RIF News and Press, RMR Mortgage Trust Com From 02/27/19

New residential housing construction was surprisingly weak in December, presenting more evidence for assuming that the US economic growth will continue to slow. Housing permits perked up, providing a degree of optimism for expecting that building activity will rebound in the months ahead. But ...

For years, realtors have been waiting for more housing inventory. It had become an article of faith, what was restraining a full-blown recovery was the lack of units available. The level of resales like construction was up, but still way, way less than it was now fourteen years past the prior ...

Now that was a bad Housing Starts report! Just like the recent delayed report on Retail Sales, it may have been better if the finally released report on Housing Starts for the month of December was just swept under the rug. While economists were expecting the headline print to come in at a SAA...

San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle lead with biggest multi-month drops since 2012; San Diego, Denver, Portland, Los Angeles decline. Others have stalled. A few eke out records. San Francisco and San Diego are catching the Seattle cold, and others are sniffling too, as the most splendid hou...

I don't know if it was the intent of the Fed, but Jerome Powell has managed to trigger a rush into stocks more frenzied than the one that engulfed the last days of the dot.com/techbubble. The vertical ascent since Christmas in the Dow/SPX is unprecedented on a percentage basis over an 8-week p...

By Robert Hughes The Consumer Confidence Index from The Conference Board rebounded in February, increasing by 9.7 points to 131.4. The index is constructed so that it equals 100 in 1985. The February gain follows three consecutive monthly declines from November through January. The composi...

During the 2018 partial government shutdown, which affected the timely reporting of housing market data, we began exploring alternative sources for that data that are providing a more detailed picture of recent trends in the residential real estate market at the state level than is possible ...

Unless the Fed is going to start buying millions of homes outright, prices are going to fall to what buyers can afford. There are two generalities that can be applied to all asset bubbles: Bubbles inflate for longer and reach higher levels than most pre-bubble analysts expected. Al...

Just recently, I spoke with Andrea Riquier, MarketWatch's reporter on housing, about the issue of affordability and current housing trends in the U.S. One of the interesting points we discussed is the issue of a "house" as a representation of the "American Dream." I cannot entirely ...

Who Wins in a long-drawn-out gradual Housing Bust? It always boils down to this: Regardless of how thin you cut a slice of bologna, there are always two sides to it. When home prices drop after a housing bubble, there are many losers. But here are the winners - including a whole generation...