Recent News:
Source: Forbes Advisor
New home construction hit a wall last month, falling 9.5% in April from the previous month, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Census Bureau. This comes as the supply of homes for sale continues to lag and the cost of materials to build a home remains at record highs.
Housing inventory stayed around the two-month supply range in February and March, which is well below the six-month benchmark needed for a balanced housing market. But the housing availability drought hasn’t stopped buyer demand, which is pushing up home prices and creating an untenable market for would-be homebuyers across the country.
Source: BankRate.com
When you have a mortgage, your monthly payments go toward repaying the amount that’s borrowed, with interest, and usually homeowners insurance and property taxes.
The portion that’s paid to the principal and interest over the course of the loan term varies according to what’s known as an amortization schedule. Understanding how your mortgage amortizes is important so that you can make a more informed decision about how to pay off your loan, and the length of time and cost it will take to do so.
Source: Forbes Advisor
The Covid-19 relief efforts that were meant to help homeowners with mortgage payments and prevent people from losing their homes is creating a new record for the housing market: Foreclosures filed in 2021 hit the lowest rate in more than a decade.
There were 151,153 foreclosure filings in 2021, a 29% drop from 2020 and the lowest number in at least 16 years—when real estate data analytics company, ATTOM, began tracking this data in 2005.
Significant contributing factors to the low foreclosure rate levels were the Covid-related forbearance on mortgage payments, a ban on home evictions and a 2021 mortgage servicing rule that discouraged foreclosures. While there are still some mortgages working their way out of forbearance, the ban on evictions has long since expired on July 1, 2021, and the servicing rule by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sunset on Jan. 1, 2022.
