Loan Modification

January 2010 Sees 315,000 New Foreclosure Notices ? Up 15%

By Carmen Dellutri

I picked up two newspapers today and one said the housing market is coming around, and the other said foreclosures are up 15% from the same month last year.  The reality is the numbers don’t mean anything when people are losing their homes.  In January 2010, over 315,000 households in the United States received a foreclosure related notice.  We are over two years into this foreclosure nightmare, and it seems that we are still playing the numbers game.The question we have to ask is:  What is going to be done to stem the tsunami of foreclosures that are currently in the system, and more importantly, the ones that are likely to be coming in the future?  I’ve read estimates of 2.5 million to 3.5 million homes are at risk in 2010.  On top of that, we have a tidal wave of commercial real estate foreclosures to worry about.

When is the Federal Government going to take this issue seriously?  Foreclosed homes are lowering the overall cost of housing because of the depressed prices.  Many individuals are living in homes that they can no longer afford, and each and every day the prices are dropping.

So, what does someone do when they can no longer afford to live in a home and cannot modify the loan.  Well, I can tell you that I’ve counseled hundreds of individuals who were willing to purchase their own homes from their lender for the fair market value of the home, and they were told no.  Yet, once the house was sold at the foreclosure sale it was sold for less than the homeowner was actually willing to pay.  Now what sense does this make?

The only thing that I can gather out of this whole mess is that there are either people much smarter than me pulling the strings or we are in a mess that we just don’t have a solution for.

Related posts:

1. Why the Mortgage Meltdown Matters
2. Seriously Delinquent Mortgages NOT Facing Foreclosure More Than Doubles
3. Housing Slump May Exceed The Great Depression

Full post as published by Mortgage Law Network on February 12, 2010 (boomark / email).