Hampton Roads' Rising Foreclosures Not Letting Up

Despite some uptick in refinances, the local real estate market remains devastated and the number of foreclosures continues to rise. Indeed, the only growth areas in the legal realm is in foreclosures and bankruptcies. While the President continues to roll out purported plans to save homeowners from losing their homes, the plans are not well explained - many lenders do not seem to even know the details - and the downward pressure on home prices continues unabated. For new first time home buyers the $8,000 tax credit does not seem to be doing much of anything to stimulate purchases. Unless and until lenders - many of whom have received billions in bailout funds - begin lending again in earnest, I do not see any looming recovery. It continues to be a bleak landscape for firms that work heavily in the real estate industry. Worse yet, commercial transactions appear to be slowing as well. Back in the summer of 2007 I said that the housing market was going to trigger disaster and it has. Sadly, nothing seems to be happening to stop the blood bath yet and so the downward spiral continues. Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot.

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Foreclosure filings in Hampton Roads rose again last month, to the highest point on record, as many lenders continued to repossess and auction off homes in the area despite national efforts to stem foreclosures, a report to be released today found.

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Foreclosure prevention specialists in the area said the majority of the clients they see facing foreclosure have been put into that position because of a job loss. "Very few of the ones we're seeing now are people who were put into loans they couldn't afford," said John Allen, a vice president of The Up Center, a Norfolk organization that provides foreclosure prevention counseling. "It's almost always job loss, or reduction in hours, or something revolving around that."

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Dotty Acampora, a foreclosure prevention counselor for the nonprofit Virginia Beach Community Development Corp., has seen a similar trend in recent months. More than half of her current clients have recently lost jobs or had their hours cut back. "The problem is the lenders are just not going to work with someone who is unemployed," said Acampora, who spent nearly two decades as a mortgage banker and is a former president of the Tidewater Mortgage Bankers Association. "They're not going to do a typical forbearance, because unemployment is too widespread."

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For the second consecutive month, foreclosure activity nationally was at the highest point RealtyTrac has recorded.