Housing Market Showing Signs of Improvement 

We know it’s difficult to grasp  that the economy is getting better when all you hear about is layoffs and bankruptcies. We'd  like spread some good news.

We took a look at the ten banks with the largest dollar volume of residential real estate loans to see how they are faring as compared to last year. Overall delinquent loans have fallen nearly 20% at those banks.

Not only have total delinquencies declined, bad  single family debt has decreased from last year as well. A backlog in paperwork and a moratorium on foreclosures may have helped the OREO go down. But the fact that delinquency levels have also declined, in spite of the slower-than-normal route to repossession, indicates that problems in the single family home loan sector are indeed on the mend.

The chart below denotes the actual dollar amount of bad loans. When comparing percentages: the percent of delinquent single family loans has decreased from 10.8% to 10.4% while repos have gone down from 0.48% to 0.37% at these ten banks. No matter how you slice it, the housing market is showing improvement.