February 9, 2011 (Jeff Alan) CoreLogic released its December Home Price Index (HPI) which shows that home prices continued their bumpy ride, declining for the fifth month in a row. According to the HPI, national home prices, including distressed sales, declined by 5.46 percent in December 2010 compared to December 2009 and declined by 4.39 [...]
February 9, 2011 (Shirley Allen) Lender Processing Services (LPS) released its December Mortgage Monitor report and disclosed that foreclosure activity continues to climb but new foreclosure proceedings declined slightly. Incredibly, nearly 6.9 million homes are now in some stage of delinquency or foreclosure, with foreclosures being 7.8 times historical averages and the total number of [...]
February 8, 2011 (Jeff Alan) Bank of America is splitting its mortgage business into two units, with a new division created specifically to handle foreclosures and discontinued loan products. The new unit, Legacy Asset Servicing, will be charged with resolving issues involving faulty paperwork that had led the bank to temporarily suspend foreclosures across the [...]
February 8, 2011 (Shirley Allen) The average price of a single-family home declined 1.5% in the third quarter from a year earlier but home prices have already stabilized in about a quarter of all housing markets. Expect home prices to decline 5.5% this year, with three-fourths of the housing markets seeing prices stabilize by the [...]
February 8, 2011 (Chris Moore) As Congress wrangles with its solution to reform the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Obama Administration puts on the finishing touches for its plan on restructuring the two GSE giants, an unintended consequence may be an explosion in business for the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). Read [...]
February 8, 2011 (Chris Moore) Credit rating agency Fitch Ratings reported that mortgage servicers modified 36,500 mortgages through government and proprietary programs in December 2010, down 57% from the peak of 86,500 in April 2009. Fitch also stated that based on current and expected inventory, it will take four years to remove the backlog of [...]
February 7, 2011 (Jeff Alan) DataQuick reports that during the fourth quarter of 2010, the number of homes in California going into foreclosure was at its lowest level in three years. During the three month period Notice of Defaults (NoDs)were down 16.2 percent from the previous quarter and down 17.5 percent from the fourth quarter [...]
February 7, 2011 (Shirley Allen) Clear Capital has reported in its monthly Home Data Index (HDI) Market Report that home prices increased 0.9 percent during the first three weeks of January, the first gains in home prices since August 2010. On a quarterly basis, prices were down 1.6 percent for the last three months, a [...]
February 4, 2011 (Jeff Alan) Standard and Poor’s Rating Service (S&P) has released its “Fourth-Quarter Shadow Inventory Update” and predicts that it will take more than four years to clear the shadow inventory of distressed properties. The prediction is an 11 percent increase from the third quarter of 2010 and a 40 percent increase from [...]
