past three quarters. One out of three now believes home values in their local markets have not yet reached a bottom and more than a quarter (28 percent) expect home values in will decrease over the next six months. Read More »