Unsold Mansions: The Elite Go Begging

About 45 homes are for sale in the Tucson area with price tags over $2 million.

Some are tucked into secluded, cactus-laden canyons. Others are perched on rocky outcroppings overlooking the city. Many sit alongside lush golf courses in gated communities.

For the most part, they have something in common: They're not selling.

Five homes priced above $2 million sold in 2010. If that pace continues, it'll take about nine years to work through the existing inventory - and that's assuming no more come onto the market.

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Trashed! Golf Course Home Is Called Worst Mess

A 2-story house on the Seacliff Golf Course in Huntington Beach is the worst example of "malicious vandalism'' of a foreclosed home that a top Realtor for bank-owned properties says he's ever seen in Orange County.

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What Do I Put In A Short Sale Hardship Letter?

What in short sale and letter and why do I need to write one?
Please mail your real estate agent has explained the process of short sale to you and has told you that you need to write a short sale hardship letter. If you are reading this is most likely because they did not thoroughly explained that to you. The hardship letter is the statement from you to your lender as to why you no longer can make your mortgage payment and why they should accept a short sale on your home.

What should you never do when writing a hardship letter?
Your short sale hardship letter is not the place to complain about your lender! As you sit down to write your letter resist the urge to complain to your lender about how unfair they are and how bad your loan is. They simply do not care! You need to focus on staying factual and nonemotional as you write your hardship letter. Keep in mind that the person reading your hardship letter does not really care about your situation but has the power to approve or disapprove the sale of your home. Starting off by telling them how stupid they are, and how unfair the bank is been to them is not likely to help you.

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Write A Letter To Get Your Short Sale Approved

You can no longer afford your mortgage payment and you’ve decided to try to get out from under your house. The easiest thing would be to just let the bank go through its process and foreclose on your house. But you don’t want a foreclosure on your credit report. A short sale is a good alternative. You’ll market your home and agree on a price with a buyer, subject to your lender agreeing to take less than the loan balance as payment in full. But it’s not that simple. There’s one more thing. The bank will only approve a short sale if they believe that it’s their best option. They’d really rather that you keep making payments as originally agreed. In order to convince them that their only other choice is foreclosure, you need to write a convincing hardship letter.

Lenders know which kinds of things make loans default. If you claim to have a financial hardship, they will want to know specifically what the problem is. And they’ll want to verify it. Here are some of the more common financial hardships that tell lenders that a loan is not going to succeed.

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Fed Wants To Strip A Key Protection For Homeowners

As Americans continue to lose their homes in record numbers, the Federal Reserve is considering making it much harder for homeowners to stop foreclosures and escape predatory home loans with onerous terms.

The Fed's proposal to amend a 42-year-old provision of the federal Truth in Lending Act has angered labor, civil rights and consumer advocacy groups along with a slew of foreclosure defense attorneys.

They're not only asking the Fed to withdraw the proposal, they also want any future changes to the law to be handled by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which begins its work next year.


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Bank of America Foreclosures in Utah Could be Halted Again

Plaintiff Peni Cox who has challenged Bank of America’s Utah foreclosure practices has taken another step closer to being heard in the 10th Circuit Court. Attorneys for Cox, John Christian Barlow and E. Craig Smay have filed a motion to stay the court order issued by federal Judge Clark Waddoups June 11, 2010. The decision has allowed ReconTrust Company to continue its unabated non-judicial foreclosure activity in Utah. The judge denied Cox's request for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) July 7, 2010 saying he was not persuaded by the Plaintiff’s arguments.

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Fannie and Freddie Foreclosures Increasing at Fastest Rate Yet

Another day, more foreclosure news, more bad news at Fannie and Freddie, ho-hum…

From a story today at Housing Wire by Jacob Gaffney, we learn that the number of homes with mortgages owned by government sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac entering foreclosure is at an all-time high, and is still increasing.

Thus far, 1.46m homes have entered foreclosure in 2010. In the same amount of time in 2009, we had 1.68m foreclosures, and 1.25m in 2008. According to a study by Lender Processing Services cited by the article, the rate foreclosure starts are increasing by is the fastest pace yet.

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Home Foreclosures Still Hit Utah Metro Areas

More than 75 percent of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. are posting high foreclosure rates, according to a midyear report from foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac.

The Provo-Orem area was Utah's hardest-hit metro in the first half of 2010, with about 3,000 foreclosure-related filings by the end of June, the RealtyTrac report said. That number is an 8.37 percent improvement from the last half of 2009.

Salt Lake City was 36th on the list, with more than 8,000 properties undergoing foreclosure. That amounts to about two homes for every 48.

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As FHA Mortgage Volume Increases From 2009, Serious Delinquencies Spike

The rate of seriously delinquent mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) declined slightly from May to June, but the gross number of mortgages that are either 90 or more days past due or in foreclosure increased 35% year-over-year.

According to the FHA June single-family operations report, the total volume of mortgage in-force increased more than 24% to 6.4m in June compared to the same month one year ago. The total value of unpaid FHA mortgages was $865.5bn in June, up 30.3% from $663.8bn one year ago and up 3.3% from $837.8bn in May.

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Home Sales Around St. George Driven By Bargains

Foreclosures and short sales are driving around 70 percent of property sales around St. George in southern Utah, real-estate officials say.

The redrock town near national parks and wide-open public lands has been battered for nearly two years by a recession that put a halt to rapid development with some speculation.

Officials say sales of new and existing homes picked up in Washington County for a second month in May to 361 -- up by 51 sales over the same month last year.

But officials expect a dip in market activity this summer now that a federal tax credit for home buying has expired, followed by a slow recovery that could keep home prices low for two or three years before they rise again.

"The key there is that we stopped falling," said Allen Carter, owner of Southern Utah Title.

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Las Vegas and California Cities Show Top Foreclosure Listings

The mortgage crisis is hitting states all over the country. No state is exempt from feeling the pinch financially and all of the housing markets are looking quite bleak. However, the hardest hit areas are in the states of Nevada and California. The worst city for housing markets is Las Vegas where the foreclosures are the highest. On the list of the top 20 cities for foreclosures, 17 of these were in California, Florida, and Nevada. It is estimated by many that over 3 million people will face foreclosure this year alone. Some other states where the numbers are increasing are Oregon, Utah, Illinois, and Arkansas as well.

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How to Buy a Foreclosure

You want to buy a foreclosure? Remember, there are both great opportunities and great pressures and pitfalls in this market.

First, you have to decide at what stage of foreclosure you want to buy. There are three options: 1. pre-foreclosure; 2. sheriff's auction; 3. repossession, called REO (for real estate owned by the bank).

"The safest and best way to buy is when it's a bank-owned property," said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosure properties.

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Banks Taking Too Long to Approve Distressed Home Sales, Brokers Say

Debbie is one of California's many homeowners who have found they can no longer afford the house of their dreams. Although she stopped paying her mortgage last year, she has found a way to avoid foreclosure: a "short sell" of the house for less than she owes on it.
New federal rules speed up the process of purchasing a short-sale home.

But even though she has found a qualified buyer, she can't get the bank to approve the sale.

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Profiting From Distressed Homes

SITTING in the office of his 20,000-square-foot mansion on seven and a half acres here, Harsimran Singh Sabharwal, a real estate investor, recently shared his rags-to-riches tale: how, in 1973, he came to the United States from India with $8 in his pocket and now has a house whose kitchen dwarfs the home where he grew up, in a family of eight.

The secrets to his success? Faith, a positive outlook and buying distressed properties.

An engineer with a doctorate in business economics, Mr. Sabharwal started buying abandoned homes in East New York, Brooklyn, in 1983, rehabilitating them and “moving people from shelters to houses.”

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