On Monday CNBC's Diana Olick wrote a post about mortgage cure rates.  For those of you who haven't read her stuff before, I recommend it.  She is one of a very small minority of housing analysts who understand the comprehensiveness of the housing market.

A cure rate is a term used to represent the percentage of delinquent loans that are returned to "current" status each month.

In other words, for every 100 loans that are delinquent, how many of the owners will get caught up with the payment they have missed.

According to Fitch Ratings, Olick writes that from 2000-2006, 45% of loan delinquencies were being cured.  That percentage has dropped to just 6.6% now.

More interesting, of the 6.6% that are being "cured", approximately 25% of those are from loan modifications.  Unfortunately, statistics have shown that loan modifications have high re-default rates when measured over a period of several months.  

What this cure rate study reveals is that many home owners are on the brink and are unable to rebound as they have before in the past.

This Fitch study, when combined with the recent MBA delinquency study which showed that 13.16% of all mortgages were at least 30 days late, reveals that a massive number of loans will be going into foreclosure over the next 12 months.

While home sales have increased over the past couple of months, the number of foreclosures continues to increase at a greater rate.  This means that home values will continue to erode.