The Pulse of Central Florida Real Estate, With a Focus on Luxury

By Alan Zibel-AP Real Estate Writer

WASHINGTON – Sales of new homes jumped last month, but the overall pace was the second slowest on record. The lackluster economy has made potential buyers skittish about shopping for homes.

The Commerce Department says new home sales rose nearly 24 percent in June from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 330,000. May's number was revised downward to 267,000, the slowest pace on records dating back to 1963. Sales for April and March were also revised downward.

The housing market had boomed earlier in the year on the strength of federal tax credits. Since they have expired, the number of people looking to buy has dropped.

By CNBC

For American taxpayers, now on the hook for some $145 billion in housing losses connected to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans, that amount could be just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the losses could balloon to $400 billion. And if housing prices fall further, the cost to the taxpayer could hit as much as $1 trillion.

Two things are clear: Taxpayers don't want to foot the bill, and Fannie and Freddie, taken over by the government in 2008 to stanch the financial bloodletting, need a major overhaul.

"Some of us who don't even own homes are paying to support others and their home ownership, and they ask 'why?' said Robert J. Shiller, a Yale University economics professor and co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.

By Shobhana Chandra-Bloomberg.com

Sales of U.S. previously owned homes unexpectedly fell in May, a sign demand was probably pulled into prior months before a June tax-credit deadline.

Purchases of existing houses, which are tabulated when a contract closes, decreased 2.2 percent to a 5.66 million annual rate, figures from the National Association of Realtors showed today in Washington. To receive a government incentive worth as much as $8,000, buyers must have signed contracts by the end of April and need to complete deals by the end of this month.

By Richard Burnett-Orlando Sentinel

Personal bankruptcies have roared back to record levels in Central Florida, only a few years after Congress overhauled the nation's bankruptcy law in an attempt to rein in the number of people declaring themselves broke.

Fueled by the worst recession and highest unemployment in decades, bankruptcies in the Orlando area last year exceeded the record set earlier in the decade, before the new law made it tougher for people to erase their debts.

And the region, suffering through one of the longest and deepest housing slumps in the country, is on pace to set another record for bankruptcies this year.

According to data compiled by U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Orlando, bankruptcies in the region jumped to 20,305 last year, an increase of nearly 60 percent compared with 2008. That total also broke the previous record of 17,770 filings set in 2005, when cash-strapped consumers here and across the country rushed to declare themselves insolvent before the new, tougher bankruptcy law took effect that fall.