Market Watch

CoreLogic, a residential property information, analytics and services provider, has released its January National Foreclosure Report. The Foreclosure Report provides data on completed U.S. foreclosures and foreclosure inventory. Keep reading to see the conclusions of the report.

The residential and commercial real estate markets, while dependent on different economic factors, appear to be sharing a similar pattern of incremental overall growth early in 2014. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has released its latest Commercial Real Estate Outlook for the first quarter of 2014. The Commercial Real Estate Outlook offers overall projections for four major commercial sectors and analyzes quarterly data in the office, industrial, retail and multifamily markets. The report shows that while commercial markets are improving, they aren’t doing so at a blistering pace.

For all the things the recession has done to impair the housing market over the past few years, reducing the size of new homes being built is not one of them. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), citing Census Bureau data, reported that new home construction has been dominated by a bigger-is-better ethos over the past four years. “The average home size has continued to rise for the past four years, from 2,362 square feet in 2009 to 2,679 square feet in 2013,” said Rose Quint, NAHB assistant vice president for survey research.

The Mortgage Bankers Association has released the results of its National Delinquency Survey for the fourth quarter of 2013. The NDS covers 41 million loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties, representing approximately 88 percent of all “first-lien” residential mortgage loans outstanding in the United States. Loans surveyed for the fourth quarter were reported by approximately 120 lenders, including mortgage bankers, commercial banks and thrifts. Keep reading for the details.

The National Association of Home Builders released its National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index for the fourth quarter of 2013.The index, which is a measure of the percentage of homes sold in a given area that are affordable to families earning the area’s median income during a specific quarter, shows that slightly lower median home prices along with a small uptick in mortgage rates contributed to housing affordability holding steady at the end of 2013. Keep reading to see the full results.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau announced new residential construction statistics for January. Keep reading to see the construction breakdown.

The U.S. economy has continued to improve to the extent that the Fed will likely continue to taper its bond-buying activity throughout 2014, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard told The Wall Street Journal on Feb. 19. The Fed announced back in December 2013 that it would start tapering the amount of money dedicated to its bond-buying stimulus program. The Fed had been sinking $85 billion per month into the program at the end of 2013 as a way to help support the economy as it rebounded from the recession. Last month, the Fed cut back its bond-buying program by $10 billion to a new monthly total of $65 billion.

If there were two words to encapsulate the state of the housing market in 2013, they would be “decreased affordability.” A new report from RealtyTrac, a provider of housing data and analytics, showed that those looking for a bargain in the housing market last year might have been too late to the party.

Ellie Mae, a provider of enterprise-level, on-demand automated solutions for the residential mortgage industry, released its Origination Insight Report for January. The report draws its data and insights from a sampling of the loan applications that flow through Ellie Mae’s Encompass mortgage management software and the Ellie Mae Network. Keep reading to see the details of the report.

Freddie Mac has released the results of its Economic and Housing Market Outlook for February, which forecasts the state of the U.S. residential market using various data from the economic, housing and mortgage markets. The February data shows that even though the Fed’s decision to continue to taper its bond-buying activity caused many analysts to conclude an escalation of mortgage rates would inevitably follow, rates have stayed low for the interim. Freddie reported average rates of 4.28 percent for 30-year fixed mortgages and 3.33 percent for 15-year fixed mortgages as of Feb. 13.