In December 2015, the Federal Reserve raised the target range for the federal funds rate for the first time in almost a decade. At the time, there was much discussion regarding the impact this move would have on the still burgeoning housing recovery, specifically through higher mortgage rates and an increased cost of borrowing. Initially, it ...
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We’ve posted the December First American Loan Application Defect Index, which estimates the frequency of defects, fraudulence and misrepresentation in the information submitted in mortgage loan applications. Overall, the index fell 2.6 percent in December as compared with November and decreased by 8.4 percent as compared with December 2014.
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In November 2015, real-estate-owned (REO) sales as a share of all residential home sales remained steady on a month-to-month basis, moving up slightly to 8.2 percent from 8.0 percent in October on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. On a year-over-year basis, this was a decrease of 1.2 percentage points when compared to November 2014, which had an ...
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For the month of December, First American’s proprietary Potential Home Sales model (previously called the Existing-Home Sales Capacity model) showed that the market potential for existing-home sales increased by 0.5 percent compared to November and decreased by 5.1 percent compared to a year ago. The Potential Home Sales model provides a gauge on ...
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The fourth quarter 2015 First American Real Estate Sentiment Index, which measures title agent sentiment on a variety of key market metrics and industry issues, is based on a quarterly survey of title agents that do business with First American. In fact, more than 3,000 title agents from 50 states have participated in the first two editions of the ...
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It's the time of year when all economists worth a grain of salt (feel free to exclude me from that category) give their "forecast." Well, economic forecasters are about as correct as the local weatherman, unless you happen to be the weatherman in Southern California!
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