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The U.S. should expect home prices to continue to decline through 2013, and that will have a devastating effect on the balance sheets of consumers, according to Nomura's Richard Koo.
First-time homebuyers ticked down to 35% of sales. First-timers typically drive half of sales in healthy markets and they are critical...
Zoom in for a closer look at what housing prices are doing in your area.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” -Aldous Huxley.
So the banks owning large residential loan portfolios have slowed the foreclosure process to a trickle and, at the same time, have been unwilling to restructure home mortgage loans in a manner that would lead to large scale principal reductions.
Clearing the pipeline in New Jersey, which like New York handles foreclosures through the courts, would take 49 years. In Florida, Massachusetts and Illinois, it would take a decade.
The nation’s two biggest providers of reverse mortgages are no longer offering the loans, as the economics of the business have come under pressure.
Judges don’t like having to rule that a bank was engaged in making up documents (yes, I know, they should be indifferent, but there a lot of resistance to issuing a ruling that is tantamount to calling big established institutions crooks).
The ubiquitous Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, nominal holder of millions of mortgages, does not have the right to foreclose on a mortgage in default or assign that right to anyone else if it does not hold the underlying promissory note...
The basic story of today’s housing markets is that of a market that completely imploded, that has many Californians underwater and a market with demand diminished by both a lack of easy financing and a lack of jobs.”
While the usual suspects, California, Arizona and Nevada still lead the nation in foreclosure activity, the pain is still spreading nationwide. The sheer volume and share of distressed properties in the current market continues to push home prices..
Prices have fallen some 33 percent since the market began its collapse, greater than the 31 percent fall that began in the late 1920s and culminated in the early 1930s, according to Case-Shiller data.
Have the home builders finally reached a bottom? Or are things about to get worse, dragging down the industry's big names and ETFs with it?
In spite of the fact that the median price in Phoenix has fallen so substantially, it fell another 13% YOY:
This is the first ruling in New York to consider the question of whether MERS “can assign the right to foreclose” when it has neither rights in or possession of the note. Most courts that have considered whether MERS can make assignments...
A loss in American "household wealth" of some $11 trillion. Here's saying that the US economy can't take that sort of plunge and hope to live to see another day in anywhere near its present or recent shape.
Simply stated, subprime and predatory lending allowed banks to create millions of questionable mortgages, Wall Street bundled these risky mortgages together to sell to investors, and MERS made it quicker and easier to conduct these risky transactions
But as David Goldman argues, it really comes down to this: The market value of subprime/mortgage related assets is plunging.
The Obama administration's mortgage modification program is more than two years old. From the beginning, it's been apparent that the participating banks and mortgage servicers were breaking the program's rules.
In the U.S. we seemed to pre-programmed to assume that just because prices fall that a strong rebound is assured. I’m always struck in U.S. movies how the hero always wins no matter what. If you watch foreign movies you realize this isn’t...
These institutions are "foreclosing" on loans they have no legal right to foreclose upon as they don't own them.
From Buck Wargo at the Las Vegas Sun: Land that sold for $30 million fetches $4.4 million after foreclosure
I want to touch on three interrelated aspects of Housing and Finance issues, They are crucial to understanding the key pressures on Residential RE mess: Price, Employment, and lastly, legal issues impacting Title and REOs.
As the Michigan ruling suggests, at a minimum, notes not transferred properly are actually owned by someone earlier in the securitization chain. But no one wants to admit that; it means the investors were lied to and hold paper that does...
Falling real estate prices are eating away at home equity. The percentage of their homes that Americans own is near its lowest point since World War II, the Fed. Reserve said Thursday. The average homeowner now has 38 percent equity, down from 61%...
Recent housing and employment data suggests the economy is at a tipping point, while home prices could have much further to fall, veteran economist Robert Shiller said on Thursday.
The Fed estimated that the value of household real estate fell $339 billion in Q1 to $16.1 trillion in Q1 2011, from just under $16.5 trillion in Q4 2010. The value of household real estate has fallen $6.6 trillion from the peak - and is still fall..
A report from Fannie Mae found 27% of homeowners would consider walking away. The previous year only 15% would think of defaulting on a mortgage they could still afford.
"Nevada had the highest negative equity percentage with 63 percent of all mortgaged properties underwater, followed by Arizona (50 percent), Florida (46 percent), Michigan (36 percent) and California (31 percent). ... Las Vegas led the nation...
I’m having trouble understanding why anyone is still treating the Federal/state attorney general mortgage “settlement” negotiations as anything other that a fiasco. The more news reports come out, the more the parties aligned against the banks...
