Cincinnati Home Loan
A little Labor Day video to entertain you. Remember how hard you work and take a day to relax.
Happy Labor Day!
If you know anyone looking for mortgage assistance, let them know about me so I can help them succeed.
Hope you have a great Labor Day.
Has housing turned the corner for good?
The June 2011 Case-Shiller Index reading posted strong numbers across the board, with each of the index’s 20 tracked markets showing home price improvement from May.
Some markets — Chicago and Minneapolis — rose as much as 3.2 percent.
The rise in values is nothing about which to get overly excited, however. The Case-Shiller Index is just re-reporting what multiple data sets have already shown about the summer housing market; that it was stronger than the spring market, and that a recovery is underway, but occurring locally, at different rates.
For example, the June 2011 Case-Shiller Index shows the following :
In isolation, these statistics appear promising, but it’s important to remember that the Case-Shiller Index is a backward-looking data set, focusing on just a portion of the national housing economy.
As an illustration, the Case-Shiller Index’s “national report” only includes data from 20 cities nationwide. They’re not the 20 biggest cities, either. Smaller metropolitan areas such as Minneapolis (#48) and Tampa (#51) are included.
Larger ones including Houston (#4), Philadelphia (#5) and San Jose (#10) are not.
In addition, the Case-Shiller index fails to track sales of condominiums, multi-unit homes and new construction. In some markets, including Chicago, these excluded home type can represent a large share of the overall market.
The Case-Shiller Index is a fine data set for policy makers and economists. It describes the broader housing market and shows long-term trends. For the individual home buyer in Louisville , however, it’s much less useful. More than “broad data”, you want focused data that’s current and relevant.
The best place for data like that is a local real estate agent.
If you’re shopping for a mortgage rate, today may be a good day to lock one down. That’s because Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its Non-Farm Payrolls report for August 2011.
The “jobs report” tends to have a big influence on mortgage bonds and mortgage rates in Columbus.
The jobs report is a monthly issuance, providing sector-by-sector analysis of the U.S. workforce. It also report the national Unemployment Rate.
Wall Street expects the August Non-Farm Payrolls data to show 75,000 jobs created in August, down from 117,000 in July; and it expects that the Unemployment Rate will remain unchanged at 9.1%.
The jobs report’s connection to mortgage markets is straight-forward — as jobs go, so goes the economy. This is because when the number of working Americans rises :
These are each good turns in a recovering economy.
For today’s rate shoppers and home buyers, though, it won’t be the actual number of jobs created that matter as much as how close that jobs figure is to Wall Street’s expectations. If the number of jobs created exceeds the 75,000 estimate, look for mortgage rates to rise.
Conversely, if job creation falls short of 75,000 in August, mortgage rates are expected to rise.
Home affordability remains at all-time lows and mortgage rates do, too. If you’ve been wondering whether now is the right time to lock a rate, you can remove some risk by locking ahead of Friday’s Non-Farm Payrolls release.
The report will be released at 8:30 AM ET.
