Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Weekly Market Activity Report

Twin Cities consumers didn't do much laboring to purchase a home over Labor Day weekend, as sales activity for the week ending September 8 was down significantly. There were only 500 new purchase agreements signed in the metropolitan area during the week, the lowest number since the beginning of 2007. New listings increased slightly from the previous week, likely buoyed by post-holiday relistings.

Top 10 Cities with the Highest Cost Loans
The Chicagoland area ranked highest in the country in total high-cost loans in 2006, according to data released last week by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Chicago has led the nation in high-cost loans for the past three years.

"High-cost" loans are identified in federal mortgage lending data as first-lien loans with interest rates at least three percentage points above the U.S. Treasury standard. The U.S. Treasury standard stood at 5.19 percent in mid-July for a 30-year mortgage.

African-American home owners were nearly three times as likely to get high-cost loans as their white counterparts. Even when African-American applicants went through prime lenders, they got high-cost loans 37 percent of the time, according to the report. Latino home owners were twice as likely as white home owners to get high-cost loans. From prime lenders, Latinos got high-cost loans 19 percent of the time compared with just 9 percent of the time for whites.The top 10 areas for high-cost loans were:
1. Chicago-Naperville-Joliet
2. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale
3. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario
4. Phoenix
5. Washington, D.C.
6. Atlanta
7. Houston
8. New York
9. Miami
10. Tampa, Fla.

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