Foreclosure filings for July rose 32 percent over a year ago and seven percent over June, according to RealtyTrac. One in every 355 US homes received a default notice, was scheduled for auction or was repossessed by a bank last month Read More »

Like a bride preparing for her wedding, the residential real estate industry is slimming down, primping up, and generally working hard to reinvent itself in anticipation of the day when long-absent consumers will return to the marketplace. Read More »

Increasing minority homeownership has been a national policy of both Republican and Democratic Administrations for decades, and for good reason. Traditionally, homeownership has been the path most families have taken to establish financial security. Moreover, homeownership has long been associated with such positive factors as safer neighborhoods and better neighborhood schools. Read More »

Like black markets that spring up in ravaged cities during wartime, there’s something inherently unhealthy about the existence of a two-tiered housing market, one for “normal” sales and one for “distressed” sales. Read More »

The best news in this week’s June existing home sales report was not the increase in sales in the face of rising interest rates, which was certainly welcome news, but the fact that inventories declined despite record foreclosures during the first half of the year. Read More »

Nearly one third of all homeowners who seriously default on their mortgages end up paying what they owe and don’t need to renegotiate their loans, according to a new, massive study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Read More »

As long as Americans have owned homes and records have been kept, never have more families lost more homes to foreclosure than in the first six months of this year. The raw numbers in RealtyTrac’s latest report are startling. Read More »

Just what is the world coming to?

Five months and 1,1 million foreclosures after President Obama announced the Making Home Affordable programs, the Administration has yet to identify a single borrower who has closed on a modified loan under the program, though at least one servicer reports approving 87,100 mods. Read More »

A recent study conducted by researchers from the graduate schools of business at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University found that one out of four homeowners who default on their mortgages make a strategic decision to clear out their belongings and walk away from their homes-even if they can afford to pay their mortgages. Read More »