November 2009

“I’m walking away from my house,” says Sakson, 57, who stopped making payments about six months ago on her home in Pennington, N.J. “The bank can have it.” What Sakson did is called a strategic default, or a voluntary foreclosure, [...]

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–Industry lobbyists are raising red flags over a measure that would require mortgage lenders and securitizers to retain a portion of the credit risk of loans for sale to investors. The proposed requirement is meant to ensure lenders [...]

U.S. banks are at risk of sizable new loan losses, particularly on commercial property, and some banks may not have sufficient capital to fully cushion against losses, a Federal Reserve official said on Monday. Some large regional and community banks [...]

“I thought this was finally over, but it’s one of these things where there’s no end in sight,” said Lane, a 65-year-old biotech executive who fell on hard times after losing his job and coming down with cancer. Massachusetts homeowners [...]

* Regulators urge “prudent” commercial loan modifications * Commercial real estate seen as trouble spot for banks By Karey Wutkowski WASHINGTON, Oct 30 (Reuters) – U.S regulators on Friday encouraged banks to modify troubled commercial real estate loans, which are [...]

The Internal Revenue Service has delivered a valuable gift to those with $1 million-plus mortgages on their mansions. In an internal legal memo released publicly last month, the IRS concluded that a taxpayer can deduct interest on the first $1.1 [...]

This has been mentioned on my blog for the last two years and now it looks like the dominoes are really starting to fall in commercial real estate. I am predicting the crash of 2010-2012 will wipe out 25-40% of all small to large [...]

Jasmine Bendon of Ventura says her FICO scores dropped from the mid-700s to the low-600s after her lender put her on a trial modification and reported it as a partial payment. On the plus side, the trial modification has cut [...]