Daily Dose

According to DataQuick, California home sales were up 28.2 percent in February but down 12.8 percent from March 2013. While many are predicting a recovery in California, last month’s sales were the lowest for a March since 2008, when 24,565 homes sold—a record low for the month of March. Last month's sales were 23.9 percent below the average of 43,251 sales for all months of March since 1988, when DataQuick's statistics begin.

RealtyTrac estimates 9.1 million U.S. homes were seriously underwater in the year's first quarter, representing a slow improvement over the past few years. "U.S. homeowners are continuing to recover equity lost during the Great Recession, but the pace of that recovering equity slowed in the first quarter, corresponding to slowing home price appreciation," said Daren Blomquist, VP at RealtyTrac.

Lenders closed on a greater share of mortgages last month compared to February—and they did it at a faster pace, according to mortgage software provider Ellie Mae. The company’s latest Origination Insight Report, released this week, shows that out of a sampling of loan applications initiated 90 days prior to March, 58 percent closed last month. That rate is up from 55.3 percent in February and from the 2013 average of 54 percent.

Secured loans, or advances, from the Federal Home Loan Banks system to lenders dried up significantly after the market crash of 2008, when the loans peaked at about $1 trillion. But since then, advances have risen to $492 billion, largely due to a flood of secured loans to the system's four largest members—JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citibank. These lenders accounted for $135 billion of the contributions through 2013.

Reports from the Federal Reserve’s 12 districts indicate economic activity has increased in most regions across the country since the end of February as the unusually harsh winter came to an end. According to the most recent update, eight districts—Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco—characterized their economic expansion from March to April as “modest or moderate.”

Legal expenses took a substantial bite out of Bank of America’s first-quarter earnings, resulting in a net loss of $276 million to start the year. “The cost of resolving more of our mortgage issues hurt our earnings this quarter,” said Brian Moynihan, CEO of the North Carolina-based megabank. “But the earnings power of our business and customer strategy generated solid results and we continued to return excess capital to our shareholders.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) released on Wednesday its Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, reporting a 4.3 percent improvement in loan application volume for the week ending April 11. The headline index was boosted by a 7 percent gain in MBA’s measure of refinance applications, which has been weak over the past few weeks as rising mortgage rates drain the pool of remaining potential refinances.

Homebuilding across the country lifted slightly in March but still fell short of expectations, while permits for new housing tumbled. According to figures released Wednesday by the Census Bureau and HUD, March housing starts were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 946,000, 2.8 percent above February’s revised estimate but below a consensus forecast of 970,000 predicted in a survey of economists.

In a release issued late Monday, tech firm Ellie Mae acknowledged that a network outage in early April did not stem from a possible cyber-attack as originally thought. Instead, the downtime was "triggered by a confluence of factors involving network, hardware, software and demand for service." The company also commented that it has taken steps to prevent future incidents.

It would appear that the Silver State is slowly making a comeback, according to a new report from Wells Fargo’s Economics Group. Overall, the group believes that Nevada's housing market is on the right track, fueled by rising employment, higher incomes, and a rapidly increasing population. However, inventories "will have to come down further before residential construction can really take off."