While the housing collapse continues, with residential construction likely to decline for the remainder of 2008, there are reasons for optimism that the pace should soon begin to subside. Since peaking in 2Q 2006, the Case-Shiller national housing price index has fallen 16.2%. With reference to the long-run relationship between rents and home prices, roughly an additional 15% decline in home prices should be expected.

Although real estate mortgages are funded through banks, mortgage bankers, and their financial lending institutions, in most cases the money actually comes from two giant secondary lenders: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These are quasi-public organizations that create a secondary market for residential real estate loans. This means that when a bank creates a mortgage, it can then “sell” that mortgage to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and recoup most of its investment, which it can then loan out again. It continues to service the loan (collect the payments) for a fee, although it can also sell this servicing to some other similar organization if it chooses. (This is why, if you’ve ever had one of these mortgages, you find that the lender to whom you make payments is constantly changing.)

Bay Area home sales climbed nearly 30 percent from March to April, the first monthly gain in half a year as financing became easier to secure and shoppers took advantage of bargains, according to a research firm.From a year ago, however, sales were still down 15.3 percent, according to DataQuick Information Systems of La Jolla (La Jolla County).

There were month-over-month sales increases in February, March, May and October of last year, none of which presaged an overall strengthening of the market.

There seems to be no end to the number of foreclosure opportunities for investors these days. In keeping with this trend, a number of Web sites have been created to serve the foreclosure investor. To that end, we’ve listed 100 sites below, from tutorials to databases to articles and blogs. Although some sites are more useful than others, we’ve tried to avoid sites that offer no value to the investor whatsoever. These include databases listings without a clue as to who offers these databases and Web sites that offer advice without credentials. With that said, we may have missed a site or two that may truly be useful. If you know of a site that provides value to the foreclosure investor, let us know through your comments.

Couched in the new terminology of decoupling versus recoupling whether the old aphorism “when the US sneezes, the world catches a cold” holds this time or not has been the subject of much debate. Growth in the rest of the world has so far seemed resilient in the face of the US credit crunch and economic slowdown but could it be that we are now at the tipping point where the US is beginning to share its pain with others? On a financial basis the US credit crunch is already well shared. The US economic expansion of this decade was supported by significant external borrowing so it was inevitable that foreign financial institutions would take some of the hit. Losses by European banks in fact equal those of their American counterparts. Of the $323 billion in losses incurred by global banks to date $152.2 billion of it has been borne by European banks and $152.5 billion by American banks. Asian banks have been relatively unscathed with just over $18 billion in losses (source: Bloomberg page WDCI).