Posts with tag double dip recession

Nearly two years since the Great Recession officially ended, the housing market still shows few signs of picking up. And it could get worse before it gets better. Looking further back, home prices have now hit their lowest point in two years, falling 0.7 percent below March 2009 levels, according to a recent report by... Continue Reading »

Blame it on mortgage insurance rates. Mortgage applications dropped 5.6 percent from a week earlier as of April 22, reported the Mortgage Bankers Association. This coincided with a hike in FHA loan premiums -- over the past month, applications had risen as home buyers tried to beat the deadline. There also was no... Continue Reading »

Is the housing market experiencing a double dip? It depends who you ask. The latest data on home prices, including the influential Case-Shiller Index, indicates that values are falling again in almost every market across the nation. Then again, the Commerce Department recently reported that the sales of newly constructed... Continue Reading »

It may be a white Christmas, but all signs point to homeowners still treading in the red. Home prices in all 20 markets measured by the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices dropped in October, the latest month in which data was available. In fact, only the 10-City Composite and four metro areas, three of which are in... Continue Reading »

When Robert Shiller, Yale economist and co-creator of the revered S&P Case-Shiller index speaks, the real estate world listens. The last time the Case-Shiller housing price index came out, 12 of the 20 U.S. cities tracked showed decelerations -- meaning prices in those cities have been flat for more than a year. With... Continue Reading »

How do you like these odds? A new report from Moody's Economy.com predicts a one-in-four chance of the national housing market lapsing into a double-dip recession. The author of the report, economist Andrew Gledhill, identifies 22 cities that are most likely to take another nosedive. While the cities are spread across the... Continue Reading »

Builders are building more new homes, but apparently not enough to constitute a recovery. While housing starts increased 1.7 percent in July, to 546,000, those numbers were substantially lower than the 560,000 anticipated, according to the Commerce Department. New building permits fell 3.1 percent to a 14-month low,... Continue Reading »

Have home sales and prices finally hit bottom? Unfortunately, many analysts say no. A new report from Capital Economics released Monday says that recent home price increases will have little effect, since pending home sales dropped around 32 percent since the homebuyer tax credit expired in April. Moody's Investors Service... Continue Reading »

Alan Greenspan's prognostic opinion over the weekend on NBC's "Meet the Press" that a further drop in home prices could lead to a second or double-dip recession was a rather duh moment in the news of domestic economics. With a battered and emotionally fragile economy, any negative headline news, like a further decrease... Continue Reading »

In any normal market, an increase in home sales would be good news. But combined with extremely sluggish price appreciation, the leading housing indicators may point to more trouble than good. Research firm Radar Logic believes these two factors, combined with a decrease in sales of foreclosed homes, suggest that the... Continue Reading »

Whether one considers China's housing market as "on the brink of collapse" or in the midst of a "healthy correction," all eyes are on what was until recently one of the more stable, and growing, global economies. The fears are based on China's housing bubble, which is not unlike the bubble the U.S. and other countries... Continue Reading »

It's been a rocky week for residential real estate, with many leading indicators plummeting into negative territory. The big question is whether we're headed for a double dip in home prices, or if the market will slowly stabilize. HousingWatch has gathered some of the top headlines from TV and print in the past 24... Continue Reading »

Walking down Fifth Avenue recently, I couldn't help but be struck by the number of empty storefronts, particularly at this time of year. So much for those green shoots. Talk of an economic double dip is rising, as typically happens at the tail end of every recession. What backs up the argument for a double dip? Let's have... Continue Reading »