Policy

North Texas Housing Market Looks Like A Bubble

The North Texas housing market is looking like a bubble waiting to burst. Home prices continued to melt up in April. Median and average home prices hit new all-time highs across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The median home price in Denton County hit a new record high of $480,000, an increase of 22.9 percent from last year. Average prices hit $577,607. That was up 25.1 percent year-over-year. The melt-up in prices is pretty astounding considering mortgage interest rates are now solidly above 5 percent. Monthly payments for a prospective home buyer in North Texas have [...]

Media Narrative on Housing Shortage is Comically Absurd

The current media narrative on the U.S. housing shortage is comically absurd misdirection. Numerous experts in the industry continue to float the same tired narratives and misdirection while media mouthpieces nod in agreement. It's truly sad to watch. News segments offering up explanations of our housing affordability crisis look more like industry infomercials. According the Wall Street arm of the housing industry renting is the new American dream. Wall Street predators are just filling the gap, providing much-needed housing in a time of need. Just a few days ago our local CBS affiliate ran this [...]

Contracts For North Texas Home Purchases Still Shrinking

I have been monitoring the contracts for home purchases in the North Texas area since last week, and the numbers are not encouraging. The number of active option contract properties (listings where the home has gone under contract with a buyer option to back out) continues to shrink. This is not surprising considering the economic backdrop, but it also points to a more prolonged downturn than many in the real estate industry were expecting. Pending sales data for March will not be pretty, but the April data for North Texas home sales could be an [...]

Things Get Ugly For Denton-Based Sally Beauty

Things just got ugly for Denton-based Sally Beauty supply. The international retailer and distributor of professional beauty supplies saw its stock plummet after Amazon announced its own professional beauty store. This is not exactly great news for one of Denton's largest businesses. Amazon is a virtually unregulated monopoly on multiple fronts with huge tax advantages to many of its competitors. Amazon Beauty customers will still need a license to purchase professional use products, but Amazon is playing by a different set of rules as regulators continue to turn a blind eye to Amazon's monopolistic business [...]

Jerome Powell Visits Dallas Fed – Global Perspectives In Oblivion

Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, visited the Dallas Federal Reserve yesterday to cap the Dallas bank's Global Perspectives series. Aside from pontificating about global economic perspectives, the meeting between Robert Kaplan and Jerome Powell was insightful for many reasons. Kaplan reminded the audience of Powell's policy experience which includes time as partner at private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Listening to a Goldman Sachs alum toss softball questions to a Carlyle alum is one way, I suppose, to placate a concerned public that the economy is still healthy and the Fed is on the ball, [...]

Existing Home Sales Lowest In 3 Years With 4.1% September Drop

The National Association of Realtors reported the lowest levels for existing U.S. home sales in 3 years. Sales of existing homes posted at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5,115,000 for September, down from August numbers which were also revised lower. The year-over-year decline in existing home sales of 4.1 percent puts sales levels back to where they were three years ago. Existing home inventory at 1.88 million homes was up slightly from last year's 1.86 million units. NAR's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, indicated that "higher interest rates have led to a decline in sales [...]

Denton TX Mortgages – Lock Your Rate Or Not?

Should you lock your Denton TX mortgage interest rate at the time of application? If you are buying a home, it's a difficult question to answer. As early as last week Treasury bears were screaming at the rooftops that yields (and by default mortgage rates) were going to shoot higher, as evidenced by the 10-year Treasury crossing a supposed line in the sand above 3%. What a difference a few days makes! This morning the yield on the benchmark 10-Year Treasury dipped to 2.82 percent, retracing 29 basis points from the recent "line in the [...]

Debt, Deficits & Housing – The Smoke & Mirrors “Recovery”

Many among the status quo have defended the last 8 years as a productive "recovery" from the abyss of financial armageddon unleashed by our criminal banking sector. The efficacy of the recovery depends on the person responding to the question. For the vast majority of the U.S. population, there has been no recovery, but instead a steady decline. If you have been paying attention to the early release of season 5 of 'House of Cards', speaking of the email data dump exposing our corrupt political machine for all to see, the reasons behind the phony [...]

Foreign Investment In U.S. Real Estate Cools In 2016, But China Still Leads List Of Funny Money

The National Association of Realtors has published its latest survey profiling foreign buyers of U.S. real estate, and the latest data is remarkable for a number of reasons. Not surprisingly, China is still the largest source of foreign investment into U.S. homes and property. Something also worth noting is the decline of to total investment dollars reaching its way into the United States. It appears that the latest global central-bank-sponsored asset bubble may be finally popping once again. This will be a particular cause for concern for those wealthy property owners who have bought into [...]

Mortgage Rates Drop As “Recovery” Drowns In The Sea Of Central Bank Market Manipulations

"Anyone claiming that America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction." Barack Obama - SOTU January 2016 2016 has seen one of the worst starts to a year ever for major U.S. stock indices ever, and that means mortgage rates have continued to fall during the first two weeks of the year. For those who were rushing to lock in a sub-4 percent mortgage, there really was no need to rush. It is now easy to get a 3.75 percent fixed rate 30-year mortgage here in the Houston area. Mortgage rates are driven by demand [...]

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