Foreclosure found this interesting article Ralph Roberts is a Realtor who has written many books about the real estate market and flipping homes, such as Foreclosure Investing for Dummies. U.S. News talked with Roberts about some of the first things a potential investor should know before getting into the foreclosure market. Read More Here.
With all the talk about how the housing crisis has hit large urban areas—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami—it's easy to overlook its effect on rural America. But according to the Charlotte Observer, the housing slowdown could be hurting rural communities just as much—if not more—than cities.
"The foreclosure problems in small-town America may be even more widespread than in cities. Mobile and prefab homes make up at least 15 percent of the nation's rural housing, and three-quarters of them were financed with installment or personal property loans rather than mortgage loans," the Observer reports. "When the owners default, it leads to repossession rather than foreclosure, and these defaults are not included in the foreclosure data."
Read Morehere.
In a bold move to try and slow down the foreclosure melt downs, JP Morgan Chase has put a stop to placing delinquent home loans into foreclosure for 90 days to try to help homeowners keep their homes. The Chase foreclosure plan will cease putting delinquent loans into the foreclosure process for 90 days as it puts a loan modification team together and implement their mortgage rescue plan. Their foreclosure prevention plan is intended to assist home loan borrowers at risk of foreclosure receive mortgage modifications. Loan modifications have been pretty hard to get in this mortgage crisis since many homeowners owe more on their home loans than their home is worth. A loan modification is the process by which the homeowner tries to get the terms of their loan modified to accommodate affordabilty. JP Morgan Chase plans to prevent unnecessary foreclosures
Despite the fact that JP Morgan Chase is one of the largest banks affected by the foreclosure crisis, holding 1.5 Trillion dollars in mortgage loans, will be implement their plan on loans held by the bank which is only about 20% and the other 80% of loans are held by investors whose loans they service and are currently not figured into this plan, yet. According to Charlie Scharf, CEO of Retail Financial Services at Chase,
While Chase has helped many families already, we feel it is our responsibility to provide additional help to homeowners during these challenging times. We will work with families who want to save their homes but are struggling to make their payments.
One of the program’s first priorities, is to eliminate the negative amortization loans it services, most of which they inherited when they took over Washington Mutual Bank and EMC. This is a significant addition to its current foreclosure prevention program. [Read more →]
After several weeks of billion dollar lifelines being thrown to Big Business and Wall Street, there appears to be a growing consensus that the mortgage crisis was caused by low-income home buyers. Many people believe that because low to moderate income home-buyers received SUBPRIME mortgage loans to buy their homes from banks and brokers who turned around and sold investments backed by those SUBPRIME loans on Wall Street, that these home-buyers are responsible for the financial crisis we are currently experiencing in the United States and around the globe. Many are pointing directly at the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which was created to prevent redlining and discrimination in certain geographic neighborhoods by banks and lenders.
Just to name a few of the people blaming low income homeowners for “wanting the American Dream” are as follows from the Washington Post’s Clarence Page;
Neil Cavuto of Fox News opined last month that if banks hadn’t been forced to make loans to “minorities and risky folks,” the Wall Street disaster would not have happened.
Ann Coulter blamed “affirmative action lending policies” that loaded banks up with mortgages that eventually defaulted and brought the financial system to its knees.
George Will on ABC’s “This Week” blamed “regulation, in effect, with legislation, which would criminalize as racism and discrimination if you didn’t lend to unproductive borrowers,” because “the market would not have put people into homes they could not afford.”
And there’s Rep. Michele Bachmann, a conservative Minnesota Republican, who caused a stir in Congress by quoting an Investor’s Business Daily article that accused the CRA and President Bill Clinton of forcing banks to give out loans “on the basis of race and often little else.”
