Corelogic came out with their October Housing and Mortgage Trends report a little while ago and there are several interesting insights which I will summarize here. Unfortunately, they are pretty clear that they don’t want any part of their report reproduced so I won’t be displaying any of their graphs but you can click on that link above to see them for yourself.
- Home ownership rates have declined substantially for younger people from 1980 to 2010. See figure 3. In the 25 – 34 age group the home ownership rate has declined from 51.6% to 42% and for 35 – 44 year olds it has declined from 71.2% to 62.3%. Home ownership rates have actually increased for people above 54.
- There is a rather disturbing trend that people are spending much more on housing than they did 25 years ago. See figure 4. Since 1985 homeowners have increased the % of their total expenditures allocated to housing from 21.2% to 33.2% while renters have increased their housing % from 16.4% to 38.4%.
- Note that renters now spend quite a bit more (on a relative basis) on housing than homeowners do. If I were the NAR I would probably claim that this shows that it’s cheaper to own than rent but that would be a stupid conclusion. You can’t really be sure what this means. It probably means that a landlord is more willing to let you extend yourself than a mortgage lender.
- Most foreclosed properties that are taken over by the banks sell pretty quickly but almost 10% of those foreclosed in 2006 remain bank owned as of the second quarter of 2010. In all likelihood these properties are really scary.
- Bank owned properties have recently taken longer to sell. During 2006 and 2007 20% of foreclosed properties were sold by the lenders within 3 months. That percentage increased to 46% during the second quarter of 2009 but by the second quarter of 2010 the percentage declined to 36%.
- More and more of the bank owned properties are being bought with cash. The percentage has risen from 40% in early 2006 to 56% by the second quarter of 2010.
- When you look at CoreLogic’s mortgage performance charts on page 5 of the report you see that delinquencies and foreclosure filings are trending down over the last 2 years – much more so than you would imagine from what you read about in other sources.