From HW:
Notices of default, the first step in the California foreclosure process, dropped 17.5% in the fourth from the year before, but the decline may not have come from borrowers improving their financial situation, real estate data provider DataQuick said.
Lenders recorded 69,799 NODs at California county offices in the fourth quarter, down from more than 84,000 in the fourth quarter of 2009 and the lowest level since the second quarter of 2007.
“We don’t know how much of the decline is due to less household financial distress, and how much is due to shifts in lender and servicer foreclosure policies,” DataQuick President John Walsh said. “The level of default activity would certainly be higher if it weren’t for alternative strategies such as short sales, or even lengthening grace periods.”
More than half of the homes in California that received an NOD in the last 18 months have been foreclosed on or sold through a short sale. The status of the other half isn’t clear, DataQuick said, but they should be in the modification or short sale process.
“The institutions that hold these loans in their portfolios will do whatever it takes to lessen their losses, including waiting,” Walsh said. “An additional factor is all the turbulence when it comes to the formalities of the foreclosure process.”
Hat tip to several people who sent in the latest trulia rent vs buy chart:
http://trulia.movity.com/rentvsbuy/
Does anybody keep track of what percentage of NODs are people who temporarily got behind due to job loss, illness or other “life events” and eventually got current again? Or are they all lumped together?
I’ve only seen them lumped together, and none of the pundits expect anybody to cure their deficiency.
Shadash sent this along from cnbc, the story about both the robo-signing and NODs being shut-down as a cause for the lower totals in 4Q10:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/41250862
An excerpt:
What does it mean going forward?
“This prolonged curtailment in NOD volume will lead to fewer foreclosure completions in 2011 than forecast,” notes mortgage consultant Mark Hanson. “After four months of total uncertainty over the entire foreclosure process nationwide, it will have consequences on the mortgage, housing, and related sectors.”
Hanson says distressed loan pipelines are “poised to get out of control beginning in Q1”
My self-serving totally selfish buyer opinion is that the banks should clear out and sell their existing inventory of REOs now in preparation for the next wave! I can hope, but know it’ll never happen.
From the Trulia chart for SD:
Rent: $1500-$2000
Buy: $200k-$300k
Really?
Jim,
Does this include all the homes waiting to go into NOD or Foreclosure? What happened to the backlogs that are mounting?
I don’t have a dataquick account. It would be interesting to know the distribution of NODs between low, medium and high $ amount loans as a proxy for low, medium and high priced properties.
Also, does dataquick report the total $ amount of NODs so we can compare total $ amounts of 2009 relative to 2010?
I would like to know what segment of the market is suffering NODs and if there is a distributional shift over time from low-price homes to higher-price homes?