The bad credit mortgage woes and subsequent problems that have wracked a major portion of the national real estate market don’t necessarily indicate the state of the Southern Mississippi real estate market at present.
Read the rest of this entry »
A new housing report shows mixed results in three metropolitan markets in Mississippi, with median home prices dipping slightly in the Jackson area and climbing in the Gulfport-Biloxi area.
Read the rest of this entry »
Foreclosures in Madison County have increased 154 percent over the past year, records show, one indicator of the glut in the Mississippi housing market, in part because of overbuilding, analysts say.
Read the rest of this entry »
Approximately 450 Mississippi families, many in the state’s six Gulf Coast counties, are eligible for special-rate mortgage loan program now available to buy a home.
According to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the reservation lines are open now for the $50 million in Mississippi Home Corp. bond issue funds available to qualified applicants through participating lenders.
In many counties, families of three or more with total household incomes under $56,980 are eligible for the Mississippi mortgage deal. In a few counties, the household income can be higher.
The 2007A bond issue includes a pool of funds available to families buying homes in Jackson, Harrison, Hancock, Pearl River, Stone and George counties and to home buyers directly affected by Hurricane Katrina.
The interest rate on the home loans will be 5.70 percent.
“The special mortgage rates, coupled with the program’s 3 percent cash advance, will help the Gulf Coast recovery process by significantly lowering the costs of owning a home,” Mississippi Home Corp. Executive Director Dianne Bolen said in a news release.
The remaining bonds will fund 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages at a low rate of 5.90 percent statewide. The program includes a cash advance of 3 percent of the loan amount to help home buyers make down payments and cover closing costs.
Since January 1, 2006, Mississippi Home Corp., the state’s housing finance agency, has provided funds through its Mortgage Revenue Bond Program for almost 2,700 home mortgage loans totaling $300 million.
The Stone County, Miss., Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved the first stages of an 8,000-home planned community, which will include 12 “villages” as well as a city center, trails, lakes, fields, a sheriff’s office, a fire station and town hall, the Hattiesburg American reports.
The project, which will be the biggest in the Mississippi housing market, and whose first phase will cost $150 million, will include 12 different villages built across 5,000 acres of land. The community will include both townhouses and condominiums.
The single-family homes are expected to be priced from $130,000-500,000, with the possibility of some home prices reaching $1 million, said Bob Windham, a partner with Mississippi Investors VI, LLC. Officials did not say if some of the units would be set aside as affordable housing.
The project has been in the works for nine months, but quickly came to fruition because of circumstances created by Hurricane Katrina.
“For a project of this size to move this quickly is really unprecedented. But of course, the need for housing in South Mississippi is unprecedented as well,” said one housing official.
The group will do all the “horizontal building,” including roadways, water systems and some of the commercial center, then will sell the villages to eight home builders, none of whom are based in Mississippi.
“The builders will come in here and speculate on homes,” he said, “and as they sell, they’ll build more. I don’t know if we’ll build 500 in one year or 5,000.”
He said based on market analysis and current Mississippi mortgage rates, he believes that the demand for housing quickly will fill the development.
“If all of the information is true, there is a pent-up need of 80,000 homes in Mississippi,” he said.
The question will be whether people can afford mortgage loans on some of these properties. For now, officials remain optimistic. Stone County tax assessor Charles Williams Jr. said the development will have an enormous impact on the county.
“Nothing this large has happened in Stone County since it was founded,” he said. “Nothing on this scale.”
Currently there are 3,500 single-family homes in Stone County, he said, plus about 800 mobile homes and more renters, which means the development, according to his estimate, will triple the population in the next five years.
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department approved Gov. Haley Barbour’s $700 million plan to help an estimated 10,000 lower-income homeowners with Katrina recovery grants of up to $100,000 each.
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, at a ceremony outside Gulfport City Hall, also announced the approval of a $500 million program to help business recovery and economic development in the 49 Mississippi counties covered by the Katrina disaster declaration.
This program will provide grants of up to $10 million for those counties and will take loan applications from the counties to promote business recovery and employment. At least $160 million of the economic development money is earmarked for six southern counties in the state, as assistance continues to pour in for Mississippi mortgage holders.
Both programs are being funded by the more than $5 billion in federal Katrina recovery money that U.S. Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott and Gov. Barbour shepherded through Congress last year, unprecedented in previous disasters.
The Secretary talked to a small crowd of city, state and federal leaders yesterday, praising efforts to help those with home mortgages that lost their jobs and cannot afford financing on their own.
“(Sen. Cochran) has been to my office so many times I was concerned that he liked the view and might want to take my office from me,” Jackson joked. “Without him acting very swiftly, we would not be here today… Gov. Barbour has made sure that every resource needed in Mississippi gets here. But the governor understands not just homeowners need help. He was the first governor, and I mean the first governor, to propose funding for the recovery of public housing residents.”
“I believe (HUD) will continue to work with you until every homeowner, every family and every resident in [the South Mississippi housing market] can rebuild and have a place to call home and every business can rebuild,” Jackson said.
The new homeowner grant program is being called Phase II.
It follows a first grant program, also funded with the HUD money Congress approved, that started last April and is slowly providing grants of up to $150,000 to homeowners of any income level, provided they lived outside the federal flood zone and lost their homes to Katrina’s surge; and provided they had homeowner’s insurance at the time.
The new grant program approved Wednesday applies to homes that suffered flooding inside or outside the flood zone, whether or not they were insured. But it applies only to homeowners whose household income does not exceed 60 percent of the area’s median income, roughly $63,000 for a family of four.
FNC Inc., a national mortgage technology firm based in Oxford, Miss., has added a new department to help drive sales of the company’s data products and workflow solutions to appraisers and mid-size mortgage lenders.
Two full-time inside sales representatives have already been hired, today’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports.
The department will feature 30 part-time positions, managed under the umbrella of the Inside Sales team.
“The Inside Sales team focuses on innovative products that help mortgage companies and real estate appraisers do their job better, such as Data Express, a premiere online property research tool, and Docuharbor, a system that allows the user to receive faxes online as secure PDF files,” said Marcia Garrett, who the sales director.
“Appraisers have used FNC’s AppraisalPort for years, but we want to arm them with a whole new set of tools,” she added.
FNC’s Collateral Management System has streamlined operations for providers of home mortgage loans by converting paper to data to knowledge since 1999. FNC’s success positioned the company at No. 154 on Inc. 500’s list of the fastest growing private companies in America in 2004.
Habitat for Humanity, the 16th largest home builder in the country, plans to have built 1,000 homes along the Gulf Coast by mid-summer 2007.
It’s just the latest in a series of Gulf Coast affordable housing initiatives.
In less than four months, two homes have been constructed on empty lots in Gautier and the Habitat construction crews have already started building three more homes in the area. On Saturday, Rebecca Borden and Becky Johnson became first-time homeowners as part of the Habitat for Humanity partnership program.
“These properties in Gautier were owned by another construction company and when they fell apart Habitat for Humanity bought all of them and we are building these homes from start to finish to make them a home for someone,” said Latan Griffin, president of the Jackson County Habitat for Humanity organization.
Becky Johnson, mother of six, and Rebecca Borden, mother of two, were both living with family members in Jackson County before this week and have never owned their own home.
“I have always lived with family or rented,” Johnson said. “This is very exciting for us.”
South Mississippi Habitat affiliates have seen a dramatic increase in construction efforts due to the $125 million in donations since the hurricane. Habitat for Humanity in South Mississippi has received a mandate stating that they must build 500 homes in Jackson and Harrison counties within a three-year period.
Individuals may need to apply for a bad credit mortgage loan in order to afford the housing - but at least it will be there.
After Katrina, Habitat launched Operation Home Delivery, a program to help displaced, low-income families in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The operation is a part of the organization’s long-term commitment to these areas.
A homeowner’s grant would make it easier to rebuild his flooded King Avenue home, Pascagoula, Miss., resident Stephen Breland figured.
He never imagined that the federally funded grant would actually double his monthly Mississippi mortgage bill and reduce the loan he received from the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Breland’s home in the Chipley neighborhood, six blocks from the Gulf of Mexico, was flooded with four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina.
“I thought the Homeowner Grant Program was great, because nobody owed me anything. I was outside the flood plain and thought I didn’t need flood insurance,” Breland told the Mississippi Press.
Breland said he had no outstanding debts and wasn’t behind on his monthly mortgage payments. The grant would go straight to the SBA, which had approved Breland’s request for a debt consolidation mortgage.
“We didn’t want to have two mortgages. We knew flood insurance was going to go up. Then when our policy came up for renewal, the rate hikes started kicking in. We can’t go to another company. They’re not writing policies down here. It’s expected to go up nearly 400 percent,” Breland said.
The result, Breland says, is a monthly mortgage that has increased by more than $200. In addition, Breland said the Small Business Administration decided not to consolidate his mortgage. The reason is a federal law that prohibits duplication of funds for disaster victims. It prevents victims from receiving financial aid from multiple sources for the same loss.
The law is in place to prevent the home mortgage holder from being burdened by debt, SBA spokesman Carol Chastang said. The SBA says Breland’s loan and grant money are both for structural damage his home suffered in Katrina. Breland says he claimed no structural losses on his income taxes.
“And you know what SBA had the nerve to tell us? That if we had not closed our grant so soon, they would have given the loan to us. But what would you do if you’ve got your grant papers, saying you can close your grant?”
“Once I got information about my grant, I went and closed. I thought I was doing the right thing. It caused the SBA to pull back what they offered me. So they’re not paying off my primary mortgage. Now I have an SBA note, plus a higher mortgage note for the next six or seven years,” Breland said.
Breland considered declining his homeowner’s grant, but he said SBA told him not to.
“Because that’s money back to them,” he said.
Because of their homeowner’s grant, Breland will have a smaller SBA loan to pay off.
“I’m very grateful for owing less, but I’m really upset they could change the rules because of their inefficiency and mistakes,” Breland said.
Breland had expected to close on his SBA loan in July.
However, five different SBA representatives have tried to work with Breland since he applied for a loan last May, he said. The agency also lost a $280 check he sent them for a title search and didn’t find it until six weeks later.
Officials with Mississippi Development Authority, the agency in charge of the Homeowner Grant Program, have said SBA glitches are one reason why the program has been frustrating for grant applicants.
U.S. Sen. Trent Lott has called SBA’s computer system “a disaster” and has said that the agency’s problems are an issue in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
A slump in the U.S. housing market is pushing down the costs of building materials in Mississippi, the Biloxi Sun-Herald reports.
The prices of trees used for lumber began to feel the full effect of the dramatic downturn in residential construction markets this quarter, a Mississippi report by forestry analyst Forest2Market concluded.
In response, mills have cut production or curtailed for extended periods, citing the housing market conditions as the dominant factor.
Marshall Thomas, the president of Georgia’s F&W Forestry Services Inc., said Southern landowners are holding off on selling their trees until the prices they can get for them come back up. The result is a decrease in supply that is putting the brakes on even more drastic price drops, at a time when Mississippi mortgage demand is already slow.
“This is a buffer against overly sharp (standing tree) price declines and an advantage that tree farmers have over agriculture commodity producers. Most farm crops are perishable and must be harvested and sold or stored at maturity,” Thomas said.
Mississippi State University forestry professor Andy Londo said he expects the price of trees to go down for a little while but to come back up as the pace of rebuilding on the Coast picks up. Parts of the Florida and Alabama housing market on or near the gulf of Mexico are also still rebuilding from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina. A wet winter could boost forest prices further by making it more difficult for loggers to reach trees.
“Anything that increases demand or decreases supply, of course, increases the price for home construction on the supply side,” Londo said.
A home builder will always be happy to see the price of softwood such as pine drop in a building-supply market that has seen significant increases in everything from fuel to steel costs. Pine is used to build the structural components of homes. Hardwoods, such as oak, are used for finishing.
“Wood is the only thing on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to go down. Prices are down 15 to 20 percent since after the storm. Anything that drops the overall cost helps,” John Ruble, the president of Bayou Plantation Homes, said over the weekend.