Orlando Real Estate - Blog

Warren Buffett said that the real estate business his company Berkshire Hathaway owns is seeing a small improvement in housing demand. The National Association of Realtors seemed to confirm his observations when it announced that the index for pending home sales went up in March. This data helped send the stock market higher as it stays true to form by rising on the most modest news.

Except for low home prices and very low mortgage rates, all of the elements for a recover in housing are missing. Those two things should be enough, but balanced against them are shrinking access to credit, an inability of Americans to get higher wages, and crippling unemployment.

The April unemployment figures will be out later this week. Six hundred thousand people lost jobs last month, according to most estimates. Two and a half million people have lost work since the beginning of the year. A housing recovery cannot occur in the presence of the massive collapse in unemployment. The devastation of the potential home buying base is too great. Many of the people who lose jobs will also lose their houses and that increases the inventory of unsold homes.

Consumers have lost access to credit. The fact that mortgage rates have dropped does not even begin to offset that. Qualifying for a mortgage is harder than ever. Banks have reason to be cautious. One of the large credit bureaus just released a report that says 4.7% of payments for bank-issued credit cards were late sixty days or more in March, an increase of 38% over the same month last year. According to Reuters, "In March, lenders closed 20 million card accounts, sending the total down by 58 million since the peak in July 2008 to 380 million." Banks will not be lending to consumers as long as there are no solid and sustained signs of an economic recovery. They cannot afford the risk after all of the write-offs they have already taken. complete story 

Source: Time.com - Douglas A. McIntyre

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