Posts tagged as Housing
Story Has Everything You Want in a Story
Oh yes: this is the story that has it all, baby: Four Loko, insurance scams, foreclosures, a retired ladies detective club, RICO complaints, fake absentee ballots, the FBI, Las Vegas, offshore bank accounts and actual broken kneecaps. Stick with it, it gets crazier and crazier.
Do Not Under (Almost) Any Circumstances Buy a Home
Bank of America is paying just $20 million for having foreclosed improperly on 160 active-duty military service personnel. (This, of course, was frequent predatory lender suit-settler Countrywide in action; Bank of America purchased Countrywide in January, 2008, for $4.1 billion in stock, and has paid for it more and more ever since, including the former CEO's SEC settlements.) But $20 million! That's nothing, in the grand scheme of the forthcoming housing disaster. For one thing, there are about half as many foreclosed houses being sold now as there were two years go: at this new pace, "it would take exactly three years to clear the current inventory of 1.9 million properties already on the banks’ books, or in foreclosure." And then there will be no houses in foreclosure! Just kidding. There'll be tons more! Both new ones, and let's not forget that litigation has stalled a huge number of foreclosures. All that will get dumped on the market, even as housing prices are down 33.1 percent from summer of 2006 and 28% of all single-family mortgages are underwater.
The Rain in Spain Something Something on the Debt-Ridded Homeless
I'm not quite sure what the Times means by "personal liability mortgages" in their fascinating story today on the insanity of foreclosures in Spain, because that phrase doesn't really exist in English. But, yow, I did have no idea that repossession wasn't the end of owing money on loans and mortgages, and that mortgage debt was excluded from bankruptcies in Spain. Maybe there are actually ways in which the U.S. looks out for individuals that is better for people than they way it is done in Europe! Huh. Still, it is hilarious to look back at this BusinessWeek article from 2007, which declares Europe's mortgage and housing and banking industries to be sound and untouchable, while now we are talking about "Spain’s giddy real estate boom" and 1.4 million people there are facing foreclosure.
Rent Is Too Damn Scary
Your datapoint of the day: 51% of Americans would live with a ghost as long as rent were free, while 27% would share space with a spectre for a 50% reduction in rent. No word on how many people are willing to split the bill with werewolves and vampires, but I'm sure USA Today will get to that soon enough. [Via]
Should You Buy A Foreclosed House?
1. Probably not, seeing as the people who own the houses are retaining titles left and right because apparently few financial institutions can actually follow the foreclosure guidelines. Bad news for Nevada, Arizona and California, where about half of home sales are of foreclosed houses. READ MORE
Trashing Out the Foreclosures: Paul Reyes, "Exiles in Eden"
Recently I went to visit an acquaintance who was trashing out his own condo. There were hinges to be pried out of doorways and appliances to take for eBay. The house had become inert, a non-house: trapped somewhere between the building's association who wanted the fees owed to pay for the building's roof and walls and the like, the people who wanted the property taxes to pay for things like schools and street lights and roads and the people who were in charge of collecting (or more likely not collecting) the mortgage for whomever actually owned the mortgage debt (at the end of that chain, quite possibly you and me). These various claimants made the house largely worthless-more worthless than the latest assessment, which was... well, a comparable apartment nearby had recently sold for $120,000. It had been listed at $325,000 in May, 2009. That $120,000 sale price was not much higher than that apartment's last sale-twenty years ago. READ MORE
Manhattan's Millionaires-on-Paper (May Be Mostly In Brooklyn!)
In looking at the recent wild estimate that there are 667,200 "millionaires" in New York City-supposedly up nearly 20% from 2008-it's important to pull back and look at what makes someone a millionaire on paper. The number one marker in New York City of this semi-mythical, marvelous status is home ownership. READ MORE
We're on Track to Foreclose on One Million Homes This Year
As the data has suggested for some time, we're doing well with our plan to put a million people out of their homes this year. "One of every 78 U.S. housing units, or 1.28% of the total, was subject to at least one foreclosure filing in the first six months of the year. That's a total of 1.65 million properties." By the way, how correlated are unemployment and foreclosure rates? Math explains: quite.
Graphed: U.S. Foreclosures and Home Repossessions, 2005 to 2010
It's hard to get a sense of what's going on in America with foreclosure filings, the number of homes being foreclosed on and the actual number of houses being taken back by banks. The newspapers are confusing! Are they "down"? Are they "up"? So we dug up the actual numbers for each year since 2005, up to the projected numbers for 2010. A "foreclosure filing" can be a number of things, including notice of default, auction or seizure-which is why the actual number of houses receiving these notices is a useful number to know.
Breaking Matt Bai Housing Update Just In!
When Matt Bai, a Times reporter and Yankees fan in his early 40s with two children, wanted to buy a new house, the mortgage brokers laughed at him! But he had perfect credit, and had only bought his last home six years ago! (It was a "center-hall colonial on a corner lot three blocks from the subway and American University.") Then he found out that his nanny had a very bad mortgage on her house, the payments of which were 75% of her income. And so he bought a new house, a "spacious, if deteriorated split-level," even though the counter tops were ugly, with a nice, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. And then he wrote about all of this at work.
