Mortgage Payment Program

In writing blogs about the mortgage and housing markets lately, it has been difficult to find anything not relatively depressing to write about. There simply is not a lot of good news about housing these days. This week, for the first time in what seems like months, I saw articles with at least a glimmer of good news.
New home sales rose unexpectedly in April over March but still remained near historically low levels. According to a key government report on the battered housing market, April sales came in at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000, up 3.3% from March. The reading was above the consensus forecast of 520,000. Another small bit of potentially good news is that, according to the same report, The median price of a new home sold in April was $246,100, up 1.5% from $242,500 a year earlier.
Like I said, it is a little good news. Unfortunately, that good news is still offset by the reality that April home sales were down 42% from their level a year earlier so that small rise in home sales prices could be skewed slightly and may not accurately reflect an uptick in home values.
By no means does this indicate the end is in sight to the housing slump. Far too many other key indicators point to tough times ahead for a while longer in the housing sector. I just thought it would be nice for a change to find some good news to talk about.

Tags: April Housing Rise, home values, Housing Sector, Housing slump

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under Consumer, Industry, Mortgage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.