Mixed bag for housing: New home sales down, delinquencies down, too

It's a little from column A, a little from column B today for housing.

No surprise this morning with the Commerce Dept's announcement of new home sales: The tax credit hangover continues with the worst June ever and second worst month on record, but hey, at least sales were up 24 percent from May (which happened to be the worst month ever.)

On the positive side, mortgage delinquencies (while still near record highs) were down ever so slightly, according to the Wall Street Journal's Developments blog:

Some 9.39% of all loans were 30 days or more past due, down from 9.54% in May, according to LPS Applied Analytics, which tracks loan data. An additional 3.69% of mortgages were in some stage of foreclosure, down from 3.72% in May and the record high of 3.81% in March.
The ratio of loans that were seriously delinquent, or 90 days or more past due, to the amount of loans in foreclosure still shows a sizeable overhang but fell for the second straight month, to levels last seen last September. The fact that there are still more than double the number of delinquent loans than loans in foreclosure suggests that the glut of bank-owned properties will continue to weigh on housing markets for many months to come.
Foreclosure starts increased sharply during the month on loans owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as more government loan-modification trials failed to convert to permanent modifications. On Friday, Freddie said that its share of seriously delinquent loans fell for the fourth straight month, to 3.96% in June.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal over the weekend had an interesting article on people who are choosing to "double down" on their investment in housing in light of the uncertain stock market and bargains to be had. Interesting read.

Foreclosed homes out the wazoo

It still amazes me that we don't actually know how many foreclosed homes there are out there. The latest estimate came out today from Barclays, which puts the number at 480,000 (h/t to the WSJ Developments blog). RealtyTrac puts the number at 758,000. Others go somewhere in between.

So I'm thinking only half of those are in my neighborhood ...

But seriously, that's when it really hits home when you see it in your own area. With all this extra time I found myself with, courtesy of my former employer, I took a long walk (the first in quite a while) around my entire 900-home neighborhood. (It's a relatively new development -- all the homes were built between 1999 and 2008.) I was stunned to see just how many homes appear to be empty and presumably foreclosed upon. And there's a whole other bunch on the market.

Sure makes me worry about the future salability of my home. After all, I did literally buy it at the height of the market. Case Shiller says home prices in Chicago peaked in Nov. 2006 -- the exact month we signed our contract. I have nothing if not good timing.