by Calculated Risk on 5/17/2011 10:07:00 PM

A couple of stories:

• From LPS "first look" report: April Month-End Data Shows an Increase in Delinquency Rate and Drop in Foreclosure Inventories. After the sharp drop in delinquencies in March, the delinquency rate edged up in April.

The delinquency rate increased to 7.97% from 7.78% in March. There were an additional 4.14% of mortgage in the foreclosure process, down from 4.21% in March.

A total of 6.39 million loans were delinquent, up slightly from 6.33 million. The full report will be released on May 26th. Note: The Q1 delinquency report from the MBA will be released this Thursday and will probably show a sharp decline in delinquencies.

• From FNC: March Home Prices Show Improving Trends - Rising 0.1% from February. This is one of several house price indexes I'm following in addition to Case-Shiller and CoreLogic. This is non-distressed sales.

FNC announced Wednesday that U.S. home prices in March continue to show signs of stabilization following rather mild declines in February, making March the second consecutive month with better-than-expected price momentum.

Based on the latest data on non-distressed home sales (existing and new homes), FNC’s Residential Price Index™ 1 (RPI) indicated that single-family home prices in March trended slightly upward since February at a seasonally unadjusted rate of 0.1%, consistent with rising home sales during the month. Despite continued downward price pressure from a relatively high volume of foreclosure sales, March marks the first month that home prices have shown a modest one-month gain since the April 2010 expiration of the homebuyer tax credits.

Note: This is a hedonic price index using both sales and real-time appraisals. In general it has tracked pretty well with Case-Shiller and CoreLogic.

FNC has data online for 30 MSAs here.

Earlier:
• Housing Starts decline in April
• Industrial Production unchanged in April, Capacity Utilization declines slightly
• Multi-family Starts and Completions, and Quarterly Starts by Intent