May 2010

AURORA, Colo. – The City of Aurora’s foreclosure program is just over a year old, but it has already rehabbed 29 homes that had been ‘blights of their block”. “We got about $4.5 million from the feds in March of [...]

Despite some indications that the economy is recovering, the housing market remains a disaster area. Currently, about seven million homeowners are behind on their mortgages and that number is only getting worse. Banks, with the help of the government, are [...]

Since the recovery in house prices began last summer, homeowners and real-estate agents have embraced what many believe is a return to normalcy (forever rising prices).  In Wall Street-fueled markets like New York City, properties are once again getting multiple [...]

From Gretchen Morgenson’s latest Fair Game column: If you blinked, you might have missed the ugly first-quarter report last week from Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giant that, along with its sister Fannie Mae, soldiers on as one of the [...]

May 10 (Bloomberg) — More than a fifth of U.S. mortgage holders owed more than their homes were worth in the first quarter as repossessions climbed to a record, according to Zillow.com. Twenty-three percent of owners of mortgaged homes were [...]

Fewer Americans were late with their mortgage in the first quarter, with the ratio of borrowers 60 days or more past due at 6.77 percent. That’s down from 6.89 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the latest data from [...]

In early 2006, Darcy Parmer began to worry about her job. She was a mortgage fraud investigator at Wells Fargo Bank. Her managers weren’t happy with her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t doing a good job of sniffing out questionable [...]

Three New York residents filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against units of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., alleging that the bank misled them about their chances of getting long-term reductions in mortgage payments. The suit highlights one risk of the [...]

When Fallbrook homeowner Armando Robles was rejected for a permanent mortgage modification, he was disappointed —- but that was nothing compared to how he felt when he discovered his credit rating was trashed and he was stuck with a “catch [...]

The former chief executive of the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing has been arrested, authorities say. Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson is suspected of embezzlement, trading irregularities, and other breaches of banking laws, the special prosecutor’s office has said.

“Short sales and foreclosure homes are a reality in today’s real-estate market,” Tawes said. “Therefore, you can find many luxury homes in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Carefree and Phoenix that fall into the short-sale or foreclosure categories.” Rosalie Soward, a Valley [...]

Struggling California homeowners will have another source of assistance later this year from a federal program giving the state $700 million to devise its own foreclosure-prevention solutions. While that sounds like a windfall, it’s minuscule compared with the hundreds of [...]

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KKCO) – Hundreds of people in Mesa County are trying to hold onto their homes, during one of the worst economies since the Depression. That desperation often makes residents vulnerable to foreclosure scams.

Jim Dineen had to sign an unusually long 40-year mortgage to hang onto his West Chester Township house. Kathie Gibson sued her lender after a year-long runaround over the College Hill home she still fears she’ll lose. And Jerusha Kessler [...]

FOX BUSINESS VIDEO – Breaking Down Freddy’s $61.3B Tab Egan-Jones Rating Company Co-Founder Sean Egan weighs in on Freddy Mac’s new request for aid. Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com

The cases have been piling up in the Alexandria-based Eastern District of Virginia’s U.S. Attorney’s Office since the peak of the real estate boom as prosecutors have sought to stem the mortgage fraud tide that has plagued the region. According [...]

The first wave of U.S. mortgage defaults was spurred by lenders who made bad loans and borrowers who wound up with larger monthly payments than they could ever hope to manage. Lately, something altogether different has been making an increasing [...]

In 2006, the year home prices peaked, D.R. Horton’s sales did as well, with 53,099 home sales closed. Its founder predicted the company would break the 100,000-unit barrier by 2010. That will not happen — not this year, not anytime [...]