Bush acts to provide relief and home prices up!

Today President Bush announced that he has a plan to offer some relief for the struggling mortgage industry in an effort to stem the tide of foreclosures.

I have not studied the plan in detail, but Wall Street seemed to like the ideas.

In other news, the Dallas Morning News reported today that Dallas area home prices were up 5% year over year at the end of the second quarter.

Once again, there is far more good news on the local landscape than bad.

Here is the entire article:

HOMES – Dallas prices rise 5% in 2nd quarter
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, August 31, 2007
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

A benchmark federal report shows that Dallas-area home prices are still gaining ground.
Home prices in the Dallas area were up about 5 percent at midyear compared with the second quarter of 2006, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's quarterly report that was released Thursday.

The report was the second this week to show Dallas home prices still going up.
Nationwide, there was a 3.2 percent gain for the same period – the lowest increase in 10 years. And U.S. home prices were up just 0.1 percent from the first quarter.
"House prices were basically flat in the second quarter despite tightening credit policies, rising foreclosure rates and weakening buyer sentiment," federal housing office director James Lockhart said in a statement.

The region that includes Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana had the strongest home price gains in the second quarter. All the Texas cities in the report had price increases.
El Paso had the seventh biggest one-year increase in the country – up 12.49 percent. In the Austin area, prices were up 10.76 percent, and in Beaumont-Port Arthur, they rose 10.62 percent.

The Fort Worth area showed a 3.57 percent gain from last June.
Out of the 287 markets in the federal housing report, 61 saw price declines in the second quarter. The largest losses were in California.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight bases its quarterly report on information from loans made by the country's two largest mortgage sources: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Analysts who prepared the in-depth housing data warned that the latest figures do not reflect "the extent of recent mortgage market instability."

Those effects won't show up until at least the third-quarter report, they say.
Dallas had only modest increases in previous Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight reports.For the last five years, home prices in the Dallas area have risen 18.77 percent, compared with 50.76 percent nationwide.




Everyone spread the good news and thanks to Chelsea Alexander of Republic Title for sharing this article with me.