The main impact of the settlement on the housing market will come from the new guidelines clarifying best practices for servicing delinquent loans.  This should mean the foreclosure process should start to speed up again.  We look for prices to fall 7% from 3Q11.  We forecast that the real recovery will start in 2014, and [...]

Although momentum is building in the New Jersey housing market below $400,000, median prices continued to drop in the fourth quarter of 2011.  According to Jeffrey Otteau, president of Otteau Valuation Group, Ocean County saw the largest percentage median price decrease in the fourth quarter, down 13.7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010.  Monmouth [...]

Home prices in the U.S. may continue to fall, according Robert Shiller, an economics professor at Yale University and co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index.  Despite “mildly positive signs” in the housing market, “we may continue to see home price declines,” Shiller said today in a radio interview.  “It is an ‘‘incredibly bad situation in [...]

In a sign of recovery in the housing market, cost-conscious buyers have returned to the market for lower-priced properties across the New York area in recent months, leading analysts to speculate that the worst of the housing slump may be over.  In New Jersey sales have picked up due to buyers of properties priced less than [...]

The nation’s apartment-vacancy rate in the fourth quarter fell to its lowest level since late 2001 as Americans continued to favor renting homes instead of buying them.  Demand has swollen from people being foreclosed out of their houses as well as those unable or unwilling to buy.  In the fourth quarter, the vacancy rate fell [...]