Foreclosures Fall To 40 Month Low -- Due To Paperwork Delays

[Karl]

Foreclosures Fall To 40 Month Low -- Due To Paperwork Delays, Not Recovery

Posted: 05/12/11 12:26 PM ET

Foreclosure activity has fallen to a 40-month low, but not because of any recovery in the housing market, a new report finds. Rather, the slowdown comes from massive delays in processing foreclosure paperwork.

In April, overall foreclosure filings -- including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions -- declined for the seventh month straight to 219,258, a 9 percent decrease from March and a 34 percent decrease from April last year. Banks seized 69,532 homes last month, a 5 percent drop from March, according to data provider RealtyTrac.

“This slowdown continues to be largely the result of massive delays in processing foreclosures rather than the result of a housing recovery that is lifting people out of foreclosure," said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, in a press release.

Nationwide, foreclosures completed in the first quarter of the year took an average of 400 days from initial default notice to conclusion, up from the 340 days the process took last year and more than twice the average time -- 151 days -- it took to complete a foreclosure in the first quarter of 2007. In some states, that number soared higher. In New Jersey and New York, the average timeframe in the first quarter of this year was 900 days. In Florida, it was 619.

With home prices still falling, a slowdown in foreclosures driven by paperwork delays is bad news for the overall housing market recovery. Home prices hit their lowest point in two years in April, falling 0.7 percent below March 2009 levels, according to a recent report by Clear Capital. Housing experts say the data from RealtyTrac's report does not indicate a reversal of this trend will be quickly forthcoming.

"As the servicers sort out their processing issues and staff up a little that means these homes will end up on the market as a distress sale and that will cause home prices to fall further," said Celia Chen, a housing market analyst for Moody's Analytics. "It delays the problem. It extends the recovery in the housing market,"

Last fall, many of the nation's largest lenders voluntarily halted home repossessions when flawed foreclosure practices came to light. On Wednesday, the Huffington Post reported that HSBC North America Holdings, the 12th-largest mortgage servicer in the U.S., will continue its moratorium on home seizures in some jurisdictions. According to the bank's filings, the bank will not fully resume foreclosing on defaulted borrowers for a number of months. The Obama administration is now pushing for the creation of a federal account to help distressed borrowers and settle ongoing probes into faulty mortgage practices, the Huffington Post reported on Wednesday.

There is still a large stock of homes in distress -- at least 3.7 million homes are in a late stage of the foreclosure process, according to the report -- and housing experts stress that processing these properties as quickly as possible is critical to the recovery of the housing market.
"This is what frees up the economy to make forward progress and allows home prices to rise," said Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics. "It will probably take about another year to work our way through the foreclosure mess."

Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

[Karl]

What did Sass say?

In the US people would have not means of servicing their morgage loans are allowed to keep the home?

...or what was he trying to say? ...to convince us of?

Our banks should have made accomodations on servicing of loans with persons and entities who had no means of living up to any sensible solution?

Tell us how knowingly a financial institution would allow any person or entity a loan that those making the decisions at the financial institution knows cannot be serviced?

Would you do that, Sass? Loan funds you know will not be serviced...knowing you will never get paid?

[Muadib]

Is there bankruptcy protection in the US ?

Why ?

[Karl]

Is there bankruptcy protection in the US ?

Why ?

To forgive a mortgage debt?

NO!

[Muadib]

answer my question....

[Karl]

Yes...and it allows for reorganisation - (only if there is means of servicing the new offered arrangements) - or liquidation of assets to give creditors some satisfaction.

...any reorganisation must make sense to the TRUSTEE and JUDGE. There is no reorganisation ...no option of reorganisation if there is no possibility of servicing the new debts.

For persons and entities that were 'FINSACed' they had already been adjudged by the financial institutions to have had no resources to service any reorganisation and thus the alternative 'sale of assets' to satisfy their creditors was taken.

[Muadib]

suh wait.. how people house get tek wheh and personal assets siezed against skyrocketing sums multiples of what they borrowed at the time of the collapse ?



Is not like dem nevah know bout 'debt forgiveness'.. mi hear seh a few select benefited..

[Karl]

suh wait.. how people house get tek wheh and personal assets siezed against skyrocketing sums multiples of what they borrowed at the time of the collapse ?



Is not like dem nevah know bout 'debt forgiveness'.. mi hear seh a few select benefited..

Expose them!

Published: Friday | May 13, 2011

Patrick Hylton testifies before the FINSAC Commission of Enquiry on Tuesday, May 4, 2011.

• Hylton says FINSAC debtors' files should be open to public scrutiny

McPherse Thompson, Assistant Editor - Business

The files of all debtors in financial institutions whose insolvency led to their acquistion by FINSAC during the 1990s should be opened to public scrutiny, as well as the Commission of Enquiry, to determine whether borrowers were fairly treated, Patrick Hylton has suggested.

According to Hylton, the former manageing director of FINSAC, establishing whether the bailout company treated debtors fairly required a careful and detailed analysis of the majority, if not all, of the tens of thousands of loans that FINSAC purchased from indigenous financial entities in which it intervened.

In addition to examining the cause of the collapse of the financial sector, the commission has been mandated to ascertain whether debtors, whose assets were seized by FINSAC and sold to the Jamaica Redevelopment Foundation, were fairly treated.

However, while recognising the importance of every loan, customer and their experience, Hylton, alluding to the number of aggrieved debtors who testified before the commission, said:"I do not think that if we have 20 complaints - or even if there were 50 or 80 - out of tens of thousands of facilities handled, that such a set of circumstances can lead to any reasonable conclusion regarding whether FINSAC was generally fair to debtors and the extent to which the approach to treating all debtors was similar."

Hylton, who testified at the enquiry at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, said that in any financial institution, the experience was that persons whose loans were non-performing and were aggressively pursued were those with the most complaints.

determining fairness
Currently group managing director of National Commercial Bank, Hylton suggested that the only reasonable way to determine fairness "is to have every single debtor's file open to the scrutiny of the commission and perhaps the public."

If that was done, he said, the original circumstances, the record of the negotiations which took place pursuant to making the loans, the rationale for FINSAC's approach, as well as the response of debtors would become public knowledge so that an informed position can be adopted.

Such an approach should also be taken given that, to the extent that those loans were purchased by the government and funded with taxpayers' money, then every dollar of write-off reflected a benefit at taxpayers' expense.

"In those circumstances, taxpayers should be informed of who the beneficiaries (of write-offs) were and the magnitude of the benefit they received," said Hylton.

"That is why we considered it necessary for our approach to write-offs to be well structured and carefully justified, with that justification documented in all the circumstances."

good starting point
He said that in every case where a compromise settlement was reached, there would be a memorandum or case summary outlining the details. "These memos and case summaries represent a good starting point," Hylton suggested.

Challenging the oft-trumpeted notion that it was the high interest rate regime at the time that affected debtors' capability to repay their loans, the former managing director said that to the extent that the facts demonstrate very significant discounts and write-offs approved or offered by FINSAC, then the impact of high interest rates on the borrowers' ability to repay would be somewhat mitigated.

Hylton, who now runs one of the institutions that got into trouble, said one of the issues observed during the period when Government tried to rehabilitate the financial sector was that while borrowers would eventually negotiate settlements with FINSAC involving significant discounts on the sums outstanding, several of them would initiate payments as agreed and then default again, seeking new and further compromises.

"It was also our experience - and admitted by some borrowers - that they were using this as a strategy to try and get a better deal," he said.

mcpherse.thompson@gleanerjm.com

Are you now ready to retreat from the position expounded here for years
that there were no wholesale review of each of the tens of thousands of borrowers special circumstance that had them operating failing ventures?

Are you ready to tell all here that the matter of claiming that the ventures that found themselves as failing ventures were properly run, was false?

Are you here to tell all on the forum that it is downright impossible that FINSAC could have even come into the picture unless the various managers were already in the position they were because of poor management decisions?

You already know that the idea being sold that the black entreprenuer class was wiped or beaten into recession was and is patent lie and as fact, nonsense?

[Assasin]

sho me where I said that? find it. I said there is no way the US banks wouldn't have made deals. People who can't pay either go in foreclousure or the bank do a short sale and collect less money.

Not like your bandit friends who keep on adding incredible interest and fees to people who couldn't afford it.

In case you don't know in England you go to a judge who is very normally give the home owner a very reasonable deal on mortgage payment.

STOP TELLING LIES ON ME.

[Muadib]

What I know on this matter is that no sane Govt will ever implement the policies that the then Govt did leading up to FINSAC...

Spin and defend all you want..

[Karl]

What I know on this matter is that no sane Govt will ever implement the policies that the then Govt did leading up to FINSAC...

Spin and defend all you want..

Is it spin to point out facts -
i) on how FINSAC came into the picture i.e. businesses and persons were already in default on loans?

ii) that FINSAC or other entities made concessions to borrowers who could service new arrangements?

iii) that some of the borrowers had engaged in businesses that had no hope in hell of becoming viable?

iv) the 'stories' being peddled by you and some others is far from true?

[Muadib]

my statements stands.. can you address it ?

[Karl]

sho me where I said that? find it. I said there is no way the US banks wouldn't have made deals. People who can't pay either go in foreclousure or the bank do a short sale and collect less money.

Not like your bandit friends who keep on adding incredible interest and fees to people who couldn't afford it.

In case you don't know in England you go to a judge who is very normally give the home owner a very reasonable deal on mortgage payment.

STOP TELLING LIES ON ME.

There is no lie!

No judge gives a deal where there is no presented fact/facts on means of servicing of an obligation.

You by your statements put forward the idea that you get a reasonable deal...regardless of whether or not there is an ability to repay.

Sass: You cannot just go around making those opened statements. By that ommision of the need for ability to service the loan you do not put forward the whole truth.

...and your above statement claiming that you said

I said there is no way the US banks wouldn't have made deals. People who can't pay either go in foreclousure or the bank do a short sale and collect less money.

again by itself is false! Fact is, you still continue to make false statements.

The first part of your statement namely -

there is no way the US banks wouldn't have made deals.

is false on a number of grounds.

I shall only name one - You are implying that "FINSAC'd" borrowers were never "given deals". That is false. There are even reports in newspapers' articles on facts put forward by the witnesses at the inquiry, including by some of those who have given evidence and suffered, that they went through multiple "deals".


The second part -

People who can't pay either go in foreclousure or the bank do a short sale and collect less money.

Is, if you had said that before, repeating a falsehood.
If you are now saying it for the first time - It is false!

There are many options for persons who cannot continue to service their mortgages. That the results could be Forclosure or Short-sale agreement are but 2 of them. So it is not true to suggest that it must be either one or the other.

...and no amount of claiming "lies are being told on you changes" the facts.

[Karl]

my statements stands.. can you address it ?

Of course I can.
...but before moving to your later point you must first address my questions

[Karl]

my statements stands.. can you address it ?

Of course I can.
...but before moving to your later point you must first address my questions