The big US housing boom really started to dwindle in 2006 and increasing foreclosure news has dominated the media ever since. Homeowners began to lose their homes or are threatened with foreclosures because they have failed to keep up with the payments on their mortgage.
In cities where subprime mortgages are prevalent, foreclosure of homes also became widespread. MS Foreclosure are just one example. Unfortunately this has led to a decrease in home values as well which just adds fuel to the fire. Additionally, state and most local governments were forced to cut back on their spending because the drop in the value of these properties sharply decreased their tax bases.
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. Unfortunately, this means that even more foreclosure news will be heard through the rest of this year.
The New York Times stated in February of 2009 that there are more than 1.5 million prime mortgages alone with delinquent payments (data by First American Core Logic). On the same month, delinquencies on subprime mortgages reached 1.65 million while the Alt-A loans rose to 836,000. Shockingly over $717 billion in bad loans were on the books for February – up over 60 percent from the same time period a year ago. All of these foreclosures have also dramatically impacted Wall Street and mortgage bonds. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that the banking industry has lost. (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 new Obama administration has announced a plan to try and help as many as four million homeowners via a $75 billion dollar spending bill. The effects of this plan are expected to be felt in the next coming months. Until then, we should brace ourselves for more foreclosure news that is looming in the neighborhood.