The first 15 days of August turned into another banner period for the FHA.

Figures from HUD show that FHA loan applications were up 21.3 percent when compared with a year ago — and 39.6 percent over late July. At this rate, the FHA would get more than 1 million loan applications this year.

As to endorsements, they’re up 12.5 read more

The FHASecure program announced by President Bush has a number of important features which need to be looked at with some care.

First, HUD says that “FHASecure, like all FHA products, will be underwritten to ensure the borrowers have the ability to repay the loan, will require read more

Below is the official White House listing of the President’s recommended FHA revisions and proposals.

• 1. The President Calls On Congress To Pass Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Modernization Legislation. The President’s FHA modernization proposal would lower downpayment requirements, allow FHA to insure bigger loans, and give FHA more pricing flexibility. read more

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Thank you for joining me. Secretary Paulson and Secretary Jackson gave me an update on the strong fundamentals of our nation’s economy. Economic growth is healthy, and just yesterday we learned that our economy grew at a strong rate of 4 percent in the second quarter of this year. Wages are rising, read more

Calculated Risk — a cleaver and readable blog that covers financial and economic matters — reports that a Bank of America research note has looked at what can be done to bail out subprime borrowers. The answer, says Calculated Risk, is that:

“FHA and Fannie Mae’s ” read more

Blogger Noah Rosenblatt runs UrbanDigs.com, a very smart look at real estate in Manhattan and beyond.

He has two August 29th posts that have important national implications.

First he talks about the Case/Schiller Index, a benchmark which looks at sales of the same properties over time read more

The Federal Reserve will meet as scheduled September 18th and the key question of the day will concern what to do with the federal funds rate.

While the Fed dropped the discount rate by .5 percent in August, the discount rate read more

The stock market took a dive today, and why not? The minutes from the Federal Reserve meeting of August 202020 were released this afternoon and they did not suggest a short-term resolution to the current mortgage meltdown:

“Participants,” said the Fed, “noted that investors had become read more

The Philadelphia Inquirer points out that FHA market share, “in dollar terms, had fallen from 9.2 percent in 2001 to 1.8 percent in 2005, the last year detailed federal home-loan data are available. Nationally, the FHA’s market share had tumbled from 5.3 percent in 2001 to 1.9 percent last year, while subprime mortgages soared from 7.2 percent to 20.1 percent of the market over read more

The Washington Post reports that “the Bush administration is considering broadening the FHA’s mandate to help borrowers avoid foreclosure. The administration is studying the possibility of allowing the FHA to take on mortgage refinancings for borrowers in default, something the agency is not currently permitted to do, a senior official at the Department of Housing read more

The FHA program involves mortgages and insurance, and it surely involves politics because it’s a government program.

So, which of the presidential candidate or celebrity would you want next door?

ERA — the big real estate network with some 3,000 offices nationwide — surveyed 1,002 people age 50 and above and read more

Anyone notice that bond yields are falling?

It used to be that 10-year Treasury bonds and 30-year mortgages had about the same interest rate because they were considered to have roughly the same level of risk. Given events on Wall Street I’m not sure how the two investments now match up, or how they will read more

Whenever real estate sales slow you begin again to hear about land contracts, in essence installment sales where the buyer does not get title until some or all payments have been made.

Interestingly enough, the FHA allows land contract buyers to refinance such loans — thus enabling them to get title at closing. Given that read more

Writing in the Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner says “the subprime mess is not so much a new crisis as a continuation of the saga that began with the savings and loan scandal of the early 1980s, when executives of S&Ls went read more

How can you qualify for an FHA loan?

Interestingly enough, it is in one sense harder to qualify for an FHA loan than for many of the private-sector toxic loans which are now failing at impressive rates.

Why is an FHA loan application more difficult? Because you have to document income. You can’t read more