By KIMBERLEY HAAS Industry leaders are sharing their thoughts as 2022 winds down and they are expressing gratitude despite challenges in the current market. Bill Banfield, EVP of Capital Markets at Rocket Mortgage in Detroit, Michigan, said he appreciates the mental stimulation of navigating a tough market because people are forced to get creative in finding solutions for customers. “Your company, your teams, you get to try to figure out how you can help people or how you can improve your company. It’s actually a much more fascinating time than when you’re in a super boom and all you can do is talk about rates and payments,” Banfield said. Banfield had just sat down with The Mortgage Note to talk…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Leaders at Lenders One Cooperative are planning to open branch locations at select Walmart stores in seven states. The company, established in 2000, is a national alliance of independent mortgage bankers, banks, and credit unions managed by a subsidiary of Altisource Portfolio Solutions. President Justin Demola said in a recent interview with The Mortgage Note that opening branches inside Walmart stores makes sense for their members and customers who will have access to lending services in the same place they shop. “Walmart is an interesting opportunity for us and our members,” Demola said. “The timing has lined up nicely. This project started almost two years ago when the mortgage market was buzzing. Interest rates were super low…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS A realtor who works in Florida says he has represented a number of buyers in the past two years that moved to the Sunshine State for more than its warm weather. They were escaping COVID pandemic restrictions, John Alestra, who works at Agile Group Realty in Tampa, said in a recent interview with The Mortgage Note. “A lot of the feedback I got from folks, a lot of it was just they didn’t want to deal with their states. They saw how they handled the pandemic. They wanted to make that move to a state where they felt they could live their lives a little more freely,” Alestra said. Alestra said they missed the basic life they…
Home price growth cooled again in September, increasing only 11.4%, according to CoreLogic’s Home Price Index. This is the fifth month of lower YOY growth. Two-thirds of American metros saw at least some month-over-month declines as well, contributing to a 0.5% national decrease from August. Southeastern states continued to see higher price appreciation than other areas. Florida topped the list for the eighth straight month with 23% growth, followed by South Carolina (+17.6%) and Tennessee (+17.4%). Washington, D.C. ranked last with only 1.8% appreciation. “The rapid increase in prices during the COVID-19 pandemic caused many U.S. housing markets to reach completely unaffordable levels for potential local homebuyers,” said Selma Hepp, interim Lead of the Office of the Chief Economist at…
By CHUCK GREEN During the pandemic homebuyers fled to southern states for warmer weather but now would-be purchasers are bailing out of deals at a faster clip than anywhere in the country. According to analysts at Redfin, 60,000 deals were called off nationally in September. That’s 17% of the homes that went under contract that month. In Florida, Jacksonville had 745 home-purchase agreements fall through, equal to 30.3% of homes that went under contract. That was the highest percentage among the metros Redfin analyzed. They were followed by San Antonio, TX (25.3%), Atlanta, GA (25%), Orlando, FL (24.6%), and Tampa, FL (24.5%). In August, about 800 home purchase agreements were tabled in Jacksonville. That’s 26.1% of homes that went under contract…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS The vice president of research at the National Multifamily Housing Council says 4.3 million new apartments will be needed by 2035 to meet demand. Caitlin Walter spoke at the National Association of Real Estate Editors conference on October 13. She is primarily responsible for conducting NMHC’s research on apartment industry trends, according to the council’s website. Walter said there were 737,000 apartments under construction in 2021. “The issue is that it takes a long time to build an apartment community, and we’re not actually seeing those under-construction numbers turn into completions. And that is largely due to the delays that started during the pandemic that have continued to persist,” Walter said. Walter referred to a study the…
Habitat for Humanity Affiliates in Florida and South Carolina will be able to build more affordable homes after the recent sale of mortgage notes on their behalf. Leaders at CBC Mortgage Agency, a nationally chartered housing finance agency and a source of down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, announced its CRA Note Exchange platform had completed the sale on Sept. 12. CRA Note Exchange enables the sale of Community Reinvestment Act-eligible loans through an online portal to free up capital for additional affordable home construction. Banks and other financial institutions can review, select and purchase loans in specific areas that support their CRA or other lending objectives. The exchange was launched in 2018. Habitat for Humanity is a global nonprofit housing organization…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency are warning survivors of Hurricane Ian they should be aware of con artists and criminals looking to take advantage of the situation. Predators may promise homeowners a disaster grant in return for payment or fill out an application for assistance without a person’s knowledge, according to the FEMA website. “If a FEMA Inspector comes to your home and you did not submit a FEMA application, your information may have been used without your knowledge to create a FEMA application. If so, please inform the inspector that you did not apply for FEMA assistance so they can submit a request to stop further processing of the application,” the website says. People…
Home price appreciation is leveling out on a national level, but zooming in on price points and regions reveals a more complex picture, according to new data from the AEI Housing Center. The center looked at how home price appreciation is changing, first by price tier and then by specific metros and geography. While June home price appreciation dropped to nearly zero month-over-month nationally, the story is completely different when analyzing these two metrics. In the first, the Center divided home sales into four price tiers based on their access to leverage. Doing so revealed that appreciation is slowing across all tiers, especially when it comes to the highest level. High-price tier homes were the first to show a negative…
California and Florida metros collectively account for 80% of the top 10 highest average rents across the country, forcing Americans to look to the middle of the country for affordable rentals. That’s according to HouseCanary’s first National Rental Report, which compares listings volumes, new listings, and median listing price information on single-family detached listings from H1 2021 and H1 2022. National rent prices saw a double-digit increase, up 13.4% YOY in the first half of 2022. At the end of H1 2022, the average rent was $2,495. Property demand remained strong, with the number of days on the market staying basically the same from last year. At the end of H1, rentals were on the market for an average of…
