Foreclosures Triple: Housing Recovery is Just Crazy

The lag between failing to pay your mortgage and ultimate foreclosure is quite a number of months during the best of times. The sudden and complete implosion of the economy has made it all but impossible to process all these foreclosures in a timely manner. Therefore, even these horrific numbers are in actual fact much much worse.

Everybody has heard of the people who stopped paying months ago but haven’t been evicted because the bank just can’t get around to them. So imagine how long it will take fore the massive job losses in October and November of 2008 to translate first into stopped mortgage payments and then second into actual foreclosures?

Foreclosures in 2009 will absolutely rocket. House prices will go cliff diving from even these levels…

A 2009 recovery in real estate prices is pure delusional fantasy. Foaming at the mouth, bat-shit crazy type fantasy… Gary Busey style crazy… zero interest rates or not.

Metro-Area Foreclosure Sales Tripled in First 10 Months of 2008: “Foreclosure sales in the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas almost tripled in the first 10 months of last year as rising unemployment and falling home values made it tougher for homeowners to sell or refinance their mortgages.

Motivated sales, which include foreclosure auctions and banks selling homes taken over for non-payment, increased 193 percent from January to October 2008 from a year earlier, New York-based real estate data company Radar Logic Inc. said today in a report. Conventional sales rose 6 percent in that period.

“Lenders are motivated to sell foreclosed houses as quickly as possible to get as much of the loan recovered as possible,” Radar Logic Chief Executive Officer Michael Feder said in an interview. “They have a tendency to accept deeper discounts relative to other sales, to the point where motivated sales are driving the market.”

Home prices fell in 24 of 25 U.S. metropolitan areas in October, Radar Logic said, as unemployment hit a 15-year high in November. Almost half the homeowners who bought in 2006 now owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, making it difficult for them to refinance without bringing cash to the closing, according to Seattle-based real estate data company Zillow.com.

Forty-one percent of October home sales in Los Angeles and Phoenix were foreclosure auctions or financial firms trying to recoup lost loan value, Radar Logic said.

U.S. foreclosure filings increased 71 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier to the highest on record, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a Irvine, California-based provider of default data.”