This is potentially big: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may allow people mortgage forbearances (i.e. skip payments) if they can prove unemployment interfered with their ability to pay their mortgages.
This will undoubtedly help people who are jobless and financially struggling. There’s no question about it. But here’s the question: What does it do to the [...]

From the Warren Group press release:
Foreclosure activity in Massachusetts dropped significantly during the month of March, according to the latest report by The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman. The number of foreclosures initiated by lenders plummeted almost 60 percent from a year earlier.
Lenders filed 1,048 petitions to foreclose in March, a 59.4 percent [...]

Bloomberg is really on top of things. They have another great, detailed article on yet another “faulty foreclosure” case in Massachusetts. The new case is Belivilacqua v. Rodriguez and deals with the issue of someone who bought a foreclosed property from U.S. Bancorp — only to find title-and-timing problems, similar to the Ibanez case. Here’s the [...]

Boston.com has a good tally of the towns and neighborhoods where foreclosures decreased or increased the most in 2010. The place where foreclosures fell the most, however, isn’t a town, it’s a part of Boston: Roxbury. Foreclosures fell 24.7 percent in 2010 in Roxbury. Other Boston neighborhoods show up on the list for decreases in [...]

Either way you cut it, foreclosures are at very high levels as data for 2010 was released. According to the Warren Group, there were 12,233 foreclosures in 2010 — a 32 percent increase over 2009’s 9,269. But the 2010 number was still below 2008’s total of 12,430. That may seem like a glimmer of hope, [...]

The New York Times yesterday reported the story of a California woman who discovered her Truckee home had been burglarized, literally cleaned out of all possessions – including her dead husband’s ashes. The woman (Ms. Ash — you can’t make this stuff up folks), later discovered the culprit was (as she alleges) her bank. She [...]

The video below is about the Earl family, who claim they were wrongful evicted. One day they came home and found that the bank changed the locks on the doors and basically kicked the family to the curb. So what did the Earl family do? They gave the bank a taste of their own medicine [...]

From Business Insider:
Turns out that Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad was upset because his home was being foreclosed on. Boohoo. Here’s an idea: next time, try not being an (alleged) terrorist.
“The video of the sympathizing CNN anchors is absurd. Click to watch it on Real Clear Politics.”

File under: Debt burden

Even a few months ago, news that foreclosures are spiking would have been big news in Massachusetts. Not these days.
The explanation given in the Globe sounds reasonable — maininly that foreclosures are now seen as a lagging market indicator, sort of the way unemployment numbers are seen as a lagging recovery indicator.
The housing market is [...]

Scott and Larry Kudlow tackle the thorny issue of housing prices and the federal government’s latest plan to modify mortgage plans to keep struggling homeowners afloat.
Both have identified the problem: Many homeowners are still “under water” in terms of the values of their homes purchased at the peak of the market and the values of [...]