Government

Behold, nonsense. Here are some headlines today:

• New Home Sales Slide in March
• US new-home sales off 7 percent in March, largest decline in a year
• New home sales plunge in March‎

This is known as bad reporting. The worst comes from Karl Case via Yahoo Finance: “The American Dream Of Buying A Home May Be Over.”

If any of these people bothered to actually check the facts, they’d know better. Instead, you’ve got a whole lotta nonsense.

New-home sales were actually up in March.

So there’s talk about the potential of a HARP 3.0 that would be available to even more distressed homeowners.

The Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) is a Obama-administration initiative (started in 2009) that allows homeowners who are current but underwater to refinance their loans at today’s crazy-low rates.

If you wanted to take advantage of HARP 1.0, you had to meet certain requirements:

We told you the other day how home sales were up in March over a year ago (and have been posting such gains for nine months now), and NAR is reporting that inventory nationwide is down 21.8% from March 2011.

So what’s the deal? According to the Wall Street Journal, the reasons are threefold.

First, although prices are down closer to their historical norms, people remember 2005 — and don’t want to sell so far off the market peak (even if prices may not get back to those levels for decades). “That’s especially true for the roughly 15% of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgage.”

It’s time to stand up for your profession. It’s time to stand up for housing. It’s time to show the country that Realtors® are going to be heard.

On May 17, thousands of Realtors from across the country will converge on Washington D.C., in front of the Capitol, Washington Monument (location moved to accomodate the thousands of rally registrants!), sending a message no one can misunderstand:

We are Realtors, we are strong, and we are here to protect the American Dream. We’ve had enough of nay-sayers, we’ve had enough of political gridlock, we’ve had enough of attacks on housing. And we’ve had enough of confusing bureaucracy and skittish lenders.

…or know when to ask for help.

This morning I fielded a distressing call from a home seller who was qualified for the DoD Homeowners Assistance Program. They were not in my area but when they were looking for answers to some questions about the process they found my blog posts on the program. All I can say after our conversation was WOW.

 In anticipation of the Realtor Rally to Protect the American Dream of Homeownership on May 17, NAR has created a make-your-own-sign tool, so you can help get the message out with the thousands of Realtors gathering around the Washington Monument.

(Yes, thousands. The rally had to be moved because the original location turned out to be too small based on the registrations.)

NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun paid a visit to Lynchburg today for an economic summit, and took the opportunity to remind people how the housing market is recovering, and that it’s “inevitable” there will be an increase in home sales.

Click here to see the (short) video on WDBJ’s site.

Here’s a quick survey you’ll want to take.

The Federal Reserve Bank has asked VAR to help find out what’s happening in our markets, and what we think the near future holds.

This is a rare opportunity for Virginia Realtors to provide the Fed with accurate, front-line information about the economy — information that will be used to help formulate monetary policy, including Fannie and Freddie reform.

It’s important. At the bottom of this message is a link to brief (and we mean brief) survey. It should only take a few minutes to complete.

What does it ask about? Your feelings about…

FHFA acting director Ed DeMarco finally gave in to pressure from, well, everyone and said that principal reduction for underwater mortgages might be a good idea after all.

The FHFA oversees Fannie and Freddie, and DeMarco had said that the two GSEs could not allow principal write-downs on loans they backed, arguing (at the time) that it would be too damaging to their bottom lines.

This is for all Virginia Realtors® from your fellow member Forrest Odend’hal of the Prince William Association of REALTORS®:

My fellow REALTORS®,

How do we know when it is time to take action? We certainly know in our transactions when we need to take specific tasks to keep a deal on track or when to make a call to request information. How do we know when it is time to take action in our industry, in our profession, or in our livelihood?