FICO Warns of Inflating Housing Bubble

The National Mortgage Professional reports:

Mortgage bankers fear another real estate bubble, according to the latest quarterly survey of North American bank risk managers conducted for FICO, a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company. In the survey, 56 percent of respondents directly involved in mortgage lending expressed concern that "an unsustainable real estate bubble is inflating."

"The home loan environment has bifurcated," said Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs. "Six million homeowners in the U.S. are still underwater on their mortgages, with the average negative equity a whopping 33 percent. Yet with home prices soaring in many cities, total homeowner equity in the U.S. is at its highest level since late 2007. That doesn't feel like a healthy, sustainable growth situation. No wonder many lenders in both Canada and the U.S. are concerned about the risk in residential mortgages."

Disturbing.