Archive for the 'Dallas Real Estate' Category

By Steve Brown / The Dallas Morning News

The outlook for Dallas home prices was brighter in two indexes released Tuesday.

They were down 2.2 percent in June from a year earlier but rose 2.7 percent from May to June to the highest level since last September, according to the closely watched Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Index. It was the fourth consecutive month of gains in the Dallas index price, S&P said Tuesday.

And the Federal Housing Finance Agency said that Dallas-area prices were up slightly in the second quarter.

Full Story

How can social networking benefit your business?By Josh Hixson
Real Estate Editor

Facebook has officially invaded the world of North Dallas real estate.

Firms such as Ebby Halliday and Virginia Cook found it hard to ignore the allure of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of active users and recently took the plunge into the world of online social networking, while Rogers Healy and his 2,000-plus members have been veterans of the scene for quite some time.

None of the agents we talked to could say they sold a home soley because of Facebook, but they did indicate the website’s ability to reach potential clients is what drew them and their companies to the social networking site in the first place.
Full Story

A few years ago, news of a 5 percent drop in Dallas home prices would have caused blood to run cold in the local real estate market.

But in the current national housing market depression, Dallas’ price decline is being hailed as the best in the country.

Dallas had the smallest home price decline among 20 cities in the January Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

Full Story

March 23, 2009
By ALAN ZIBEL, AP Real Estate Writer

WASHINGTON – Sales of previously occupied homes jumped unexpectedly in February by the largest amount in nearly six years as first-time buyers took advantage of deep discounts on foreclosures and other distressed properties.

Economists said sales, while still at levels not seen since 1997, may finally be coming back to life after declining sharply following the stock market plunge last autumn.

Read Full Story

By TIM PARADIS, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK – Wall Street is getting the good news it wants on the economy’s biggest problems: banks and housing.

Investors reignited a two-week rally Monday after hearing the government’s plan to help banks remove as much as $1 trillion in bad assets from their books and home sales showed a surprise increase. Major stock indexes jumped as much as 4 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which rose nearly 300 points.

The Treasury Department said its plan would rely on the government’s $700 billion financial rescue fund, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., as well as private investors.

Full Story March 23, 2009

By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Most Texas home markets continued to eke out tiny increases in home prices in early 2009, according to a new report by First American CoreLogic.

Texas home prices were up by just less than 2 percent in the California-based housing analyst’s latest survey released Monday.

While Texas prices rose, nationwide home prices in January fell by 11.6 percent compared to a year ago to the lowest level in almost five years.

Full Story

By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
The rising tide of residential foreclosures in North Texas is putting more high-end homeowners underwater.

“The largest gains in first-quarter home [foreclosure] postings were among luxury homes,” said George Roddy, president of Addison-based Foreclosure Listing Service.

More than 13,000 D-FW homes were posted for foreclosure in the first three months of 2009, Foreclosure Listing Service said Feb. 12.

Filings for homes priced at $1 million and up jumped 175 percent from a year earlier, the service said Tuesday. And foreclosure postings were up almost 40 percent for houses priced from $500,000 to $999,000.

“Compared to two years ago, postings of ultra-luxury homes have skyrocketed,” Roddy said in a prepared statement.

Full Story

By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
Falling home prices and mortgage rates have made Dallas-Fort Worth even more affordable for residential buyers.

At the end of 2008, more than 67 percent of the homes sold in the D-FW area were affordable for residents earning the area’s median family income, according to a new report by the National Association of Home Builders.

That’s the D-FW area’s highest affordability ranking in four years.

Full Story

President Barack Obama rolled out a bold $75 billion, three-part plan Wednesday to halt the soaring rate of mortgage foreclosures nationwide, one that seeks to encourage refinancing of homes now worth less than their mortgages and provides incentives for lenders to lower the debt load on struggling homeowners.

The Homeowner Stability Initiative, which Obama unveiled in Phoenix, seeks to address one of the triggers of the global financial crisis: the 2.3 million U.S. foreclosures last year that are protracting the housing crisis and helping to drive down home prices across the nation.

Specifically, the Obama plan seeks to provide low-cost refinancing for as many as 5 million Americans. It seeks to help delinquent or at-risk borrowers get their mortgages modified so that no more than 31 percent of their income is tied up in their mortgages. And it provides financial incentives to lenders and even a new insurance program to promote more mortgage modifications.

Like the failed efforts under the Bush administration, however, the Obama plan doesn’t compel banks and other lenders to modify troubled mortgages. Instead, it provides a menu of incentives that may or may not prove sufficient.

Banks joined two prior voluntary efforts during the Bush administration _ Hope for Homeowners and the Federal Housing Administration’s FHA Secure _ but these efforts have resulted in relatively few mortgage modifications.
Now they’ll have a stick waved at them if they don’t comply with the subsidy plan. It will come in the form of Obama’s support for legislation pending in Congress that would allow bankruptcy court judges to modify the terms of a mortgage.

That’s forbidden right now, and banks and other lending institutions fiercely oppose what they call “cram down” legislation, warning that it’ll bring uncertainty for lenders, who will respond by restricting mortgage lending.
Banks may soon have to choose between the lesser of two evils. They could either modify loans - with a subsidy - to provide lower lending rates, and lose what they might have made from the higher lending rate over the life of the loan. Or they can do nothing and run the risk that a homeowner could file for bankruptcy and then have a judge order new loan terms that allow the borrower to stay in the home - and pay the lender less money.

The president’s plan also offers payments to mortgage servicers, who collect mortgage payments on behalf of investors who own the mortgages originally issued by banks but were sold into a secondary market. Servicers apparently would be offered a payment for modification on par with what they would collect in the case of foreclosure.

Source

By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
What home price decline?

Most recent studies show home prices in Dallas-Fort Worth decreased slightly last year, but a new report disagrees.

First American CoreLogic Inc. says in its latest study that home prices in the D-FW area were up almost 2 percent at the end of 2008 compared with a year earlier.

Nationwide prices were down 11.1 percent, according to the same report.

The study released Wednesday runs counter to others that say median home sales prices fell here in 2008.

Full Story