Free Republic

Real estate agents are famous for putting a listing in the best possible light to close a sale. On Thursday, the industry's national trade association confirmed that its monthly data have been painting a rosier picture of the pace of home sales since 2007. As msnbc.com reported in March, the National Association of Realtors has been overstating the pace of existing home sales by more than 16 percent. The trade group now says just 17.7 million existing homes were sold from 2007 to 2010, not the 20.6 million it originally reported. The NAR made no changes to its data on...

30 percent of home owners "under water". Home values will drop another 3-5 percent and stay at that level the next few years.

Single-family originations will likely dip in 2012 because of fewer refinances, according to Frank Nothaft, chief economist at Freddie Mac. The market will see a refinance burnout, Nothaft said, with a dwindling pool of eligible borrowers and higher mortgage rates by the second half of 2012. Nothaft projects $1.3 trillion in single-family mortgage originations in 2011, compared to $1.14 trillion in 2012 and $1.07 trillion in 2013. The Freddie Mac projections for 2012 come as a Pew Research Center study showed a record-low number of adults married in the U.S. About 51% of all adults were married as of 2010,...

Banks Not Wanting to Lend is a myth. It’s a trendy thing to blame the banks for not wanting to lend, but it’s not reality. Don’t get me wrong…most everything else might be able to be blamed on them, but not this. This is what makes the problem in mortgage and housing so fundamentally grave. It’s just not as easy as lowering rates, doing a mass refi event, or pulling Foreclosures off the market. After nearly 5 years, if there was an easy fix (such as printing trillions of dollars in order to try to create inflation) housing would be...

This is a big story that you're not hearing much about. cites a forbidden source: This is nearly a half-trillion dollars that the Federal government is on the hook for, which might not be showing up in deficit numbers. Another "perfect storm."