You know it can’t be good news when an article about home sales starts out like this: Analysts’ estimates for July home sales aren’t even close.

And it wasn’t good news.

According to HousingWire.com, the sale of new single family homes hit an all-time low of 276,000 units for the month of July, down over 12 percent from the revised June estimates of 315,000.

That’s 35 percent lower than one year ago.

NAR reported a 27 percent decline in existing home sales for July, which is the lowest in more than a decade. The estimate on the street had been a 12 percent decline.

Not surprisingly, real estate brokers and agents are feeling the pain. NAR and other state realtor associations are reporting double-digit drops in membership. NAR alone has lost 200,000 members since 2006. Some California agents are reporting business is off some 65 percent from peak years.

At a conference held last week to discuss the overhaul of housing finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that the Obama administration was not looking to perform “radical surgery” on the system, but was focused instead on creating a “new and improved” version of the current system where the government would subsidize mortgage loans made by private lenders.

The administration convened the conference with dozens of leading experts on housing finance, who were largely of two minds: some want to do away with the current system altogether, with the government taking a more limited role by offering insurance for catastrophic losses only. Others argue that mortgage lending will not recover unless the government plays a more active role, providing the guarantees necessary to attract investors.

Left largely unsaid was the fate of Fannie and Freddie, which now guarantee 90 percent of all new mortgages. While most agree that they are unlikely to survive in their current form, there are so far no suggestions on what to do to get rid of them and their vast portfolios of troubled loans.

For the New York Times coverage of the conference, go here.

An analyst from Lender Processing Services, a default services analytics group, is predicting that foreclosure and REO issues could continue to plague the housing market recovery until late 2013.

During the LPS annual conference in Denver last week, LPS Applied Analytics managing director Kyle Lundstedt said that well-intended programs designed to keep borrowers in their homes were having unintended consequences, and that those in the default industry need to be prepared for troubled loan inventory to continue to rise.

“If current trends persist, it will take about 12 months before foreclosure proceedings are initiated,” once borrowers become delinquent, Lundstedt said in an REO Insider report. “It takes a heck of a long time to get into foreclosure at this point. When you are in foreclosure, it doesn’t get much better. Today, if you entered foreclosure, it would be 16 months before you got out. How many people think that is a good thing? It’s tragic.”

The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research center and borrower advocacy group, reports that Latinos account for almost half of the foreclosures in California.

The CRL says that Latino borrowers make up 48.2 percent of the over 700,000 California homes currently in the foreclosure process, based on their analysis of data from ForeclosureRadar and Catalist. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinos make up 37 percent of California’s total population.

White/Non-Hispanic homeowners accounted for 34.6 percent of foreclosures in California, and African-Americans were 7.6 percent. Asians accounted for only 6.4 percent of California foreclosures.

According to a REO Insider article, lenders and servicers have taken notice of this trend, and some are targeting minority-owned brokerages for their REO listings. In addition, a Fannie Mae executive said that hiring real estate agents and brokerages that serve minority communities is one of its key strategies.

A new University of Texas-Virginia Tech study says that while foreclosures may “destabilize and disorganize” communities, they do not directly affect the neighborhood crime rate.

Researchers said that instead of affecting crime, foreclosures are — like crime — symptomatic of a community’s lack of political clout, poverty and segregation.

The study used data on foreclosures and crime in Chicago during an eight-year period, from 2000 to 2008. During that time, foreclosures tripled in the study area. Researchers examined the consequences of the rising foreclosure rates, and the effects on crime and the structure of the study area.

Many housing experts had thought that foreclosures increased property crime since abandoned homes were easy targets for vandalism and burglary. David Kirk, assistant professor in the UT Department of Sociology and lead researcher on the study, said, “We suggest that our results provide a more informed depiction of the complex relationship between community conditions, foreclosures and crime in Chicago. We were able to statistically adjust for confounding influences such as segregation, the political hierarchy of communities and other unobserved factors predictive of both foreclosures and crime.”

Bank of America has announced a co-op short sale program, targeted at homeowners who have failed to qualify for mortgage modifications under HAMP or HAFA.

BofA is launching the new program with 2,000 homeowners who have already been pre-screened because they applied for mortgage modifications under HAMP or HAFA. The bank is offering them the short sale as an alternative to foreclosure.

Letters to homeowners asking them to participate in the new short sale program have been sent out. They have 120 days to list their property. BofA says it will assign a short sale specialist to work with homeowners and their real estate agents on each short sale.

Once the home is sold, the homeowner gets a $3,000 relocation fee, and the agent receives a six percent commission on the sale. If the home does not sell, the bank will accept a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure. BofA is also waiving deficiencies.

To learn more about the program, go here.

New research from The Urban Institute’s MetroTrends, which reports on social and economic trends in urban America, shows that despite a drop in home prices, affordability continues to be a problem for many Americans, especially in coastal metro areas.

According to the MetroTrends data, the share of American households spending more than 30 percent of monthly income on housing costs rose from 30 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2008.

The research also showed that residents of coastal communities have been especially affected, particularly those in California, Florida, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. According to the report, 12 metro areas in central and southern California have 43 percent or more of their populations spending more than 30 percent of monthly household income on housing costs.

Researchers said that most of the coastal metros suffered a double whammy of unemployment and house price declines, but the impact was particularly severe in Western metros, particularly Los Angeles county, which continues to lead the state in foreclosures.

ForeclosureRadar reports that California foreclosure activity was “mixed” in July, with foreclosure filings and cancellations dropping from June and foreclosure sales rising.

California foreclosures moving to REO status were up 13.46 percent in July from the previous month, but down over 18 percent from July of 2009. Notice of default filings were down 4.8 percent from June, and down 47 percent from July of 2009.

ForeclosureRadar CEO Sean O’Toole said that despite a “tsunami of mortgage delinquencies, we continue to see no signs of a foreclosure wave.” He said that government and lender intervention programs are continuing to delay foreclosures.

The report also said that in July, it took an average of 226 days to foreclose in California, down slightly from a 2010 peak of 239 days in April.

To read ForeclosureRadar’s July 2010 California Foreclosure Report, go here.

July foreclosure data from RealtyTrac shows that REO levels in July were at the second highest level since the company started reporting in April of 2005.

The highest point ever recorded by the company was just two months ago, in May, when there were 93,777 properties that went back to banks as REO. In July, that number was only one percent less, at 92,858.

However, RealtyTrac said that foreclosure filings categorized as a notice of default through REO dropped almost 10 percent in July from the same month one year ago. It also dropped in June, making July the second consecutive month for yearly declines.

In July, Nevada continued to hold the #1 position as the state with the highest foreclosure rate at one in every 82 houses. Arizona was second, with one in every 167 houses and California was fourth, where one in every 200 houses received a foreclosure filing in July.

Things are gonna get better, or things are gonna get worse. Take your pick.

Two top economists, the kind that institutional investors rely heavily upon, have weighed in on which way the economy is going to go. And they disagree! (No surprise there, really.)

Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley is the more optimistic of the two, saying that things will pick up in the second half of this year and unemployment will begin inching its way down. Deflation? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs says the market is poised for a sharp slowdown in the last half of this year that will send unemployment rates shooting up again, potentially triggering deflation.

Here’s the article from the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/business/economy/06deflation.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Now, if the guys who are supposed to know, don’t know, or can’t agree, what the heck are we simple humans supposed to do? Hold on tight, I guess.