National

CoreLogic’s March 2012 Home Price Index finds that, nationwide, prices dropped from year to year — but only by six-tenths of a percent.

They also increased 0.6% from February to March. Normally I ignore month-to-month numbers, but what’s notable about this is that it’s the first month-to-month increase since July 2011.

Read more over at Calculated Risk.

“Housing analysts at Bank of America say the nation’s homeownership rate will decline further,” reports Housing Wire. “The rate will eventually fall to about 63 percent and remain there, they say.” (The current US home ownership rate is 65.4 percent.)

 Well that settles that, doesn’t it?

Do people really believe they can predict something like that? Seriously? It’s one thing to say that, thanks to foreclosures, home ownership is likely to go down further. But to actually try to name a number?

“Renters Really Prefer Owning, Builder Survey Says,” says the Wall Street Journal. I grabbed that immediately — looked like a good, positive story.

Unfortunately, the survey the story is based on doesn’t really say that.

Sayeth the Journal:

A survey from PulteGroup — one of the nation’s largest home builders — has found a surprising result: Many renters want to buy homes.

But PulteGroup actually said:

As we told you the other day, all the hubbub about shadow inventory — a flood of foreclosures and distressed sales coming down the pike — looks to have been a tempest in a teapot and much ado about nothing. A mountain out of a molehill, if you will.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece, “That New Foreclosure Tsunami? Still Waiting” in which it points out that the fears seem unjustified:

In its March National Foreclosure Report, CoreLogic found that foreclosures dropped 18.8% from March 2011. Even better, foreclosures in the first quarter were down 14.7% from the first quarter of 2011.

“Compared to a year ago, the number of completed foreclosures has slowed,” said Anand Nallathambi, chief executive officer of CoreLogic. “Since the foreclosure inventory is also coming down, this suggests that loan modifications, short sales, deeds-in-lieu are increasingly being used as an alternative to foreclosures to clear distressed assets in our communities.”

Click here to read the details.

“Gold gold gold gold gold gold gold.” –Dwarf mining song, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.i

A Gallup poll found that 34 percent of Americans consider gold the best long-term investment. Real estate and stocks came in as number 2 and 3, with men preferring real estate and women preferring stocks.

Why gold? Historical reasons.

It’s time to say it: The housing market recovery is happening. Now. We’ve passed bottom and are on the way up.

When I say “bottom” I don’t mean that every metric is going to be going up. Prices, for example, have a bit of ways to go down. I mean that the overall bottom of the housing crisis is past us.

Now, before I’m accused of being an –AR cheerleader, let me remind you that 1) I don’t do that stuff, and 2) I’ve been accused of being too negative when I wrote about the bad stuff. If the numbers are bad, I don’t do sugarcoating.

So why do I say we’re on the upswing? Several reasons.

Grains of salt

First, a quick note. Don’t believe me. Really.

Back to HARP for a moment. The Home Affordable Refinance Program lets underwater homeowners with solid payment histories refinance at lower rates.

The first version only had a million takers. The second — HARP 2.0 — started in March 2012 and is already working a lot better.

This is all old news, but I put it here for readers unfamiliar with HARP.

Anyway, I found this amusing:

Dan Green over at The Mortgage Reports explains that one of the reasons HARP 1.0 failed was that banks didn’t trust other banks’ underwriting!

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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.