Keeping with my grasping at good news theme:
From an email sent to SunTrust lenders on Friday:
This e-mail has been distributed to all Retail employees who are on the STM Communication Intra-Day Pricing Change distribution list.
Price Change: IMPROVING MARKET
New Rate Sheet: 2008 076 A
Available on intranet: 4:00 pm
Please be sure to share this notice with all appropriate Retail employees in your branch or office.
Thank you.
It might be fleeting, and there may be a contrary email waiting to be sent out this afternoon, but the psychology of the market needs the occasional spate of good news.
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Jim — I’m sorry if I’m just missing it here, but what’s the good news? Is the SunTrust memo commenting on better rates? Or better sales/more transactions? Can’t tell from the memo.
It’s a little thing, but it’s a sign that a lender thinks that the market is improving.
Of course, I posted this before I saw the new today’s write-downs this morning.
When the market moves during the day, that is – bond yields shift either positive or negative by a significant amount, lenders tend to reprice. They do so for two good reasons: 1. Stay competitive in the market by reducing rates, as the other lenders are doing the same (dropping yields). 2. Protect their P&L by pushing rates up when their investors demand a higher rate of return (increasing yields). http://www.Bloomberg.com is an excellent site to follow the 10 year bond yields during trading hours.
Nationally, 18% of current homesellers have negative equity.
And today, Tuesday, there’s this:
‘Yale economist Robert Shiller, who developed one of the widely followed gauges of home prices, said in a speech Tuesday that home prices, which have already fallen about 15 percent from their peak in 2006, may fall further than the 30 percent drop experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s, so far the biggest decline in home prices in the country.
“Basically we are in uncharted territory,” Shiller said, noting that the 85 percent rise in home prices from 1997 to 2006 after adjusting for inflation had represented the biggest housing boom in U.S. history, so the fall in prices could be just as historic.’
From the AP newswire.
March’s existing home sales are down. And I’m part of the problem. I’m waiting to buy.
Perhaps C’ville won’t be quite as impacted as other areas of the county…but still, there’s so much inventory, prices are headed down.
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