Bob's Blog

Several title companies have announced that they will go ahead and insure loans on some foreclosed properties from companies that have been implicated in the robo-signing controversy. No consent agreements vouching for the accuracy of the paperwork will be required by Stewart Title Guaranty, Fide...

Altos Research conducts a regular 10-city survey on single family homes in the markets of San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Denver. It also monitors and provides individual city reports on 26 cities in the U.S. The homes listed ...

Even though cities in the “big four” foreclosure states of California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida account for 19 of the leading 20 metropolitan areas for foreclosure rates, foreclosure is a wide-spread issue that is getting worse throughout the country. In fact, Realtytrac has discovered that fo...

The Case-Shiller Index for August has substantiated the warning we received a couple weeks ago from Clear Capital that there is now a widespread trend of lower home values. The 20 city composite recorded a .2% drop in home values between July and August, while the 10 city composite listed a .1% d...

The time-honored tradition of Americans of working toward home ownership is quickly fading away. According to the Census Bureau data for the third quarter of 2010 home ownership is at its lowest point since 1999 at 66.9% of all American households. The homeownership rate fell .7% during the past ...

Delinquencies on first mortgages declined slightly between July and June, down from 3.3% of all 1st mortgages to 3.2%, according to Standard & Poor’s and Experian’s combined index. The bad news is during the same months delinquencies on 2nd mortgages rose from 2.4% to 2.8% of all mortgage 2nd loa...

ust when you thought they couldn’t get any lower, mortgage rates declined again setting lows for 9 of the past 10 weeks. Freddie Mac reported the 30 year rate to average 4.36%, down .7% from a week ago. The 15 year rates averaged 3.86%, down .04%. The 5 year ARMs are at 3.56%, which is tied for t...

TransUnion reports that more mortgages are 60 days or more behind as of the end of the 2nd quarter compared to the 1st quarter of the year, but the numbers are smaller than they were in 2009. A total of 6.67% of active mortgages were behind by 60 days at the end of June. That’s up from the 1st qu...

The Weiss Money and Markets team last year predicted that there would be a massive shift of world wealth from Western countries to Asia because so many Western countries are debt-ridden. That shift is, in fact, happening, according to the Weiss research team. This team has been right before in pr...

So far the HAMP program has been disappointing. While over 1.3 million have been approved for trials through July 2010 only 616,839 trials have actually turned into permanent loan modifications. A total of 255,954 trials are still active and will be decided upon in the next couple months for whet...