bubbleinfo.com

Hat tip to SM for sending this along, from Yahoo.com:

It’s no secret that Bank of America wants to put its mortgage-related woes behind it. But it appears that a key $8.5 billion settlement with large investors is playing a role in pushing many more people into foreclosures.

The number of homes across the country that received an initial default notice — the first step in the foreclosure process — jumped 33 percent in August from July, the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac reported last week. It was the largest monthly increase since August 2007, right after the housing bubble had burst.

Now a preliminary analysis reveals the largest escalation of foreclosures came from Bank of America. Just in California, default notices sent by Bank of America soared 96 percent in August from the previous month.

The dramatic rise is particularly evident in certain California towns and cities. For instance, notices surged 95 percent in Fresno and 76 percent in Sacramento.

Bank of America says that taking action on its foreclosure pipeline will set the stage for a housing market recovery. However, consumer advocates say Bank of America and the other lenders are ramping up foreclosures without cleaning up shoddy paperwork practices, which led to a moratorium in foreclosures last October.

“Bank of America has a ticking time bomb in its books and it needs to show investors that it is moving,” said Ira Rheingold, an attorney and executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

“‘Does that mean it has improved its practices?’ No. But Bank of America is in a desperate place,” said Rheingold.

On June 29, the Charlotte, N.C. bank struck an $8.5 billion settlement with a group of large investors– including Pimco, the New York Fed and Blackrock– who claimed the bank had sold them poor quality investments based on faulty mortgages. The settlement is still subject to court approval; a decision is expected in November. Several other investors and homeowners have also filed objections with the court to block the settlement.

Bank of America spokesman Richard Simon said the bank’s increased foreclosure actions had nothing to do with the settlement. Instead it stems mainly from a return to more timely filings on new defaults. He also noted that the bank has improved quality controls and was moving homes into foreclosure “only after all other options with homeowners have been exhausted.”

Clearing the backlog of foreclosures and defaulted loans is a key part of the terms of the settlement. Bank of America has to reduce the number of risky mortgage loans and find third-party companies that can help speed up the process. This includes helping homeowners modify loans or herding defaulted loans into foreclosure sales.

The bank’s actions to start clearing the backlog started from the date the settlement was signed, said Scott Humphries, a partner at law firm Gibbs & Bruns, which represented investors in the settlement. “It does not have to wait for court approval,” he said.

Bank of America is hopeful that the settlement will be approved, as it’s a key part of the process to enable management to focus on other issues.

The bank’s stock has been decimated this year — falling more than 50 percent since January. That’s because Bank of America has been hit by a spate of lawsuits from large investors, the government and corporations who say the bank should either buy back the billions of dollars of faulty mortgages or pay damages. Most of the mortgages were written by Countrywide Financial Corp., the country’s largest mortgage lender which Bank of America bought in 2008.

On the national level, there wasn’t any immediate reason, other than the Bank of America settlement, to explain the spike of defaults in such places as Tallahassee, Fla., where an additional 81 percent of homeowners received default notices. In Carson City, Nev., default notices rose by 185 percent.

Consumer advocates say there aren’t any signs that the shoddy paperwork practices have been cleaned up even as foreclosures are being sped up.

“Bank of America will do the exact same thing now, except faster,” said Don Barrett, partner at the Barrett Law Group, which is representing homeowners who seek to block the settlement. Barrett is a former tobacco lawyer who represented cases for attorneys general of several states against the tobacco industry.

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Is BofA continuing to surge? Here are the monthly counts of NODs in SD County and statewide (September’s count is month-to-date):

The mainstream media and blogs were buzzing this week about the big increase in BofA’s NOD filings last month.

Let’s examine the local NOD and NOTS counts to see if the foreclosure waters are rising. These are the monthly totals of notices/sales for all property types in SD County filed by all lenders, with BofA’s total right below (and NSDCC counts for SFRs only):

Looking at September’s month-to-date totals, the new-notice issuance is cooling off already. It doesn’t really matter how many notices they file, unless they actually start forclosing on people. We’ll keep an eye on them.

Whatever happened to investigative reporting? 

Today’s story on cnbc.com about rising delinquencies includes the same lightweight quotes from another ivory-tower guy, and if you just read the headline it sounds like the sky is falling again. In the text it says that the second-quarter delinquency rate increased 0.12% from the previous quarter, but is still down 1.41% from the same period a year ago. 0.12% – that’s it?

They never bother with two important points:

1.  The servicers tell you that you need to go delinquent if you want to loan-mod or short-sell.

2.  The servicers may be carefully regulating the flow of who gets reported as delinquent.

If the policy is to keep kicking the can down the road, it doesn’t matter why or how many people go delinquent, because the servicers can just drip them out as needed.  But it would be nice if the MSM can look into it a little further than just including this opinion (not fact) from the article:

The data suggest that persistently high U.S. unemployment rate is making it harder for people to keep up on their mortgage payments, and offer a grim outlook for a housing sector.

“Mortgage loans that are one payment, or 30 days, past due are very much driven by changes in the labor market, and the increase in these delinquencies clearly reflects the deterioration we saw in the labor market during the second quarter,” Brinkmann said.

We need that guy from Yahoo Sports to cover housing!

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Are delinquencies turning into SFR defaults around North San Diego County’s Coastal region?  On a quarterly basis, it looks like more of the same – they are foreclosing on roughly one SFR per day between Carlsbad and La Jolla:

Here’s how it looks on a monthly graph:

We got excited in 1Q11 thinking that the servicers were increasing the foreclosure rate, only to be disappointed in 2Q11. It looks too uniform and regulated to me.

ocerenter noted two posts ago – could the foreclosure crisis be turning a corner?

I join in his skepticism, due to the numerous ways the data can be manipulated – primarily, we’ll never know how many defaulters are not being foreclosed.  The bankers can just let people live for free if they want, and the public won’t know.

In San Diego County, there are more REOs and short-sale closings, than properties being foreclosed (based on MLS vs foreclosureradar stats):

If anything, the liquidation flow indicates that the bankers have become better at managing the pipeline – as long as they keep it around 1,000 properties per month. At least they are providing some inventory!

But what about the shadow inventory? Will the underwater folks provide an unmanageable event for servicers in the future? Not as long as selling about 1,000 properties per month is acceptable to the bankers and investors. Defaulters will just have to wait in line!

In trying to keep my promise to post only NSDCC-related data, here’s a national article from G-S, with NSDCC relevance at the bottom. Hat tip to Aztec for sending this along:

As of 1Q, the number of seriously delinquent federally backed loans surpassed the number held by banks and private label securitizations and now accounts for the majority of seriously delinquent mortgages (seriously delinquent mortgages comprise loans in the foreclosure process as well as loans that are 90-plus days delinquent but not yet in foreclosure).

This shift is due to the persistently elevated level of seriously delinquent loans among Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), in contrast with private-label and bank-held loans, where serious delinquencies peaked in 2009 and have declined significantly since.

The chart below shows the number of seriously delinquent mortgages backed by federal entities and the total mortgage market; the right axis shows seriously delinquent loans as a share of the total.

The federal share of REO property is also rising.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the recent foreclosure stats for San Diego County. 

It appears that the banks/servicers have found a steady rut for their foreclosure production:

It’s hard to believe that NODs are down 15%. 

It’s doubtful that they’ll deviate from the plan if it is working?  They declare that they are doing more short sales in order to help people avoid foreclosure, and the government gets off their back. 

Meanwhile, how’s that free-rent program?

These numbers look too uniform, yet nobody questions them – instead, more psycho-babble from a variety of casual observers.  From sddt.com:

Foreclosure activity held steady in May, as the most prominent factor in today’s housing market appears to have settled into a comfortable monthly level.

Banks foreclosed on 1,125 homes last month, according to data provided by the San Diego County Assessor’s Office, virtually unchanged from April, when there were 1,121.  It marks three straight months, and four of five this year, with the monthly total of trustee deeds — the final step in the foreclosure process — coming within 50 of 1,100.

Last month’s total is also in line with May 2010, when banks foreclosed 1,148 homes, or 2 percent more than this May.

Notices of default (NODs) — the first step in the foreclosure process, registering that a borrower is in arrears of payment — also showed little change.  May saw 1,647 borrowers receive NODs, a mere 1.4 percent increase from the 1,624 in April, and an 8.3 percent decrease from the 1,798 in the year-ago month.

Read the rest of this entry »

The only value of this data below is trying to predict how home buyers and sellers will interpret it.

Because the accuracy is suspect. For example, the ‘homes in foreclosure process’ for San Diego is more than 20% higher than the 12,561 properties shown to be in default by foreclosureradar.com. But you could also wonder about the +7.5% increase in prices too.

Sellers are happy to ignore any bad news, but how about the buyers? Does the frustration cause buyers to settle after months or years, or do they get more determined? I think there is a little of both – in my experience the buyers are holding out more for the best quality, but once they find it, they’re willing to add a little extra mustard to the price if that’s what it takes to get it over with!

The media perpetuates the idea that more foreclosures means lower prices (whether it’s true or not). But with buyers squeezing for better quality, we’ll probably continue to see the best-quality homes getting bid up, and the inferior homes getting beat down.

It’s all over the news - the housing double dip is here.

They say that the DD is caused by an overload of foreclosures dragging down prices – but they are talking about the overall national market. 

Are the recent trustee sales building a backlog of REOs around San Diego?

It looks like more of the same around here – just when the servicers get some momentum, they turn off the spigot. There have only been 14 successful trustee sales in NSDCC over the last two weeks, so we’re back to the 1+ foreclosure per day.

The threat of future foreclosures is always lingering – could the worst be yet to come?  With the banks and servicers controlling the flow, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to expect a flood coming anytime soon – or ever.

How many REOs are floating around in the shadows?

Here are the San Diego County properties owned by each lender, the number of SFRs they own in North San Diego County Coastal, and the count of how many of those aren’t listed yet:

In the depressed areas where REOs are abundant, there’s no surprise to see some can-kicking, but around North County Coastal it’s been quiet. A few of the shadows have just been foreclosed, so you know there is some lag for evictions, repairs, and processing.  Others are involved in litigation too, so it doesn’t appear that they are purposely delaying the process much around North SD County Coastal.

The buyers around NSDCC will welcome the 25 well-priced SFR REOs when they hit the open market over the next couple of months – expect bidding wars!