Foreclosure rates surge, biggest jump in 5 years

LOS ANGELES – A record number of U.S. homes were lost to foreclosure in the first three months of this year, a sign banks are starting to wade through the backlog of troubled home loans at a faster pace, according to a new report.

RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday that the number of U.S. homes taken over by banks jumped 35 percent in the first quarter from a year ago. In addition, households facing foreclosure grew 16 percent in the same period and 7 percent from the last three months of 2009.

More homes were taken over by banks and scheduled for a foreclosure sale than in any quarter going back to at least January 2005, when RealtyTrac began reporting the data, the firm said.

"We're right now on pace to see more than 1 million bank repossessions this year," said Rick Sharga, a RealtyTrac senior vice president.

Foreclosures began to ease last year as banks came under pressure from the Obama administration to modify home loans for troubled borrowers. In addition, some states enacted foreclosure moratoriums in hopes of giving homeowners behind in payments time to catch up. And in many cases, banks have had trouble coping with how to handle the glut of problem loans.

These factors have helped slow the pace of foreclosures, but now that trend appears to be reversing.

"We're finally seeing the banks start to process the inventory that has been in foreclosure, but delayed in processing," Sharga said. "We expect the pace to accelerate as the year goes on."

In all, more than 900,000 households, or one in every 138 homes, received a foreclosure-related notice, RealtyTrac said. The firm based in Irvine, Calif., tracks notices for defaults, scheduled home auctions and home repossessions.

The Japanese take out mortgages for two, three generations. We are on our way to 100 year mortgages, that is we just share crop the land and shack we are on.
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That will mean that interest rates must stay low. Once the rate reaches a high enough point the payment on a twenty year mortgage would be almost the same as on a one hundred year mortgage. If you can’t afford the long term you can’t afford the short term either if the rate is very high.

Basically, what Obama has done is tell all the private banks with troubled loans to rewrite the loans with better terms and then sell all these loans to Fannie and Freddie. This is exactly what has happened.

The result?

Homeowners got a brief financial respite from a refi, but their financial ability or status never changed and they remain in the same basic troubled position as before, only:

Now instead of private banks holding these toxic loans, the American taxpayers are on the hook for all these trillions in toxic loans!!

Way to "solve the problem", Obama!

I think what happen in Japan is that in order to keep the Bank books nice and tidy, they did everything to keep home prices up, but wages in real terms collapsed. So in order not to have the home market collapse, the banks wrote multiple generation home mortgages, pushing the payments out fifty, sixty years, just like we were/are pushing car payments out five or more years.

Anyways, young people in Japan are not having children, the population is collapsing and eventually the banks/gov ( One and the same) will have to, or not, deal with the reality of few taxpayers and much debt.

But, we are not Japanese.

And many, many unaffected off in foreign lands remain aloof. Free to make blanket statements portraying responsible, hardworking Americans in a lousy light because they lost their jobs or investments or both.

I live in the smallest home in my neighborhood, an old farmhouse that was sold cheap when the farmer died and the developer cut the farm land up for McMansions. My house and land went for less than the empty lots for the other homes. I fixed it up, learning as I went and doing the plumbing, electrical, drywall, and other labor myself, and it's great for my family despite the low price. I chose not to take any risks with my home purchase, because as a (then small) businessman working for myself with an uncertain income, I was unwilling to accept extra risk when it came to my family's home. As it turned out, I did phenomenally well, paid off my small mortgage early, and stayed there. I didn't take out a home equity loan for a vacation, as one neighbor who lost his McMansion did (twice that I know of, two weeks each in Australia/Fiji and Switzerland/Rome!). I didn't trade up to a bigger home, as another foreclosed neighbor did (three times in a decade). I know several people who are facing foreclosure or have been foreclosed, and not a single one exercised what I consider reasonable caution when choosing how much to spend on that first home, whether to take out a second mortgage or home equity loan for discretionary spending, and whether to trade up to a bigger home.

I have no issues with being blunt, upfront, and honest - as I said taking care of your people doesn’t mean molly-coddling them.

I do have issues with reneging on ones word/promises (I relate that to the obfuscation you mention) OR just throwing up our hands and saying “black and white only, letter of the law is all we can do”. That’s leads to a frozen cold waste for humanity that is far to cruel to leave to any child.

I have faith that the Lord gave us free will expecting just a bit more than that.

I heard from my deepthroat mortgage biz source back in Dec. that they were holding a ton of foreclosures that were not on the market yet.

Was there a regulatory decree that they couldn’t be processed until a certain time?

You seem to be confusing the “bank” with the “true lender” ... the banks were fronted huge amounts which they were desperate to lend. The banks themselves put up no money and therefore are not the lender (that is where the TILA violation comes into play as the bank is represented as the lender on the loan docs) , they have no insurable interest. The banks simply spent someone elses money on that other parties behalf and took huge fees for their trouble. The real and immediate losers were the investors to the true lenders as the wall street firms pocketed on average 1/3rd of all funds channeled through them and presented the CDO’s/CMO’s in such a way as to show them paying what amounted to a smaller amount of interest on a bigger slice of the pie than what was actually loaned .. GS, Lehman and other CDO writers pocketed the difference as profits ,,, a typical amount would be a $100,000 profit making a $200,000 loan on a property appraised at $250k. This was done simply by misrepresenting the interest received by a point or so and/or misrepresenting the amount loaned to be the full amount of the appraisal.

The banks that are foreclosing (or the lawyers groups that buy busted CMO’s for $0.05 on the dollar) never had an interest in the property and their paperwork trail is repeatedly found by the courts to have been fabricated/forged. The only reason they have succeeded in foreclosing is that 97% of foreclosures aren’t contested.

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