Foreclosure Crisis Is Spreading

Foreclosure Crisis Is Spreading, New Data Show
October 28, 2010 ShareShare

The foreclosure crisis took an ominous turn Thursday as a new report indicated that foreclosure activity is spreading from states that have been at the heart of the problem into places like Chicago and Seattle.

And a backlog of foreclosed properties may chill the housing market for years to come. Rick Sharga of RealtyTrac, which released the data, said he expects home prices to remain fairly stagnant until 2014.

Eleven out of the nation's 20 largest metropolitan areas saw increased foreclosure activity in the third quarter compared with the same period last year, according to the foreclosure listing firm.

The top eight metro areas for foreclosures were in Nevada, California and Arizona, said Sharga, a senior vice president.

"[Those] … areas were overbuilt, the homes became significantly undervalued [and] underqualified borrowers were put into those homes with toxic loans that ended up being ticking time bombs," he said. "When market prices finally stopped going up, the whole house of cards crumbled in all of those areas."

Those three states and Florida accounted for 19 of the top 20 metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates between July and September, the report showed. Even though they remain the nation's foreclosure hotbeds, many of their metro areas saw declines in the number of households that received foreclosure-related filings.

But many cities in other states saw a spike in foreclosure activity.

"The epidemic is spreading from the states at the ground zero of the foreclosure problems out into areas that hadn't been previously affected," Sharga said.

The Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area registered the sharpest annual increase: 71 percent. One in every 129 households received a foreclosure filing.

The Chicago-Naperville-Joliet metropolitan area posted the second-highest annual jump, a 35 percent increase. One in every 84 households received a foreclosure notice.

Among the other metro areas where foreclosure activity jumped by a large margin this summer were Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, up 26 percent; Detroit-Warren-Livonia, at nearly 23 percent; and, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, up 20 percent.

Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody's Analytics, agreed that the foreclosure crisis was moving into a new phase.

House flippers, subprime borrowers and those who lost their jobs early in the recession have largely worked through the system, Zandi said.

"Now what you're seeing is more strategic defaulting -- more recently unemployed people who have exhausted their savings, sold assets and even borrowed money from relatives to keep paying the mortgage," he said. "There's nothing left for them to do.

"Everyone is being touched by this now," Zandi told NPR.

RealtyTrac's data also show that foreclosures, once largely correlated with bad loans and overpricing, are now following expanding unemployment problems. That means markets like Chicago and Seattle are seeing more foreclosures than ever before.

The U.S. unemployment rate hit 9.6 percent last month. In the Seattle/Bellevue/Everette metro area, the rate was slightly lower, at 8.6 percent.

Still, many troubled homeowners there have been unable to hang on. As a result, there's been no letup in the inventory of foreclosed homes on the market this year, said John Bauer, an agent with ZipRealty in Seattle who represents lenders selling foreclosed properties.

"It has been on an upward trend curve ever since 2008," Bauer said. "And not just the third quarter of this year, but the last 12 months, it's been on a steady ascension."

Chicago also had the third-highest number of homes repossessed by lenders during the quarter -- 12,568 -- behind the Phoenix metro area's 14,317 and the Miami metro area's 12,963, RealtyTrac said.

In all, 133 out of 206 metropolitan areas with at least 200,000 residents posted an annual increase in foreclosure activity in the three months ended Sept. 30, RealtyTrac said.

The Las Vegas-Paradise, Nev., metropolitan area topped the list of metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates in the quarter, with one in every 25 homes receiving a foreclosure warning -- more than five times the national average. But foreclosure filings declined 20 percent from the same quarter last year.

"It's not out of the woods yet, it's just less bad than it was a year ago," Sharga said.

Rounding out the rest of the top 10 metros with the highest foreclosure rate were Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.; Modesto, Calif.; Stockton, Calif.; Merced, Calif.; Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif.; Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Fla.; Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Ariz.; Bakersfield, Calif.; and Vallejo-Fairfield, Calif.

Banks seized more than 816,000 homes in the first nine months of the year and are on pace to seize more than a million.

Wells Fargo, one of the nation's largest lenders, conceded Wednesday that tens of thousands of its foreclosure documents did not meet the legal standard, throwing those proceedings into question. That revelation comes on the heels of similar concerns at Bank of America and Ally Financial's GMAC Mortgage, which briefly suspended foreclosures.

Wells Fargo said the foreclosure affidavits did not strictly adhere to the required procedures, but said it believes all the foreclosures in question to be legitimate.

Sharga said the controversy over sloppy paperwork was not a factor during the third quarter. He added that preliminary data from this month show almost no change in foreclosure activity since September.

"We're not seeing what we might have anticipated in terms of a falloff," Sharga said.

NPR's Paul Brown contributed to this report, which also contains material from The Associated Press Copyright 2010 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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Bank of America to Resume Foreclosures

Curtailing a moratorium sooner than expected, Bank of America announced Monday that it would resume foreclosures by next week in 23 states where court approval is needed to go ahead.

The decision covers 102,000 mortgages. While the bank said it had found no evidence that foreclosures had been made in error, it said the foreclosure moratorium would remain in effect in the 27 states where a judicial proceeding is not required, as the review proceeds state by state.

While JPMorgan Chase, GMAC and other institutions have imposed similar freezes, Bank of America is the only one to put it into effect in all 50 states, and as the country’s biggest bank, it is closely watched by the rest of the industry.

In recent weeks, reports of improper procedures at mortgage servicers, like having officials sign thousands of documents a month — so-called robo-signers — have set off a political furor. Last Wednesday, all 50 state attorneys general announced an investigation of the mortgage service industry practices.

“As was the case for our judicial state review, our initial assessment findings show the basis for our foreclosure decisions is accurate,” the bank said in a statement. “Our decision to review our process and later, to extend our review to all 50 states, has been an important step to give customers confidence they are being treated fairly.” By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

If your worried about foreclosure American Eagle Realty can help you with solid answers about your rights and options before your house is foreclosed on! We are experts in the Short Sale Process and have the experience needed to work with your bank! Contact us we can help.....

American Eagle Realty
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502-969-1801

Attorney Generals from all 50 States are getting Involved in Foreclosure Investigation

Officials in 50 states and the District of Columbia have launched a joint investigation into allegations that mortgage co.’s mishandled documents and broke laws in foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of homeowners. Attorneys general are calling into question the accuracy and legitimacy of documents that lenders relied on to evict people from the homes. – Reuters

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general from 49 states and financial regulators from 39 states will work together to comb through foreclosure filings and documents from mortgage servicers to see if any state laws have been broken in the rush by services to kick borrowers out of their homes without following various state and local laws.

Homeowners, homeowner advocates and various state officials have complained that mortgage servicers have failed to follow basic procedures, like reviewing documents, properly signing them and other tasks long followed prior to the mortgage securitization boom that took off this decade.

If your worried about foreclosure American Eagle Realty can help you with solid answers about your rights and options before your house is foreclosed on! We are experts in the Short Sale Process and have the experience needed to work with your bank! Contact us we can help.....


American Eagle Realty
www.american-eagle-realty.com
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Bank of America Freezes Foreclosures in All States as Documents Reviewed

Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. lender, will halt foreclosures in all 50 U.S. states to determine whether documents used to seize homes from people had the correct data.

“We will stop foreclosure sales until our assessment has been satisfactorily completed,” the Charlotte, North Carolina- based company said today in a statement. “Our ongoing assessment shows the basis for foreclosure decisions is accurate.”

Bank of America already froze foreclosures this month in the 23 states where courts supervise home seizures. The new policy extends the moratorium to the entire nation. Banks are being pressed by state officials to halt foreclosures amid allegations that employees used unverified or false data to speed the process. Attorneys general in Ohio and Connecticut have said the practices may amount to fraud.

Lenders took possession of a record 95,364 homes in August and issued foreclosure filings to 338,836 homeowners, or one of every 381 U.S. households, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based data vendor.

If your worried about foreclosure American Eagle Realty can help you with solid answers about your rights and options before your house is foreclosed on! We are experts in the Short Sale Process and have the experience needed to work with your bank! Contact us we can help.....

American Eagle Realty
www.american-eagle-realty.com
502-969-1801 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              502-969-1801      end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              502-969-1801      end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              502-969-1801      end_of_the_skype_highlighting