RIF News and Press, RMR Mortgage Trust Com From 05/18/19

By Robert Hughes Housing activity improved in April as starts and permits posted gains. However, details varied widely among the segments and regions. Total housing starts rose to a 1.235 million annual rate from a 1.168 million pace in March. The dominant single-family segment, which acco...

Homebuilder sentiment saw a stronger-than-expected increase in May, as the NAHB sentiment survey rose more than expected to 66 from 63 and expectations of 64. Even after this month’s increase, sentiment remains well off its cycle high of 74 from December 2017, but it does erase much of ...

Two decades of easy credit and hyper-consumption from North American households have encouraged a massive overbuild in the retail sector and commercial real estate. In the process, retail - which includes online giants like Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), big-box chains, and smaller brick and mo...

In the comments of one of our recently published articles, we got into an interesting discussion about the value of investing in very high-yielding closed-end funds. Our intuition is that many of these funds have poor distribution coverage and high premiums, so our attitude has always been "bu...

The newest S&P/Case Shiller home prices indices were released last week, and below is an updated look at the data. On a month-over-month basis, 16 of 20 cities saw home prices gain, with Charlotte, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Boston seeing declines ranging from -0.13% to -0.38%. On a year-...

The National Association of Realtors (NAR - existing home sales reports) and the Census Bureau (new home sales reports) report monthly sales on a "seasonally adjusted annualized rate" (SAAR) basis. Notwithstanding the reliability, or lack thereof, of the "seasonal adjustments," it would seem a...

What a difference plunging mortgage rates make! That's our initial reaction to seeing what's happening in the West region of the U.S. housing market, where the combination of very high existing home sale prices and rising mortgage rates had been killing the real estate market in these stat...

This article was first released to CEF/ETF Income Laboratory subscribers 1 month ago, so data may be out of date. Please check latest data before making investment decisions. Quantitative screens help to rapidly narrow down attractive candidates from the database of 500-plus closed-end ...

A recent note from Brookings on the nature of the ongoing housing crisis in America has opened up with a bombastic statement: Over the past five years, median housing prices have risen faster than median incomes (Figure 1). While that's generally good news for homeowners, it puts additiona...

The Census Bureau recently published the 2019 first-quarter numbers on the housing stock. Homeownership rates had bottomed out in 2016 at 62.9%. That was one quarter which was probably an anomaly. Generally, the bottom appears to have been about 63.5%. It had generally risen since then, up t...