A "Housing Start" is a home on which construction has started and, for the 4th straight month, national single-family housing starts held steady last month.  When the demand for homes grows faster than the number of homes for sale, prices increase.  As recent home sales data confirms, buyers currently outpace sellers and one consequence of this is an increase in multiple-offer situations this year.  It's no wonder home prices are up across so many neighborhoods. October's Housing Starts report is yet another piece of housing data foreshadowing rising home prices into ...

At MintLife we strive to make complex financial topics easy-to-understand. Most homeowners are already familiar with the concept of a mortgage. A Reverse Mortgage lets you borrow money against the value of your home without your needing to pay it back until either one of two things happen; either you die or you sell the home. With recent government regulations in place, the Reverse Mortgage is a financial instrument set to explode with the wave of retiring baby boomers. These mortgages not only affect the borrower, but their heirs as well, so it’s important to understand the ins and ...

A conforming mortgage is one that, quite literally, conforms to the mortgage guidelines set forth by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Each year, the government sets the maximum allowable loan size for a conforming mortgage, based on "typical" housing costs nationwide. Loans in excess of this amount are typically called "jumbo". While home prices increased from 1980 to 2006, so did conforming loan limits.  Since then, however, as home prices have dipped, the conforming loan limit has held. Now, in 2010, for the 5th consecutive year, the government set $417,000 as the nation's ...

APR is an acronym for Annual Percentage Rate.  It's a government-mandated calculation meant to simplify the comparison of mortgage options. A loan's APR can always be found in the top-left corner of the Federal Truth-In-Lending Disclosure. Because APR is expressed as a percentage, many people confuse it for the loan's interest rate.  It's not.  APR represents the total cost of borrowing over the life of a loan.  "Interest rate" is the basis for monthly mortgage repayments. The main advantage of APR is that it allows an "apples-to-apples" comparison between loan ...

Wednesday, November 11th, Daniel Chookaszian of American Street Mortgage Company was featured on Moody Radio for a second time. Topics of discussion included, First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit Extension, Veteran Lending, and much more! Additionally Danny was recently mentioned in a Chicago-Tribune Article written by Terry Savage regarding Veteran Lending. Click here to listen to the entire interview! Read Chicago Sun Times Article referencing Daniel Chookaszian ...

Mortgage markets improved last week as foreign buyers of mortgage debt helped to push mortgage rates to a 4-week low. It marked the 3rd consecutive week that rates improved, breathing extra life into this year's ongoing Refi Boom. Fixed-rate, conforming mortgage rates fell about 0.125 percent on the week. ARMs did about the same. There wasn't much data to move mortgage rates last week; investors worked mostly on momentum and trends. However, the Friday University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey release garnered some attention.  After worsening in August and September, ...

For the eighth straight consecutive month, national foreclosure activity in the U.S. was dominated by a small set of states. As reported by RealtyTrac.com, more than half of October's foreclosure-related activity came from just 4 states: California Florida Illinois Michigan The remaining Top 10 states in terms of total foreclosure activity included Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, and Maryland. Foreclosures are up 19 percent from last October, but a deeper look at the RealtyTrac report revealed two positive developments for the housing market. Foreclosure ...

Despite the economy's improvement and prodding from Congress, banks don't seem ready to open their purse strings just yet. Nationally, mortgage approval standards are tightening. The data comes from a quarterly survey the Federal Reserve sends to its member banks.  The Fed asks senior bank loan officers around the country whether "prime" residential mortgage guidelines had tightened in the last 3 months. For the period July-September 2009: Roughly 1 in 4 banks said guidelines tightened Roughly 3 in 4 banks said guidelines were "basically unchanged" Just one bank said its ...