RIF News and Press, RMR Mortgage Trust Com From 12/08/19

The first reports in December are in, and both were negative. Let's start with construction spending. Overall construction spending declined -0.8% in October. The more leading residential construction spending declined -0.9%, the second decline in a row (blue in the graph below): Figure 1...

Real Estate Weekly Outlook The final "jobs week" of the decade did not disappoint. A stellar non-farm payrolls report on Friday lifted US equity markets to another week of gains and fresh record weekly closing highs on the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq. Back-and-forth trade headlines dictated...

Lumber is a critical industrial commodity. Like crude oil, natural gas, copper and other base metals, and ferrous metals, wood is a building block of infrastructure and essential construction material. Just because the lumber futures market is not as liquid as many other industrial raw materia...

Author's note : This article was initially released to CEF/ETF Income Laboratory members on Nov. 7, 2019. Chemist's Closed-End Fund Report Quantitative screens help to rapidly narrow down attractive candidates from the database of 500-plus closed-end funds [CEFs] for further due diligence...

The Canadian real estate industry has been one of the hottest sectors on the TSX this year. James Hunter, Global Infrastructure Analyst, TD Asset Management, explains why the market has done so well. Original Read more ...

By Jill Mislinski Wednesday morning the National Association of Realtors released the September data for their Pending Home Sales Index. Here is an excerpt from the latest press release: Lawrence Yun, NAR's chief economist, noted the decline in inventory and a small rise in mortgage rat...

Although they account for about 90% of the entire housing market, existing home sales are the least consequential to the economy. That's because building new homes entails a bunch of economic activity, from architects, builders, building trades contractors, landscapers in the building process,...

Yesterday's blog post focused on the strength of the consumer and the positive impact on the housing market. Also noted in that post was the consumer's improved financial position versus the end of the financial crisis and the current limited draw down of one's home equity. Then today, the U...

Late last week the National Association of Realtors reported existing home sales of 5.46 million units at an annual rate. This number was slightly below estimates, however, it was higher than the previous month and was 4.6% higher on a year-over-year basis. As the below chart shows, this rate ...

By Brian Phillips Black Friday is around the corner. Will US shoppers head to the mall? Or are malls out of fashion for good? The debate about the retail apocalypse is playing out in a single bond index. That index is the CMBX.6, which references 25 US commercial mortgage-backed securi...