foreclosures

HAMP's purpose isn't to save people's homes

If you listened to Obama Administration and the MSM you would have thought that the Making Homes Affordable program was designed to help people stay in their homes. You would have been mistaken.

Of the nearly 760,000 modifications that have been enrolled in three-month trial plans, less than 32,000 have transitioned into permanent relief for homeowners. Nearly 87 percent of the modifications under the administration's program are for investor-owned mortgages.

That's right - the program is designed to bail out real estate investors and speculators, not homeowners.

Moody's Forecasts Home Prices to Drop 7.8% in 2010

In case anyone assumes home prices have bottomed, this Business Week article overviews a lot of good reasons why that probably isn't true.

One of which is Moody's estimation that residential home prices will drop 7.8%.

What they are calculating is the foreclosure rate, the high unemployment rate and the withdrawal of the Federal Reserve buying mortgage backed securities, in addition to a first time home buy tax credit being modified and expiring.

Thanks to the feds' bounty of tax credits, purchases of mortgage securities, interest-rate cuts, and home loan programs, new and existing home sales are up. The median home price rose, to $177,900. What happens in 2010 depends on whether the market can stand on its own.

Homeowners getting hit a second time

You're in debt up to your eyeballs. You can't keep up with the mortgage and you are going to lose your home. It doesn't get any worse than that, right? Wrong.

Lawyers for troubled Staten Island homeowners say they are beginning to see examples of clients who go to the bank to take out money and find that their accounts have been frozen or wiped out by other banks or debt collectors -- the entities holding second mortgages on houses already in default on the first and primary mortgage. Some are learning the lender or debt collector has already gone to court and secured a judgment to garnish paychecks.

HAMP is a scam

The Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program has been touted as a savor of distressed homeowners across America. The problem is that the numbers show an entirely different story.

More than 650,994 loan revisions had been started through the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program as of last month, from about 487,081 as of September, according to the Treasury. None of the trial modifications through October had been converted to permanent repayment plans, the Treasury data showed.

None? NONE! Not a single one! WTF!
Five months and 651,000 trial modifications and not one single borrower can get a permanent break? We throw hundreds of billions of dollars at these TARP banks and they can't cut a single distressed homeowner some slack?

Foreclosures 332,292 in October 2009

We have another 8th straight month of foreclosures above 300,000 a month.

U.S. foreclosure filings surpassed 300,000 for an eighth straight month as unemployment made it tougher for homeowners to pay their bills, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

A total of 332,292 properties received a default or auction notice or were seized by banks in October, up 19 percent from a year earlier, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac said today. One in every 385 households received a filing. The tally fell 3 percent from September, the third consecutive monthly decline.

The worst is still Nevada, followed by California, then Florida. Illinois had an increase in filings, odds are caused by the high unemployment rate.

Foreclosures hit quarterly record

A month ago I pointed out the wave of foreclosures approaching. Well, that wave is beginning to come ashore.

According to RealtyTrac, one in every 136 homes in the US received a foreclosure filing during Q309, the highest reported quarterly foreclosure rate since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in the first quarter of 2005.
Foreclosure filings increased 5% from the previous quarter and climbed 23% from Q308, according to the report. Nearly 938,000 homeowners received a foreclosure filing in Q309.

Remember how we were having a housing crisis during the summer/fall of 2008? Well things are 23% worse now than they were then.

Wanna live rent free for a year?

There is a silver lining to the housing bust, at least for some people.

As of July, mortgage companies hadn’t begun the foreclosure process on 1.2 million loans that were at least 90 days past due, according to estimates prepared for The Wall Street Journal by LPS Applied Analytics, which collects and analyzes mortgage data. An additional 1.5 million seriously delinquent loans were somewhere in the foreclosure process, though the lender hadn’t yet acquired the property. The figures don’t include home-equity loans and other second mortgages.

Delinquent Prime Mortgage Cure Rate 6.6%, down from 45%

What is a cure rate? It's the percentage of loans where people who have fallen behind in their payments manage to make up the difference and get back up to date and in good standing.

From the Fitch press release:

While the number of U.S. prime RMBS loans rolling into a delinquency status has recently slowed, this improvement is being overwhelmed by the dramatic decrease in delinquency cure rates that has occurred since 2006, according to Fitch Ratings. An increasing number of borrowers who are 'underwater' on their mortgages appear to be driving this trend, as Fitch has also observed.

Foreclosures in July 2009

I think anyone reading this blog would not be surprised by the jump in foreclosures of 6.74% in one month. That's a whopping 32.32% increase in foreclosures nationwide since July 2008!

360,149 U.S. properties during the month, an increase of nearly 7 percent from the previous month and an increase of 32 percent from July 2008. The report also shows that one in every 355 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing in July

That is the 3rd time in the last 5 months for record increases.

We noted this projection of 3.2 million foreclosures by the end of this year.

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