Realtors for Ventura | Oxnard | Camarillo

Hope Now is an alliance of lenders and other organizations formed last fall to deal with the sub-prime mess. They just published data showing results through January.

It shows the overall delinquency rate at 1.21% for the first quarter, 2007, and climbing to 3.38% in January. That sounds distressing, and it is. But a closer look reveals that for those with prime loans, the first quarter 2007 delinquency rate was 0.40%, which has climbed to 1.42% in January.

That means that 98.58% of home owners with good credit who didn’t get funky loans are making their payments okay.

The real mess is in those funky loans, many of which never should have been made in the first place. Look at the difference. First quarter 2007 had a delinquent rate of 6.83%. In January, that number shot up to 18.59%. Unbelievable! That’s where all the mess is occurring today.

And unfortunately for us homeowners, all those short pays and foreclosures hitting the market place have been driving down home values.

But the upside to this mess is that lower home prices are making it easier for entry level buyers get into a home.

BankRate.com just announced (Your Best Interest Report) today that FHA interest rates (for 30 year, fixed rate loans) dropped nationally to 6.00%. You can track FHA interest rates going back to 1992 at this FHA site.

Remember 2 things:

• FHA just increased loan limits in Ventura County, and
• An FHA loan isn’t just for first time home buyers!

A quick review – who “decides” what mortgage interest rates should be? The short answer is – the investors who buy mortgage backed securities on the secondary market. Unknowledgeable people say “greedy lenders” (I’m being generous with the word “unknowledgeable”. Privately, in my rants and raves, I categorize individuals who love to speak so generally as misinformed? Ignorant? Stupid?). Read the rest of this article »

Dinosaurs live! Humor aside, we really haven’t seen a lot of FHA (Federal Housing Administration – a department under HUD) loans in Ventura County since the 1990s, simply because their loan limits were below what homes were selling for. We used to see a lot of FHA (and VA) loans in the 90s for a number of reasons – low down payments, flexible qualifying, straight forward 30 year fixed rate interest rates and the like. Read the rest of this article »

This morning the Federal regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made capital requirement changes to those two companies that will (hopefully) allow them to substantially increase the amounts of $$ they can lend to us homebuyers. (See announcement).

Why is this announcement important? Because it helps bring more liquidity to a stopped up/plugged up market. (See my earlier post “Does Fed’s cut yesterday affect home buyers?”)

So this is good news. It should filter down into the marketplace as Fannie and Freddie bring capital infusions into their organizations. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s a start!