Foreclosure activity in April fell nationally to the lowest level since the summer of 2007, but government intervention and the recent $25 billion mortgage servicing settlement are now changing the face of the crisis.

A new report came out this morning with a curious headline: “Foreclosure Activity Declines, Hurting Investors.” I read it twice. You would think declines in foreclosure activity would be a good thing, that is, would help, not hurt. Not in this bizarre housing market.

Builder confidence jumped five points in May, which is a sign that the nation’s homebuilders are feeling far better again, after an unusually warm winter wreaked havoc with the usual traffic and sales trends.

President Obama has visited a “responsible” couple who owe more on their mortgage than their Nevada home is currently worth. But did they act responsibly?

The Realtors say it, the home builders say it, and now the chairman of the Federal Reserve is saying it: “Some creditworthy borrowers are still having trouble getting a mortgage.”

A select group of struggling mortgage borrowers are about to get an offer that sounds too good to be true. Executives at Bank of America admit that, as they begin mailing 200,000 letters offering certain customers mortgage principal reduction.

Short sales (selling the home for less than the value of the loan) are rising across the nation, and while they have yet to overtake foreclosure numbers in Atlanta, they are in fact up 120 percent from a year ago, according to RealtyTrac.

The number of homes entering the foreclosure process rose 8.1 percent in March, according to a new report, but the volume is down more than 30 percent from a year ago.

More Americans are renting homes, and fewer are owning them; it’s not as if this is news to anyone who follows the U.S. housing market, but a new report from the Census Bureau today really put an historical exclamation point on the trend.

Big jumps in foreclosure activity in cities like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, New York and Raleigh pushed the national numbers higher in the first three months of this year, according to a new report from RealtyTrac.

More buyers signed contracts to buy existing homes in March than the previous month, according to a new report, prompting one expert to say, “The housing market has clearly turned the corner.”

It’s not crashing again, it’s just bouncing along a bottom, which means the recovery, as we’ve been warning all along, becomes increasingly local.

A slew of new numbers from the housing market confirm that a warm spring did in fact pull sales forward, but the new activity was not enough to bring home prices out of their decline significantly.

Buyer traffic is strong, supply of homes for sale is low, and yet home prices continue to defy the usual formula, falling again in March.

It was one of the worst housing markets in the U.S., but now investors are swarming over foreclosures in Phoenix, Arizona, in search of big rental returns.

Without a strong recovery in the job market and a big loosening in credit, which does not appear to be the case, regular demand for home purchases will remain soft.