September 2009

The facts are that with unemployment rising, this foreclosure crisis will continue to spiral out of control. They go hand and hand. This is not rocket science. This is Junior High School economics 101. Obama has not provided the relief  [...]

“We’re still waiting to see how the Wachovia and Washington Mutual portfolios play out,” said Brian Olasov, who studies the banking industry as managing director at law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge. “We’ve got a big bulge in resets still [...]

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they [...]

“Those dollars had nothing to do with residential mortgages. They weren’t directed to banks for that purpose,” Brown said. He and others note that banks are paying back billions of dollars, with interest, to the government. In the short run, [...]

Perez called his mortgage company, MVB Mortgage Corp., a Michigan-based firm, and asked if they could get a loan modification. Lowering the interest rate to the VA interest rate of less than 6 percent would allow him to make the [...]

Just look at how bank workers suffered: 75,000 were laid off from Citigroup. JPMorgan Chase ( JPM – news – people ), favored by the government and allowed to expand its reach and power by acquiring Bear Stearns and Washington [...]

Maybe this story and video will wake up some of the remaining rogue loan modification companies that seem to be defying the law and operating in California like it is still the Wild, Wild, mortgage West. Police from Santa Clara [...]

As the Federal Housing Administration rapidly increases its role in the mortgage lending business, it’s starting to face a growing number of foreclosures. While in 2006 the FHA’s market share was just 2.7 percent, now that the subprime market is [...]

Hope Now, the alliance of banks, mortgage servicers and non-profit mortgage counselors, came out with its July data this week and the numbers still look bleak. While the actual number of foreclsoures in the month declined 3% to 89,100, the [...]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) said on Wednesday they will accept IOUs issued by California’s state government to preserve its dwindling cash during its budget crisis. Bank of America will [...]

In another troubling sign for commercial real estate, a downtown office tower housing the Atlanta HUD office was sold at a foreclosure auction this week for $7 million. The building, located in Five Points Plaza at 40 Marietta St. N.W., [...]

Deteriorating commercial property markets are putting commercial mortgage-backed securities to their first critical structural test. Failing it could keep financing tight and property values suppressed for years. Since the 1990s, the CMBS practice has successfully financed commercial landlords by selling [...]

PHOENIX — Bobbi Giguere had no luck in securing a loan modification from her mortgage servicer, Wells Fargo. For months, she had sent the bank the financial documents it requested to process her modification. But each time she called to [...]

As if Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corporation’s troubles don’t run deep enough, a federal complaint newly alleges that a former employee bilked the bankrupt mortgage lender out of at least $1.6 million by devising a fraudulent bank scheme that [...]

Washington, D.C. (September 1, 2009) – HOPE NOW, the private sector alliance of mortgage servicers, investors, mortgage insurers and non-profit counselors, announced today that its July data estimates that 1.77 million homeowners received workout solutions to avoid foreclosure since January [...]

As the commercial real estate market heated up earlier in the decade and lenders competed feverishly to issue ever-riskier mortgages, hundreds of bankers, investors, lawyers, brokers, appraisers, accountants and analysts flocked to an investors’ conference in Florida each January to [...]

He’s known across the country as the sheriff who stood up for the little guy, the renter or owner caught in the foreclosure crisis. Time magazine named Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart one of its most influential people. But now, [...]

Mortgage bankers are pushing Congress to expand the U.S. government’s support of the market by guaranteeing private-industry home-loan securities and replacing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The first step builds off the model for Ginnie Mae, the agency [...]

In late March of this year in the case of U.S. Bank v. Ibanez, Massachusetts Land Court Judge Keith C. Long issued one of the most controversial rulings in recent years which has called into question hundreds if not thousands [...]

Alonzo Patterson – On July 10, 2009 a jury convicted Patterson of Burglary, a class 4 felony; and Possession of Burglary Tools, a class 6 felony. On February 13, 2009 Phoenix Police caught Patterson stealing the copper piping out of [...]

LONDON (Reuters) – Losses are rising in Britain’s residential mortgage market and pushing “non-conforming” mortgage-backed securities into a downward slide that is likely to get worse, Moody’s Investors Service said on Wednesday. “Non-conforming” is the classification used in Britain for [...]

According to analysts at Deutsche Bank AG, as property value declines and scarce credit continue to drive commercial property developers and investors into default, total lifetime losses on banks’ $1 trillion “core” commercial-mortgage holdings, or those backed by income-producing properties, [...]

He said many of the firms representing banks, which he called “foreclosure mills,” hire young attorneys fresh out of law school who handle cases for a flat fee. “They are being trained that it’s not a big deal to miss [...]

Taylor Bean “is holding hostage hundreds of thousands of homeowners, and each day of delay is causing mounting and growing harm to individual homeowners” who are unable to get information related to their mortgage loans, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. [...]

“I don’t want a handout. I want to do the right thing,” Mark Kollar said. “I thought this was supposed to give us a chance.” A CNN investigation revealed that the Kollars are far from alone. Housing counselors, homeowners and [...]