• Freddie and Fannie are clearly bankrupt but continue to get tax payer funding.
• Interest rates will have to move higher and government incentives have gone by the wayside.
• It is very difficult to get a mortgage right now, and most are coming in one form or another from the government agencies, which are in very bad shape.
• What really scares sellmyhouse.com, is the fact that there are so many foreclosures in the pipeline and default notices have increased over the last few months, not decreased.
• The supply side of the equation is about to be throw out of whack again, and that is never good for prices.

Preparing for this, if it does unfold as we suspect, will be about surviving the next year or so. Large inventory + low mortgage base = owner financing explosion. Only time will tell if we are correct but we began positioning for this a few months ago with our new website and service.

A recap and links provide the story:

1. Foreclosure Inventory = 103 Months
2. New Home Sales Still Ailing
3. Home Prices Fall in Major Cities
4. Despite Positive Signs in Housing, More Declines Expected
5. The Mortgage Problem Hasn’t Gone Away
6. Does Freddie Mac Deserve Another $10.6 Billion?
7. Fannie Mae: Where the Bankrupt Only Get More Bankrupt
8. The Disconcerting Truth About Fannie and Freddie Default Rates

SellMyHouse.com Staff Writer

However, the real scary issue is relayed in a recent Charlie Rose interview with housing expert Robert Shiller:

Charlie Rose: You’ve said that 90% of the housing market is supported by the government.
Robert Shiller: Well, it’s 80% or 90%. Really almost the whole market now is government. And we know this can’t last.

Rose: And that means prices are being artificially inflated?
Shiller: It seems to. Government support is especially prominent in sales of existing homes, which shot up to over 6 million on an annual rate in November 2009, the month that the home buyer tax credit initially was supposed to expire.

Fannie Mae has reported the rate of serious delinquencies (90 Days overdue) for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business jolted to to 5.52% in January from 5.38% in December. This is a 100% increase since January 2009. But look at the chart below and explain to me how we are anywhere near an end to this housing crisis!

It is our stance that we still have some real issues to work thru before we can claim “an end to the housing crisis”.

Jason Roberts

Founder & CEO

www.SellMyHouse.com

Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be the amount of unemployment insurance, for three to six months. In some cases lenders may allow a borrower to skip payments altogether.

Haven’t we been through this already with the loan modification programs of the past year? Less than 200,000 permanent loan modifications have been secured since the program was enacted.

The new wrinkle will be the administrations push to deal directly with the massive number of mortgages that are ‘underwater’. They could offer financial incentives for the first time to lenders to cut the loan balances of such distressed homeowners. Those who are still current on their mortgages could get the chance to refinance on better terms into loans backed by the FHA.

I do think this could help stop people from walking away just because it is underwater who can actually afford their house payment. However, as a general thought, it feels a lot like just one more government attempt to help boost numbers thru the remainder of the year so that we can get past the elections.

Lets be honest, government attempts to resolve the housing crisis have been a miserable failure. More importantly, it has strapped the tax payer with a debt level that has never been seen in this country’s history. That will have a much longer negative effect on the housing market than the false boost we have been given from the tax credit offered.  Despite billions of dollars in government incentives, home sales and new construction totals are sinking, not expanding. 

The truth, as hard is it may be to accept, is that this is a supply and demand issue. Until supply is worked thru, the housing market will not recover substantially. The foreclosure inventory has to be taken out of the system. New home builds will not recover until ‘cheap’ houses are not an option to purchase. Who in their right mind would pay $300,000 for a new house when they can buy a similar house with more square footage that is only a few years old for half of that total?

Existing house values rise as a direct result of new home construction. New housing construction has also proven to be a leading indicator for an overall economic recovery.

To me it is pretty simple, we fix the problem by expediting the foreclosure inventory thru the system as quickly as possible. Until that excess inventory is removed from the system, the housing market will not recover. HAMP and other government programs will just drag out the inevitable supply and demand issue.

I wrote an article last fall discussing my ideas on how to fix the problem. I’ve been in countless board room and conference call discussions with industry leaders about this very thing. I’m still convinced to this day that dealing with supply will ultimately resolve the demand issue, and event he economic problems we face.

Jason K Roberts

CEO

www.SellMyHouse.com

Enjoy:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Please chime in!

www.SellMyHouse.com Staff Writter

24% of houses with a mortgage are now underwater, over 11 million in total. Another 2.3 million are within 5% of a negative equity position.

Highlights of the report:

“Negative equity continues to be concentrated in five states: Nevada , which had the highest percentage negative equity with 70 percent of all of its mortgaged properties underwater, followed by Arizona (51 percent), Florida (48 percent), Michigan (39 percent) and California (35 percent).

We can use our houses as piggy banks when the market it dropping. www.SellMyHouse.com has seen estimates that predict houses could drop another 15% from current levels….or 50% from 2006 valuations.

Hope not but time will tell.

www.SellMyHouse.com Staff Writer

The entire article is here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20603037&sid=a_NoPFp0r8Y4

Cutting Losses

Losses on prime loans going through the foreclosure process averaged 49 percent versus 34 percent for a short sale as of Oct. 1, according to a Nov. 10 report by Laurie S. Goodman, senior managing director of Amherst Securities Group LP. For subprime loans, losses averaged 73 percent for a foreclosure compared with 59 percent for a short sale, Amherst reported.

“The loss severity of short sales is lower but it’s not low,” Goodman said.

www.SellMyHouse.com

Driven by rising unemployment, such loans accounted for nearly 33 percent of new foreclosures last quarter. That compares with just 21 percent a year ago, when high-risk subprime loans made during the housing boom were the main reason for default.

At the same time, the proportion of homeowners with a mortgage who were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure hit a record-high for the ninth straight quarter.

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s report Thursday suggests the housing market and broader recovery could be thwarted by the continuing surge in home loan defaults, especially as the unemployment rate keeps rising. Lost jobs, rather than the shady loans made during the housing boom, are now the main reason homeowners fall behind on their mortgages.

After three years of plunging prices, the housing market started to rebound this summer. While optimists hope the worst is over, pessimists say there are simply too many foreclosed properties that have yet to be dumped on the market and expect further price declines.

About 4 million homeowners were either in foreclosure or at least three months behind on their mortgage payments as of September, according to the mortgage bankers group. Even if a quarter of those borrowers are able to stay in their homes, “there’s a lot of potential inventory coming into the market next year,” said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Those foreclosures will push home prices downward, especially in the hardest-hit California and Florida cities, places that are also coping with soaring unemployment, he said.

The record-high foreclosure numbers are being driven by borrowers with traditional fixed-rate mortgages, rather than the high-risk subprime loans with adjustable rates that triggered the mortgage crisis.

Subprime loans with adjustable rates have fallen to 16 percent of new foreclosures from 35 percent a year earlier.

Loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration also show increasing signs of trouble. More than 18 percent of FHA borrowers are at least one payment behind or in foreclosure.

Among states, the worst of the trouble is still concentrated in California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida, which accounted for 44 percent of new foreclosures in the country. Nearly 13 percent of all loans in Florida were in foreclosure, the highest in the U.S., followed by Nevada at more than 9 percent.

By Alan Zibel, AP Real Estate Writer

www.SellMyHouse.com

A total of 332,292 properties, including 16,468 in Michigan and 9,792 in Metro Detroit, received a default or auction notice or were seized by banks in October.

The numbers are up 19 percent for the nation and 45 percent for the state, which ranked fourth nationally, according to California-based RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosure and housing trends.

While the national and state rates are both up substantially from a year ago, they’re down a bit from September to October. Nationwide, the percentage of Americans who lost their homes in October was down 3 percent from the previous month — its third consecutive monthly decline; the decline in foreclosures was 1.7 percent in Michigan and 1.3 percent in Metro Detroit.

Nationally, one in every 385 households received a filing, compared to one in every 275 in Michigan.

For the 34th consecutive month, Nevada clocked in the nation’s highest foreclosure rate, followed by California, Florida, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois and Michigan.

“The foreclosure problem is still with us and will keep prices down,” said Stephen Miller, chairman of the economics department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

“The real issue is we don’t know what inventory banks are holding that they have yet to put on the market,” he said.

Michigan’s housing market will continue to lag any national recovery by several quarters, said Dana Johnson, chief economist for Comerica Inc.

But he is among many economists who expect the state to see some signs of a rebound, which will translate into an improved housing market.

“Part of it depends on a national recovery and then some stabilization in the auto industry,” Johnson said.

The Treasury Department said Tuesday that more than 650,000 borrowers, or 20 percent of those eligible, had signed up for temporary trial mortgage relief plans lasting up to five months.

But since the beginning of September, only about 1,700 modifications had been made permanent.

Congress last week also extended and expanded a key federal tax credit for homebuyers that has been credited for boosting home sales recently.

Source: DTNews.com