You’d have to think that, at some point, the Commerce Department is going to lose interest in reporting the monthly housing starts data since, if the graphic below were an EKG, the patient would clearly be dead.

via  Seeking Alpha.

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes hit a seven-month low in June as demand for condominiums fell and contract cancellations surged, dampening hopes the distressed housing market was starting to improve.

via Reuters.

After driving in the world’s cheapest set of four wheels — Nano, sporting a price tag of $2500, and the cheapest water filter at $21 with Swach, the Tata group has now set its sights on building the world’s cheapest house by the end of the year priced at just Euro 500!

via Times Of India.

We’re living that nightmare right now. Real estate data firm CoreLogic reports that nearly a fifth of us owe more on our homes than they’re actually worth. For those who figured that there wasn’t a problem using a house as collateral to take out second mortgages and home equity loans, that figure bumps up to a spooky 38% of us underwater.

via  (LEN).

Real estate investors will outnumber traditional borrowers 3 to 1 during the next two years, a new survey says, helping clear millions of repossessed properties from banks’ books and pave the way for a recovery.

via - latimes.com.

An article at the New York Times, “Backlog of Cases Gives a Reprieve on Foreclosures,” is more than a little frustrating in that it takes some high level factoids about the mortgage mess and fails to draw the right inferences from them.

via « naked capitalism.

Starting in 2008, a retired Minneapolis police officer and longtime landlord named Robert M. Anderson went on a buying spree, snapping up 30 troubled houses on the North Side for just $775,000. Though each of the properties had been through foreclosure, Anderson was able to quickly resell those houses for $2.3 million. From 2006 to 2010, the median sales price of a house in that area fell 56 percent.

via StarTribune.com.

“Forty-two percent of the growth in housing units from 2000 to 2010, by our figures, were rental, ” he said, “so were fundamentally filling in more rental.”One reason, I suspect, is that in this housing market if people need to be mobile, they cant be in an owner-occupied situation. So people are looking for rentals.”

via StarTribune.com.

In the aftermath of the nation’s housing-market collapse and recession, more than 500 midsize and large cities have seen a rise in the share of homes that are rented rather than owned, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Census data.

via USATODAY.com.

Here are some charts showing nominal and real (CPI inflation-adjusted) housing declines in 20 Case-Shiller metro areas. Charts are grouped by 10 least expensive and 10 most expensive areas. Additional tables show housing declines from the peak. An explanation follows the charts.

via Mish’s Global Economic Trend