In the News

• Nehemiah Program

The Nehemiah Down Payment Assistance Program was terminated on October 1, 2008.

On October 3, 2008, a law was passed to make available $700 billion to begin to address the crisis in the financial services industry. This measure will not solve the underlying problems in the mortgage market or housing market, but it is likely that it helped prevent an imminent collapse of many financial institutions which would have resulted in a domino effect that would have affected all segments of society.

Data on housing price trends published by OFHEO through the second quarter of 2008 continue to show that the buyer's market in US residential real estate affects different locations in dramatically different ways. HPI is a "housing price index" in which the price in 1995 in any given city was assigned a reference value of 100.

The graph below shows that while Las Vegas experienced irrational appreciation from 2004 to 2006 followed by sharp price drop, Indianapolis exhibited relatively steady moderate growth over a long period of time, while Philadelphia experienced rapid appreciation from 2000 to 2006 followed by a leveling off. Not all real estate markets are created equal and there is no such thing as "the US real estate market" as if price trends are similar around the entire country.