Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog

The weather is better, but the news isn’t.  The National Association of Realtors released their Pending Home Sales Report this morning:

The Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in March, registered 104.3, down 10.5% from March 2006 when it was 116.5, and is 4.9% below an upwardly revised February index of 109.7.  The index is the lowest since a reading of 103.5 in March 2003, coincidentally, the middle of the housing boom.

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Thank you M and Phxagent for our early preview of the April numbers.  These numbers will differ slightly from the monthly numbers released by ARMLS and Jay Butler’s monthly report, but do consistently give us the direction of the Phoenix market.  According to M:

ACTIVE         51,897
UC                   7,051
SOLD  4-07   5,482
SOLD  4-06   6,710
SOLD  3-07   5,948

This would be down 18% year-over-year, and 8% month-over-month.
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We’ve been hearing a lot about how lax lending standards in the subprime market have played havoc with subprime lenders:

Shareholders are paying a rising toll for irresponsible lending as lax standards across the industry and weakness in the U.S. housing market combine to produce the highest default rates on subprime mortgages in four years.

"This is not something that is going to disappear overnight," said James Ackor, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in Portland, Maine. "Many of the mortgage banks, mortgage originators and mortgage subsidiaries are in the process of tightening underwriting standards to try to address some of the shortcomings on loans originated through much of 2006."

Not everyone agrees with that assessment though.  Some are saying the problem was the exceptions, rather than the rules:
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