Nearly half of all homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure during the housing bust own their own homes again and most have a mortgage. just nine years after home prices bottomed in 2007. A new report from the Urban Institute that compares credit profiles of renters and owners found nine million (7.1 percent) of all adult consumers with a … Read More »

  The recovery is at a tipping point because traditional buyers are not making up for the decline in sales to investors, who cannot find enough houses to buy profitably.  Cash buyers competing for distressed and low-tier inventory who helped to jump start the overall recovery now are fading from the market.  They have fallen to just 16.8% of all sales, suggesting … Read More »

Though three million homeowners were freed from the shackles of negative equity in the past year, it will take at least four more years for 7 million or more deeply indebted homeowners to reach positive equity, even as home values continue their current pace of recovery. Read More »

After months of decline, foreclosure activity increased in July, led by Florida and six other judicial states where legal procedures delay foreclosure processing. Read More »

Are underwater homes deterring unemployed people from moving to get new jobs? Not according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which finds that homeowners will relocate for a job, even if they will lose money on the sale of their home. Read More »

Foreclosure inventories fell 24 percent from last year at this time and completed foreclosures fell 16 percent year over year, according to the CoreLogic April National Foreclosure Report. Read More »

In another sign of institutional investors’ appetites for foreclosures, inventories of presale foreclosures have declined nearly twenty percent since last year as lenders have made volumes of foreclosures available via REO tapes to well-funded hedge funds eager to buy in bulk. Read More »

Facing a financial crisis, FHA is asking first-time buyers to pay for the sins of borrowers who came before them. Increases in FHA mortgage insurance premiums and new, tougher underwriting standards that take effect April 1 will cost new borrowers significantly more than refinancing borrowers who have had an FHA loan four years or longer. Read More »

Two new Treasury Department mortgage regulations designed to reduce lender risk will make it impossible for 60 percent of the mortgages being approved today to be approved in seven years. The impact will be greater for mortgages used to buy homes rather than refinance and in the states where prices have been most volatile. Read More »

President Obama is considering announcing a major expansion of the HARP 2.1 refinancing program in his upcoming State of the Union speech that would make it possible for underwater borrowers whose loans are not held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to refinance at today’s low rates. Read More »