Foreclosure Rates Surge

While Wall Street has been bailed out with taxpayer funds and is back to giving itself absolutely obscene bonuses, the typical taxpayer who has lost their job, suffered a health care crisis that wiped out their financial capabilities or even lost tenants because of tenant job losses no relief is in sight. Worse yet, no one in Congress or the White House seems to much care beyond making pretty statements. Relief programs are basically a bust and the level of incompetence in mortgage and bank loss mitigation departments would make the Three Stooges look like rocket scientists. Half the time the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing within lenders as evidenced by a recent Bank of America loan where the homeowner - after losing her job for a number of months - finally had worked out a loan modification. The problem was, no one bothered to tell the arm of the lender doing the foreclosure work. The house was sold without my client's knowledge and she came home from her new job to find a notice on her door that the home had gone to foreclosure. Now, after many e-mails and phone calls, the sale is being rescinded - something that could thankfully be done since the deed had not been yet delivered to the purchaser at the foreclosure sale. Situations like this woman's are the norm, not the exception and lenders need to drastically hire more competent personnel to stop more tragedies that could be averted and which overall would SAVE lenders money and help STABILIZE housing prices. We need fewer obscene bonuses and more competent staffing NOW. Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot on the surging level of foreclosures:
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LOS ANGELES (AP) -- 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.
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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.
Homeowners continue to fall behind on payments because they've lost their job or seen their mortgage payment rise due to an interest-rate reset. Many are unable to refinance because they now owe more on their loan than their home is worth.
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The Obama administration's $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has only been able to help a small fraction of troubled homeowners. About 231,000 homeowners have completed loan modifications as part of the Obama administration's flagship foreclosure prevention program through March. That's about 21 percent of the 1.2 million borrowers who began the program over the past year.
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Last month, the administration expanded the program, launching a plan to reduce the amount some troubled borrowers owe on their home loans and give jobless homeowners a temporary break. But the details of those programs are expected to take months to work out.