Mortgage Loans Are Stronger Than Ever in Texas
Delinquency rates keep falling, thanks to tighter regulations, a growing economy and a sharp drop in subprime lending.
There are many ways to mark the economic progress since the Great Recession: over 100 months of job gains, record low unemployment and a long bull run on Wall Street. But don’t overlook the improvement in the mortgage market, where a housing bust that started over a decade ago resulted in almost 8 million home foreclosures in the U.S. and over 500,000 foreclosures statewide.
That troubled past has been followed by a steady decline in past-due mortgages — in the U.S., Texas and Dallas County. The share of mortgages that are three months late or in foreclosure is the lowest in years. For Fannie Mae, which provided more than $135 billion in single-family home loans in the first half of the year, the so-called “serious delinquency rate” topped 5.5% in early 2010.
The rate had declined to 0.67% in July and August, the most recent period available. That’s the lowest serious delinquency rate for Fannie since early 2007, just before the housing bust. By other measures, the mortgage market hasn’t been this strong since 1995, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic, a real estate information company. “We learned — or maybe we re-learned — the lessons on how to underwrite mortgages correctly,” Nothaft said...
