Econintersect: This week Econintersect has reviewed home prices after Case-Shiller’s home price index release (analysis here) and pending home sales (analysis here). Additional data has been released from the Mortgage Bankers Association on mortgage applications and Altos Research has has issued thoughts on housing prices.
Mortgage applications decreased 2.7 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending June 24, 2011.
The refinance share of mortgage activity increased to 69.5 percent of total applications from 69.2 percent the previous week.
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages decreased to 4.46 percent from 4.57 percent, with points increasing to 1.19 from 0.91 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value (LTV) ratio loans. This is the lowest 30-year rate recorded in the survey since the middle of November 2010. The effective rate also decreased from last week.
Please note that 30% of all real estate transaction do not involve mortgages – the the relevance of this data is suspect. Graph hat tip to Calculated Risk:
Altos Research did an investigative piece on home price volatility.
Below is a chart of Altos Research‘s real estate prices back through 2009, across about 730 zipcodes. For each week on the horizontal axis, and for each zipcode, I calculate the proportional change in listing price (blue) and in sold price (red) since the previous week. Then I average the absolute value of these proportional changes, for a rough estimate of volatility. The volatility of sold prices is extreme.
[click on above graph to enlarge]
sources: MBA, Altos Research, Calculated Risk
