Weekly News (May 18, 2022)

Interest Rate (20th Week)

(By Fairway Home Loan )

                       Prime Rate:3.75 – 4.00%  /  Fed Fund Rate: 0.75- 1.00% .

• 3% Down payment for 1st home buyer is available.
• 5% Down payment 2-4 units FHA program available
• 15% Down payment 2 families -conventional program available.
• Potential home buyer — Have a pre-approval first before the shop.  Now we have 48hour underwriting turn-around times for regular loans.
• Self employed borrower – Need to prepare 3 month business bank statements and the YTD Profit and Loss Statement. YTD income can’t decline more than 30% compared to last year.
• 2022 Conventional loan limit:

Conforming SFR : $647,200.00/ Conforming high balance: $970,800.00

Conforming 2 Family: $828,700/ Conforming High Balance: $1,243,050

COVID-19 levels back on rise in NJ

(   Record   5/18  )

• COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are continuing to rise in NJ and NY with nearly every county now seeing high levels of transmission.
• But severe outcomes – intensive care admissions – are still relatively low in a state that has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates, at 76%.
• High case counts with fewer immediate bad outcomes is creating a level of uncertainty among many New Jerseyans as they go about their daily lives amid another pandemic uptick when almost all public health mandates have been lifted.
• Indoor mask-wearing has dropped significantly in recent months even in such places as Hudson County, which is often among the first places in New Jersey to get hit with COVID surge due to its dense population and close proximity to New York City.
• New Jersey contributed about 3.4% of the U.S. death toll – as of Tuesday 33,553 COVID death — even though its 9M residents make up about 2.7% of the country’s population.

HyunDai Auto will build EV Factory in GA

(   Korea Times  5/16   )

• HyunDai Auto will announce the plan to build an electric car factory in Savannah, GA during the time the president Biden is visiting Seoul Korea.
• This factory will create about 8500 employees and will cost about $7B.
• The local news paper, Savannah Morning News reported the factory will in Brian County and the lot is about 2,284 Ac along with the prospective rendering picture. This lot was purchased by Savannah department of economic development at $61M in May last year.
• Currently HyunDai KIA factory is in West Point, GA close to Alabama.

Deal Reached in Condo-Collapse Suit

(   WSJ    5/12  )

• Relatives of victims of the 2021 condo tower collapse in Surfside, Fla., have reached a proposed $997M settlement to resolve wrongful death claims against defendants sue over the building’s failure.
• The payout, announced in a court hearing Wed, would settle claims brought by family members of 98 victims of the collapse of Champlain Tower South last June.
• Defendants in the case included the building’s insurers, developers of a neighboring condo building, an engineering firm that warned of the tower’s structural issues before its collapse and others.
• The settlement is much higher than most lawyers initially expected. The initial pool of insurance money to settle both claims for victims who lost their homes and those who lost family members was $50M.
• The 40-year-old building with some 136 apartments collapsed in the early morning hours when many residents were asleep. It is a rare event for a building to collapse with no clear trigger, such as an earthquake, and it raised troubling questions about the country’s aging condo buildings.

New-Home Buyers Get Hit Hard by Rate Rise 

   ( WSJ 5/16  )

• People who agreed to buy homes under construction but haven’t yet closed are facing mortgage-interest rates that could be nearly doble what they anticipated when they paid their deposits.
• New-home buyers are confronting multiple obstacles this year, from surging mortgage rates to home construction that is taking longer than usual due to supply-chain and labor constraints.
• The combination of fast-rising prices for new construction and higher mortgage rates is likely to thin the buying pool for newly built homes in the coming months.
• Buyers of new homes, which count for more than 10% of U.S. home purchases, often sign contracts and pay deposits several months before their homes are ready.

Foreclosures Approach Return to Pre-Covid levels

(   TRD  May   )

• Eight months after a nationwide moratorium expired, foreclosure filings soared to the highest level since the pandemic began.
• In March, 33,333 properties across the U.S. faced foreclosure, a 29% jump from February, according to Attom. The 1st Qt saw 78,271 properties with a foreclosure filing, a 39% increase from the previous Qt.
• March was the 11th consecutive month in which foreclosure activity saw a year-over-year increase. Properties foreclosure on in the 1st Qt were in the process for an average of 917 days, down from 941 in the previous Qt.
• Among major metros, Chicago saw the greatest number of new filing during the quarter with 3,101. New York City was close behind with 2,580 starts, despite a statewide moratorium that expired two weeks into January.

Fed is watching for Signs of Inflation Coming Down

(   NYT    5/18   )

• Jerome Powell. Chair of Fed, said Tuesday that the central bank is focused on getting rapid inflation under control and that it is ready to intensify its efforts to tamp down price pressures if they do not begin to ease as policymakers expect.
• Consumer prices climbed 8.3% in April from the prior year, and while inflation eased somewhat on annual basis, the report suggested that price pressures continue to run hot.
• The central bank has begun raising interest rates to try and cool the economy, announcing a 0.25% increase in March and 0.5% increase earlier this month, which was the Fed’s largest increase since 2000.

Others/Tech News: Google released Pixel watch and Pixel Tablet.

• Google moves into hardware market.
• They also introduced a prototype of Smart Glasses which translate foreign language on a glasses.

 This is News Brief & Mini Seminar in YOUTUBE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyH9OGYi4Dg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaNHxVsWgvA&t=83s