The government released Friday its latest Housing Scorecard, once again showing cautious optimism as trends look more favorable. "May's Housing Scorecard shows that the housing market recovery is picking up after the harsh winter months," said HUD assistant secretary Katherine O'Regan. "More homeowners have positive equity, foreclosures continue their downward trend, and sales of new and existing homes are rebounding.

Though employment numbers have been in recovery, in a recent blog post for the company, RealtyTrac senior staff writer Octavio Nuiry argues that there is more to unemployment than percentages, and that a hidden actor is depressing housing market growth. Specifically, what concerns Nuiry most is the huge number of people dropping out of the labor force.

In a survey of economists, the Wall Street Journal found optimism for housing starts through the rest of the year has dropped, thanks to a slow first half. To begin the year, the consensus view among economists participating in the survey was that housing starts would jump 20 percent this year, rising to 1.11 million units from a total of 924,900 in 2013. Now, that prediction is down to 1.05 million.

In a market update, Wells Fargo's Economics Group contends that the road to housing recovery will be longer—and much bumpier—than expected. The group said that the "lack of a rebound in home sales this spring has reinforced our view that there was more than harsh winter weather behind the recent slide in home sales and mortgage applications."

CFPB Director Richard Cordray appeared Tuesday in front of the Senate Banking Committee, and as always, the proceedings were contentious. At the hearing, a myriad of topics were discussed, including mortgages, student loans, and proposed data collection efforts for the National Mortgage Database.

A survey from the New York Fed finds consumers expect home prices to increase over the next year in every region except one—the South—where a slight decrease is expected.

A new blog post from the Urban Institute asserts recent numbers on loan denial rates for minorities weren't too high; rather, they may have been too low. Using HMDA data, the group examined the credit profiles of applicants, noting that the denial rate really only matters for weaker credit profile applicants—they are more likely to get denied.

An analysis by CoreLogic found that roughly 6.3 million properties, or 12.7 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage, had negative equity as of Q1 2014. The first quarter of 2014 saw a decline from the fourth quarter of 2013, when 6.6 million homes had negative equity, or 13.4 percent. Underwater homes have a national aggregate value of negative equity of $383.7 billion at the end of the quarter.

Among the millions of households who moved between 2012 and 2013, a study finds the most important reason was to find a new or better home. According to the Census Bureau, 11.7 percent of surveyed participants moved in the year, with 48 percent moving for housing reasons compared to family or employment. All told, 17.2 million gave a housing-related reason for moving.

Credit unions continued to grow during the first quarter of 2014, although higher interest rates slowed mortgage originations, according to the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). The group reported that the pace of mortgage originations slowed in the first quarter, down to $42.6 billion in Q1 2014 from $102.9 billion in the first quarter of 2013.