Category Archives: Foreclosure

High residential vacancies are killing many housing markets, as foreclosed homes sit on the market and depress sale prices and property values.And it’s only getting worse: The national vacancy rate crept up to just over 13% according to last week’s decennial census report. That’s up from 12.1% in 2007. “More vacant homes equal more downward pressure on home prices,” said Brad Hunter, chief economist for Metrostudy, a real estate information provider. Maine had the highest proportion of empty housing stock, at 22.8%. Other states with gluts of empty houses included Vermont (20.5%), Florida (17.5%), Arizona (16.3%) and Alaska (15.9%). The […]

New mortgage foreclosure filings dropped last year in New York while still edging up nationally, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who cautioned the fallout continues from the U.S. housing crisis and recession. The state decline can be attributed partly to a temporary suspension of foreclosure activity by banks, not an improvement in the market, DiNapoli said. “In general the foreclosure crisis in New York State and New York City was less severe than in other parts of the country,” he said. “But neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx were especially hard hit.” In November 2009, New York lawmakers […]

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) – U.S. federal and state authorities still hope to strike a single settlement with banks over alleged abuses of mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices, a top banking regulator said on Tuesday. “We each have our own separate responsibilities and areas of jurisdiction, but to the extent possible we are trying to coordinate our actions,” John Walsh, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said at an American Bankers Association conference. “Whether this is possible remains to be seen.” On March 3 state attorneys general sent banks aspects of a proposed settlement endorsed […]

In HSBC’s 2010 annual report, the bank asserted that it had stopped “processing foreclosures” and that it “suspended foreclosures” in December, even though the information wasn’t made public until Feb. 28, when HSBC (HBC) filed the report with the SEC. But based on at least two cases still working their way through Florida’s courts, that delay in disclosure apparently also meant that HSBC didn’t tell attorneys bringing foreclosure actions in the bank’s name to put their cases on hold. Indeed, if HSBC had systematically put its many pending foreclosure cases on hold in December, the news surely would have come […]

On February 21, 2011, USA Today reporteted that the average U.S. borrower in the throes of foreclosure hasn’t made a mortgage payment in 17 months, up from nearly 11 months two years ago — and the time frame may get even longer. Banks and mortgage servicers, who collect payments for lenders, are taking more time to complete foreclosures because of huge volumes of defaulted mortgages. Other factors include time-consuming reviews for loan modifications and additional delays that followed revelations late last year about improperly filed foreclosure documents in tens of thousands of cases. Last year, the number of days that […]