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foreclosure: Homeownership ratio drops, apartment demand grows - 05/05/12 12:51 PM
It’s hardly a surprise that the homeownership number continues to backpedal in today’s wobbly real estate market and tight mortgage milieu.
 
Foreclosures mercilessly push borrowers from their homes and this trend seemingly will continue for several more years as another 5-6 million homeowners could face the same fate. The recent $25 billion controversial settlement with mortgage loan servicers over alleged shady practices will predictably lead to home loan lenders accelerating court filings on delinquent borrowers. Mortgage money is very affordable but helps little when strict underwriting standards erode borrower approval chances. Inventory levels in many housing markets – like … (6 comments)

foreclosure: Homeownership rate unchanged in 3rd quarter - 11/07/10 09:45 PM
According to Census Bureau statistics the U.S. homeownership rate remained at 66.9% in the 3rd quarter of this year. It is actually at the lowest point since the end of 1999, the decline predictably brought on by the severe real estate turbulence that continues to roil the market to this day. For the last year the drop has been 0.7%. Interestingly, the West had the lowest percentage at 61.3 while the Midwest exhibited the highest at 71.1%.  
It could lose more ground in the coming months since mortgage foreclosures seemingly are not abating, banks are still repossessing houses by the … (8 comments)

foreclosure: MERS in middle of new mortgage foreclosure mess - 10/18/10 06:28 PM
MERS is hardly a household name to many homeowners but the company now finds itself tossed right in the middle of the latest and rapidly-heating home loan challenge. It stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration System and the name pretty much says what it does. It records electronically, in proprietary software, mortgages that have been originated throughout the country, having currently over 65 million of them in its books, or better said in its servers.
The standard practice still is that local clerks record all mortgages and when ownership changes a new paper-based entry is created and notarized. Of course, all this … (15 comments)

foreclosure: Mortgage foreclosure errors could cloud titles for a long time - 10/02/10 03:25 PM
The wounded mortgage industry has been working as best it can to pick itself up from the canvas, with massive support and guidance from the government. It has instituted many internal policy changes, on one hand, to correct the grave underwriting, mortgage-backed security and other mistakes made in the not too distant past. On the other, Washington has come up with its own legislative cures to prevent another spectacular mortgage and real estate collapse from creeping up on the country again. Despite the continuing uncertainty and weakness in housing, cautious optimism is also entering into the mix. Maybe the worst is … (14 comments)

foreclosure: Mortgage foreclosure pulls home's price down 27%, says MIT study - 08/18/10 10:22 PM
When major upheaval pummels a real estate market, it as a rule leads to home value depreciation. That's the easy part. The hard part is to try to put an actual number on the price reversal. A team led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or more commonly MIT, recently conducted some deep research to determine how much a home's value deteriorates because of a foreclosure. The current housing and mortgage meltdown obviously got them thinking and they decided to dig up some realistic answers.
The group looked at 1.8 million real estate sales in Massachusetts spanning from 1987 all the … (11 comments)

foreclosure: Fannie Mae's new strategic default rule could amount to very little - 07/30/10 04:05 PM
Fannie Mae recently took an assertive step, in its own mind at least, to stem the growing tendency of mortgage borrowers pulling off strategic defaults. In that homeowners who could afford their payments choose to walk away from the obligation anyway. The GSE went ahead and added another category to the new policy. Home loan recipients who fail to do a workout in good faith also fall under the spell of its new guidelines. What this all means is that property owners fitting these parameters would be ineligible for mortgages backed by Fannie Mae for seven long years from the recorded … (46 comments)

foreclosure: Foreclosure filings decline - short sales climb - mortgage distress hangs around - 07/19/10 05:31 PM
Real estate market observers have mixed feelings about RealtyTrac's Midyear 2010 Foreclosure Report. It says that 1,654,634 homeowners were sent at least one mortgage foreclosure filing from January through June. That translates to over 3,000,000 by the end of the year and RealtyTrac forecasts that over 1 million of them will eventually become repossessions, or REOs - real estate owned. The number by itself is of course alarming, but the current six month number actually is a drop of 5% from the second half of last year. Ordinarily in any housing enterprise that would be something to feel upbeat about.
On … (4 comments)

foreclosure: Southern Nevada June home sales up - median price lower - 07/14/10 04:41 PM
Las Vegas homeowners and real estate observers have been looking for clear direction the local housing market could be happy about but it's refusing to cooperate. It seems to have settled on a typically erratic path that markets display when they reach the bottom on a downward cycle - or are very near it -  and just can't decide how to shake the gloominess off and embark on a climb out for better days. Last month's real estate statistics reflect that rather well.
GLVAR, or Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, recounts for its rapt audience that 3,360 resale homes were … (6 comments)

foreclosure: Builders turn to green homes for competitive edge - 07/06/10 02:10 PM
The housing collapse has been particularly brutal to home builders. It's hard to market new houses regardless of the latest features when similar resale property is selling for 20-40% less. The usual incentives, like kitchen or flooring upgrades, have very little impact when the price difference reaches, say, to $50,000, and often much higher than that. The gaps are especially wide in badly-mauled cities like Las Vegas and many areas in Arizona, California and Florida. Inviting mortgage rates are available to all buyers, so no help there either.
In order to generate more interest in their products residential real estate developers … (6 comments)

foreclosure: Mortgage foreclosure assistance authorized for worst-hit states - 06/24/10 04:55 PM
As the housing sector kept sucking for more oxygen, Washington announced back in February the Hardest Hit Fund worth $1.5 billion that was designed to help states in serious housing peril and asked them at the time, as a condition to get a slice of the money, to submit creative programs that would lend a hand to homeowners struggling with mortgage payments. The plans from Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Nevada have now been okayed by the Treasury and the assigned funds are ready to begin flowing to the states' Housing Finance Agencies, or HFA, tasked to administer their use.
California … (13 comments)

foreclosure: Mortgage foreclosure protection bill advances in California - Nevada keeps an eye on it - 06/06/10 10:24 PM
Homeowners in distress have encountered a myriad of challenges when trying to save their properties from foreclosure. Many have successfully navigated around all the different shoals and rocks strewn along the way. Others, far too many actually, have not. Mortgage lenders and servicers often lack the staff to handle the volume the housing meltdown has thrown at them, industry training of staff is suspect, their systems are in many cases inadequate and it’s also evident that their commitment has been at best lukewarm. The frustration level among struggling mortgage borrowers is understandably high.
California just introduced a fresh mortgage foreclosure protection … (9 comments)

foreclosure: Home-grown mortgage modification making headway - 06/02/10 04:23 PM
Creativity is the spice of life in the mortgage loan modification business. When the bottom fell crashing out of the real estate market and homeowners began sliding in droves toward foreclosure, home loan providers at first just watched the carnage from afar, unwilling to lift a finger for help. Soon the ominous situation grew into a full-blown crisis and the government had to get involved because the private mortgage industry couldn't or wouldn't do much about it. Despite that, mortgage lenders still found novel ways to deny most homeowners the loan modification they were applying for. The original paperwork somehow got lost, … (4 comments)

foreclosure: The Fed could make billions on MBS - mortgage-backed securities - 05/27/10 06:28 PM
When the housing market began recently unraveling at warp speed and quickly lugged the overextended mortgage industry along with it things looked quite bleak for the U.S. economy. Housing, after all, is one of its major components and should it be hit with a serious medical condition, taking a simple pain killer wouldn't help much. Then if ever, when the fury of the real estate sector's downturn became better understood, drastic action was called for.
The Federal Reserve bravely stepped forward intent on showing how it's done. Right on the heels of the private investor vanishing from the secondary mortgage market … (20 comments)

foreclosure: Southern Nevada land prices anemic, and then some - 05/23/10 10:44 PM
Land in the Las Vegas valley used to be a piping-hot commodity a few years ago, when the growth here easily topped all the other metropolitan areas in the country. The thirst for tracts of sand was such that prices zoomed higher year after year to reach a record $939,400 per acre - that is for land outside the Strip - in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to Applied Analysis, a local research shop. Housing prices closely followed the frenzied upward trend, median averages casually blowing past benchmarks that few real estate observers thought would be breached so soon.
That … (6 comments)

foreclosure: Las Vegas regular home sales bring top dollar - REOs and short sales lag - 05/18/10 10:46 PM
The current real estate chaos has introduced even the timid to the exotic avenues of unloading a home. Before, the industry experts were usually the only ones well-versed on REOs and foreclosure and short sales and even auctions. This generation of mortgage borrowers and homeowners has been, whether they liked it or not, put through a crash course on various "creative" methods of selling a property. Some have been personally involved in the paperwork-laden processes when delinquency was knocking on the door, while others have followed from the sidelines through media the often hair-raising developments. It has been for everyone a unique … (8 comments)

foreclosure: Southern Nevada resale statistics all over the map in April - 05/11/10 08:32 PM
If the median price of a single-family house is used as a sole indicator for the health of a real estate market, then Sin City would be hailed as being on the mend. According to GLVAR, or Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, Las Vegas median price grew to $142,000 in April, a strong 4.4% improvement from March. Not only that, it also is 0.2% higher from the same month last year, for the first time the year-over-year number is positive since 2007. Single-family house prices peaked in Las Vegas in February of 2007 at $310,000. The slide without a doubt … (6 comments)

foreclosure: Housing starts could double by next year - 05/10/10 07:40 PM
New home construction has had it very tough over the last few years, despite appealing mortgage financing and first-time and move-up buyer tax incentives. The sector simply hasn't been able to compete much with the existing real estate market because of vast price differences. Values, for instance, have sunk up to 60% in Las Vegas that basically gives new construction little chance to generate any meaningful demand. Housing starts nationwide reached 554,000 units last year, a surprisingly high number considering the malaise still hovering over the residential real estate landscape, while at the top of the bubble in 2005 they were … (8 comments)

foreclosure: Freddie Mac's mortgage delinquencies drop a notch - 05/06/10 05:08 PM
Freddie Mac has been pummeled thoroughly in the eye of the real estate meltdown, so much so that the government finally had to take over its operations due to heavy mortgage losses. In the recent past its matters seemed to be settling down a bit but now it needs another $10 billion from Washington to cover its 1st quarter setbacks. Besides that, it also has some good news to release.
For the first time since April of 2007 Freddie Mac can report that delinquencies for single-family home loans it guarantees slipped to 4.13% in March, from 4.20% in February. Although it … (6 comments)

foreclosure: Strategic mortgage defaults heading up - Las Vegas mortgage borrowers tempted - 05/03/10 12:08 PM
Despite sporadic indications that the real estate market is settling down homeowners still feel antsy. They are now considering a strategic default - a tactic generally used when the home loan balance is higher than the property's value - more often than before. This is being done even when they can afford the payments.
University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management conducted a study on strategic mortgage defaults and the numbers they arrived at are harsh. In March roughly 31% of foreclosures were labeled strategic, up 9% from March of 2009. So, now about … (0 comments)

foreclosure: Fannie Mae adjusts eligibility rules following pre-foreclosure action - 04/18/10 08:44 PM
The sometimes shell-shocked players in the mortgage industry are continuously scrambling to meet the exceptional challenges they face almost daily. Seemingly, not a week goes by without one of the major home loan organizations - government or private - announcing a new policy it deems necessary to better handle the real estate market's peaks and valleys. Lately it has been more valleys - the ones that ruin weekends - than the other kind.
Fannie Mae is now updating its rules on borrower eligibility after he has undergone a pre-foreclosure process, usually meaning a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, a pre-foreclosure sale or then … (4 comments)