Impending Threat of More Home Foreclosures
In 2006, the housing boom in the US began to cool down and increasing foreclosure news is constantly heard from media networks. Homeowners began to lose their homes or are threatened with foreclosures because they have failed to keep up with the payments on their mortgage.
Many of the foreclosed homes are tied to neighborhoods where subprime martgages were widespread. MS Foreclosure are just one example. Decreasing home values also contributed to the increase in number of these foreclosures. Add to that the fact that local government spending has also been cut way back because this decrease in home values has also resulted in a decrease in property taxes and their annual budgets.
There were signs of this coming however, three of them in fact. The first sign was the massive bailout of home owners that came. The second sign was all of the sub-prime loans and adjustable rate mortgages beginning to implode. Lastly, the third sign has been the fact that even prime rate loan holders are losing their homes now due to job loss and the economic crisis. In fact, many of these people even have above average or good credit ratings (not for long though). It is expected that unemployment would contribute to almost 60 percent of mortgage defaults. Basically, more foreclosure news is expected to arrive this year.
According to an analysis made by New York Times in February 2009 (data provided by First American Core Logic), the number of prime mortgages that have delinquent payments exceeded 1.5 million with loans totaling to 4 billion. On the same month, delinquencies on subprime mortgages reached 1.65 million while the Alt-A loans rose to 836,000. In all, a total of 7 billion worth of loans were recorded in February – this is an increase of 60 percent from last year. These foreclosures spelled catastrophe for Wall Street due to the mortgage bonds that they are securitizing. These also lead to bank loses of hundreds of billions. (Note: Search on ‘forecloser‘ as well because it is a very common miss-spelling of foreclosure and is prevalent in the foreclosure news posts.)
The Obama administration announced in February that they will be spending billion to save as much as four million homeowners from foreclosures through mortgage incentives and reduced payments. The effects of this plan are expected to be felt in the next coming months. Until that time comes, you will need to brace for the storm and all of the foreclosure news that is still looming out there.