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:
| Quarter | NODs | Trustee Sales |
| 2Q10 | 269 | |
| 3Q10 | 245 | |
| 4Q10 | 238 | |
| 1Q11 | 225 | |
| 2Q11 | 202 |
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.
Made the point a view posts back re this issue of “investigative journalism”.
From 2002-2007 we had “it’s a new paradigm”, “they are not making any more land”, “r/e only goes up” type of journalism. Time magazine cover comes to mind.
Now we have the opposite “crash” articles that don’t offer any real substance.
It’s the same old story.
How many reporters do you know? The ones I have met have extremely lazy personalities. Perhaps they might be passionate about their particular cause…but most don’t cover what they enjoy.
Up until about 20 years ago, the real reporting was in newspapers. They started a slow, steady decline to where they are today.
TV reporting had a golden age, but that was long ago.
Now a few things are popping up on the web with real reporting. People who know have blogs where they share insightful, truthful stuff (bubbleinfo). But we all probably miss places where you can go and reasonably trust that what is written has a level of accuracy to it.
I will never forgive the vast majority of our newspapers for sleeping, and in some cases actively encouraging, the largest housing Ponzi scheme in modern history.
If i
I think they’re just trying to make the housing market more interesting than it really is right now. We’ve been bouncing a long a flat line for nearly 2 years. Nearly ever housing stat you look at is within a couple of percent of where it was last year. Sales Volume, Pricing, Foreclosures, NODs, Construction starts, etc. have all be basically flat with a little noise month to month. If we break out of this range bound market there might be something more interesting to say.
If I want to really understand what’s going on with housing, my #1 source is bubbleinfo. With JtR on the street, I think he tells the real story with insight, 25+ years experience and sometimes humor with classic lines thrown in.
And the comments from the “regulars” can be just as enlightening…
Strange days continue. Bank of America admitted that the Countrywide purchase didn’t turn out too well a couple weeks ago (three and three quarter years after they announced the purchase): http://nationalmortgageprofessional.com/news-ticker/08/11/bofas-moynihans-admits-he-isnt-all-smiles-about-purchase-countrywide.
Thanks to this blog I’ve stopped holding my breath on the banks getting all those empty, or occupied by non-paying occupant houses off their own hands quickly. Whatever they have been doing to juggle the property taxes and the maintenance they will just continue to do for as long as it takes (2015….2020??).
Anyway Jim made the best quote of the year on this issue on July 25th and I’ll quote it again as it’s relevant,
“Defaulters will just have to wait in line.”.