Houston Refinance
Refinancing in Houston area
Real Estate News
Low Mortgage Rates Met With Blank Stares
Jun 15th
More evidence is out on Wednesday that the pool of homeowners who can refinance under today’s more stringent lending standards has been exhausted: Mortgage rates have hovered close to their lowest levels in decades, and yet refinance demand fell last week from the previous week.
Demand for home-purchase mortgages also continued to fall last week, according to the weekly application survey from the Mortgage Bankers Association. That means there have now been five straight weeks of declining demand for purchase mortgages, which have fallen to their lowest level since February 1997.
“Home buyers have not yet returned to the market following the expiration of the home-buyer tax credit at the end of April,” said Michael Fratantoni, the MBA’s vice president of research and economics.
Early indications show that home sales activity plunged in May, the first month after the tax credit’s expiration. Sales in markets including Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix and New Jersey were down by around 25% in May from one year earlier.
Most analysts expected housing demand to fall after the tax credit expired, but few had predicted that mortgage rates would tumble to such low levels after the Federal Reserve ended its purchases of mortgage-backed securities in March. Average rates on 30-year fixed-rate loans fell to 4.81% last week from 4.83% at the end of May.
Mortgage rates tracked by Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace index reached their lowest level of the current cycle on Tuesday, with participating brokers quoting an average 4.58% rate for 30-year fixed-rate loans. Read the rest of this entry »
30-year fixed-rate mortgage remains at 4.96%
Mar 18th
Freddie Mac on Thursday states the mortgage rate average for a 30-year fixed-rate remains the same at 4.96%. The increase was from 4.95% compared to last period. Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac chief economist stated, “Mortgage rates for fixed-rate mortgages were virtually unchanged this week as the effects of storms emerged in recent housing data. New construction slowed by 5.9% in February to 575,000 homes.”
Bankrate: Mortgage Rates Dip Down
Mar 4th
Bankrate Press Release:
SOURCE Bankrate, Inc.
NEW YORK, March 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Mortgage rates moved lower this week, with the average conforming 30-year fixed mortgage dipping to 5.12 percent, according to Bankrate.com’s weekly national survey. The average 30-year fixed mortgage has an average of 0.39 discount and origination points. Read the rest of this entry »
Owners: $5.4B NY housing complexes go to creditors
Jan 25th
Owners: 2 NYC apartment complexes bought for record $5.4B will be turned over to creditors
NEW YORK (AP) — The financially troubled owners of two massive apartment complexes that sold for a record $5.4 billion a few years ago said Monday they’re turning them over to their creditors.
The joint venture ownership team led by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty, hurt by the real estate market collapse, couldn’t make a multimillion-dollar loan payment earlier this month for the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village apartments in Manhattan.
Over the last few days it became clear the only viable alternative to bankruptcy would be to transfer to lenders control and operation of the 110 buildings and 11,000 apartments overlooking the East River, partnership spokesman Bud Perrone said.
“We make this decision as we feel a battle over the property or a contested bankruptcy proceeding is not in the long-term interest of the property, its residents, our partnership or the city,” Perrone said in an e-mailed statement.
The group bought the complexes, which have about 25,000 tenants, in 2006 at the height of the real estate bubble in the nation’s largest residential real estate deal.
The record purchase price seemed outrageous to many real estate analysts, but the partnership believed it had a winning strategy: It would aggressively convert thousands of rent-regulated apartments occupied by middle-class families into luxury units that would fetch top dollar.
But the tactic was a bust as the city’s housing market cooled considerably. Ratings firms estimated the value of the 80-acre area had fallen to as little as $2 billion — far less than the outstanding loan balance.
Apartment conversions happened much slower than expected, tenants fought back and a state court ruled that about $200 million in the partnership’s new rent increases was improper.
The group, which used a $3 billion mortgage and a $1.4 billion secondary loan to buy the properties, had been trying to restructure its debt. It couldn’t make a $16 million loan payment due Jan. 8.
Analysts had been expecting the ownership group to default on its loan for several months.
It hasn’t been determined when the ownership transfer of the sister properties will take place and who specifically the new owners will be, Perrone said.
Tishman Speyer, whose other properties include Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, said it wouldn’t consider a long-term management contract to continue operating the apartment complexes if it didn’t involve ownership. It said it was committed to an efficient transition of the properties’ operations and would manage them during that transition.
The housing complexes, which are so big they have their own newspaper, were built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for returning World War II veterans. MetLife Inc. decided to sell them in 2005, when real estate prices were soaring.
Tenants launched their own bid to take over the 11,227 units, three out of four of which were rent-stabilized and priced far below the market rate, before MetLife announced it had closed a deal with the partnership led by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock.
