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One in five U.S. mortgage borrowers are underwater

NEW YORK (Reuters) One in five U.S. homeowners with mortgages owe more to their lenders than their properties are worth, and the rate will increase as housing values drop in states that have so far avoided the worst of the crisis, a new study shows.

About 8.31 million properties had negative equity at the end of 2008, up 9 percent from 7.63 million at the end of September, according to the study, released Wednesday by First American CoreLogic. The percentage of “underwater” borrowers rose to 20 percent from 18 percent.

Another 2.16 million properties could go underwater if home prices fall another 5 percent, the study shows.

First American said the value of residential properties fell to $19.1 trillion at year-end from $21.5 trillion a year earlier, with half the decline in California. Forty-three U.S. states and Washington, D.C., were included in the study.

While states such as California, Florida and Nevada were particularly stressed, the study showed worrying signs of deterioration in relatively healthy parts of the nation.

“The economic slowdown is broadening,” said Sherrill Shaffer, a banking professor at the University of Wyoming at Laramie and a former Federal Reserve official. “As more people lose jobs, it will be more difficult to sustain the levels of pricing and home ownership, and that is a big factor driving down housing prices in more parts of the country.”

Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Ohio remained the most stressed states, with 62 percent of underwater borrowers and just 41 percent of mortgages.

Other areas, though, also face more stress. Connecticut, for example, saw a 25 percent increase in homes with negative equity, while Washington, D.C., had a 44 percent increase.

“Even I continue to be surprised at the tentacles of this financial and economic debacle,” said Robert MacIntosh, chief economist at Eaton Vance Management in Boston. “More people are being laid off, resulting in reduced income and therefore less consumption. That leaves fewer people with money to buy homes, and the mentality is that people believe they should wait six months rather than buy now. Less demand means falling prices.”

Roughly 68 percent of U.S. adults own their own homes, and about two-thirds of these have mortgages. Many economists expect the nation’s unemployment rate to rise above 9 percent before the recession ends, up from January’s 7.6 percent.

CALIFORNIA, NEVADA UNDER STRESS

California had 1.9 million borrowers with negative equity at year-end, more than any other state, followed by Florida’s 1.28 million. About three in 10 borrowers in both states were underwater.

By other measures, Nevada was the most stressed, with 55 percent of owners having negative equity and borrowers on average owing 97 percent of what their homes are worth. About 28 percent owe more than 125 percent of their homes’ value.

Michigan had 40 percent of its homeowners underwater, while Arizona had 32 percent.

New York fared best, with just 4.7 percent of borrowers with negative equity and an average 48 percent loan-to-value ratio, though this could change as employment and bonuses slide in the financial services industry.

According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, prices of U.S. single-family homes slumped 18.5 percent in December from a year earlier, the biggest drop in the 21-year history of the data.

Many lenders are taking steps to keep borrowers out of foreclosure. The Obama administration has backed legislation that could broaden powers of bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages for troubled borrowers. Among major lenders, only Citigroup Inc has supported such a plan.

MacIntosh expects housing prices to keep falling until “well into” 2010. “There is no magic bullet or magic arrow here,” he said. “It is a question of trying to come up with ideas and seeing what happens. It could take a long time.”

First American CoreLogic is an affiliate of title insurance and real estate services company First American Corp.

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We make use of specialized software to compare the foreclosure activity to the MLS data to find pockets of opportunity and risk. One of the main features we use extensively is sort by $/sqft with filters for size, type, and # of bedrooms to see which cities and areas are worse off than others.

We meet each Friday afternoon in Laguna Beach and are more than happy to share our property and market finding with others. Or just drop us a line through out website.

www.mysocal-realestate.com

Duration : 0:5:30

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Learn more about the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit
and FHA loan limits in Illinois and energy-efficient housing tax credits available.

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Created this on the side while I was chasing down stuff for the homeless video, I am shocked at the amount of money that has been wasted in Southern California Real Estate

Vote Up on Reddit

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Part 6 (Excerpt)

World wide recession caused by the mortgage melt-down. Is inflation far behind?

What their ratings were based on was simply that nobody thought real estate would go down again. They were just going to keep going up forever, doesn’t really matter if you call it AAA or BBB. Isnt going to matter if the note never gets called.

We certainly saw that for years in the mortgage industry. We would refinances somebody and a couple of years later they would call us up again and say hey my house went up $100,000 in value and I bought a car and a boat and my kids need to go to school and give me another hundred grand out of my property, and it just kept going up forever and ever and ever and as long as that was happening everything was just fine. But then as we know everything just stopped.

There’s only so much leverage that could exist out there and that is why the stop started if you will. Because as that leverage continued to balloon; how much more leverage can a Wall Street firm or a bank take on to buy up more mortgage backed securities? Oh I know well carve out these tranches and well sell them off overseas. So that is where it ballooned, how wide reaching and impactful has it been?

Well we see it now it’s a global recession. It’s not a US recession for that reason. And that is starting to clean itself up, not only by the Fed aggressively here at home, by working with other developed nations around the world with their equivalents of the Fed in those countries they are doing the same thing. They are acting aggressively and that’s great for the short-term but that is like putting a band-aid on a carotid artery that has been severed, it doesn’t work. That is okay for today and tomorrow, long term there are bigger issues, bigger issues translate into inflation. Where I am going with this is the fact that right now with money being cheaper than it has been at any other time in the history of the United States.

That’s your motivation, if you’re looking for a loan, if you are looking to refinance a loan, if youre looking for a loan modification, whatever your circumstances are, this is your opportunity. I am of the opinion that five years from now we’ll look back on this time period and say, my gosh look at all the mistakes the Fed made.

One of the things I want to go back to is something you said earlier about how all these mortgage derivatives were broken up and put back together. And most of them certainly many of them got bought by hedge funds. A lot of them got bought up by foreign governments and whatever around the world. One of the things about where that’s coming in is it’s causing a massive structural problem, especially in the mortgage industry when it comes to the servicing aspect and a loan modification aspect.

These hedge funds are now coming along, and they are suing the servicers because the servicers are doing what they had a right to do under the contract that they signed with the hedge fund in the first place which was to modify these loans. While the hedge funds are saying if you’re going to modify the loan we want all the money and the servicers or the bank or whatever is saying, no were not going to so now they are getting into a big fight and I have a feeling were going to see a lot of lawsuits, which is only going to hurt the American homeowner, because unfortunately it’s only going to delay a loan modification process.

But it’s also one more reason why you want to have an attorney on your side negotiating with the servicers, negotiating with the bank, maybe even negotiating with the hedge fund for all we know. But negotiating with somebody on your behalf, somebody with the legal power, negotiating for you so if they need to go after the bank for lack of standing, because maybe that’s what it takes to get their attention, go after them and prove they have a lack of standing and say, oh great now that I have your attention let’s do something to help the home owner.

Duration : 0:6:17

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Part 7 (Excerpt)

The old rules no longer apply and Suze Ormond should know that.

We have Dan Havey the author of Real Estates Future in the studio today.

Michael, I was just curious, back when I got into the industry many, many years ago there used to be a rule of thumb that if you were going to refinance you had to lower your interest rate by at least two percent and I know as time went along and products changed that really became unnecessary, but I am just curious in todays mortgage market its a lot different than we were dealing with even two years ago. Is that still true that there is a 2% rule? Whats going on now?

I happened to catch Suze Orman on television and she was talking about mortgages, the caller who called in to the program, the question became I believe similar to what Dan just asked, her comment was that basically if you’re in 6% interest rate or above now is the time to re-fi. That is what she said, a blanket recommendation. I know a lot of people put a lot of credence into what she says, maybe you could speak to that, the lowest interest rates you’ve seen in your career, you have been doing this for a while.

I have, and they are. You know there was a lot of speak the last couple weeks about the Fed, the Fed funds rate by the way is the lowest it’s ever been in history. As of this week the discount rate is to the point that banks are lending money to each other at nothing, the Fed funds rate for intrabank lending is at zero, the problem is the banks don’t have any money.

To be serious about the refinancing, because its a serious topic, I think people are starting to see their mail boxes filled with lots of advertising crap about refinance. I believe that doing the refinance is no different from doing a loan modification or buying a house, you need to sit down with the human being that’s local, that you can know is a legitimate source. You’re going to give all this personal information about you, your family, your kids, your Social Security number, you want to make sure you have somebody there that you know whos legit.

In regard to the old rule of thumb 2%, nothing could be further from the truth, and I will expand, but to the point of Ms Ormond that if youre at 6% or higher, that is a blanket statement and blanket statements never work. We just did a refinance for a guy who was at 5 1/2%, and it makes sense. Every situation is different, as far as how much do I have to lower my interest rate to make it work? It depends on the type of mortgage that you get.

The only type of loan to get today in December of 2008 is a 30 year fixed. I know that one of the things that was really interesting to me, and that you and I have referred clients to one another for several years, so we share a number of clients, were familiar with those families and those households, and this is Wednesday, on Monday and Tuesday of this week I’ve had seven phone calls from clients who you’ve already done loans for, refinances for, asking if this is the time to refinance a loan that is only a couple years old.

And I know in several of those cases the answer is yes you’re actually helping families right now with that process. I am and we do. To answer the question, you need to determine what the payback term is, in other words when your refinance is done it’s a new loan, there’s the title insurance, appraisals, lots of different things may need to be done, not in every case, but in most cases there are costs associated with that. The cost has to be offset by the amount of savings. Its a breakeven analysis

Absolutely it is, the shorter the breakeven the better the loan. I am working on a case right now which is going to be done in the next couple of days where the guy lowered his interest rate by an1/8 of a percent and it made sense for him. It’s not for everybody, 2 percent or lower, 2% is significant, now you’re talking about really significant savings in terms of cash flow…

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Part 8 (Excerpt)

The pitfall of forcing your bank to rescind your loan for lending violations

I have a question on that, it is my understanding and I could be wrong, but they dont need a copy of the note, they need the original note.

You are correct. Your attorney of course will get a copy, because they are not going to send them the original.

Items that your attorney is going to ask for, and I forget the number, I think its 47 different items that the attorney could ask for. Heres one. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and I just heard this term a couple months ago, it’s known as an alonge. What the heck is an alonge? Well apparently it’s one of the documents that has to be in the file.

While essentially the whole purpose of this is to catch the bank, the lender having messed up your loan somewhere along the way. Because if it is true that they violated some kind of Federal Law in the past when they gave you the loan or are in violation of the loan now, you can then take them to court. And you can sue them. You can have your loan rescinded. Which basically means it comes off your credit report. This loan never happened. As good as that sounds that may not be the best thing for the home owner.

I want to back up just a little tiny bit, you mentioned the alonge, there’s more to the alonge then it sounds like. The bank needs to have the original alonge, more importantly, the person who signed the alonge has to have been authorized by the licensed entity to sign that alonge. And I know for a fact that several people in this town, in this industry, were signing alonges because they needed it signed before the loans could fund. And they were not qualified to sign.

So let’s go back to this discovery process, when we find the lender has to rescind. And I will admit after being in the real estate and mortgage industry for over 20 years, I would have to say that almost 100% of the loans that are originated, if you look at them hard enough you could find something wrong with them. Something wrong, where there could be a reason for you to rescind this loan.

So let’s say you go to that point and push it and get the bank to rescind your loan. Here’s the problem. The loan is gone, it is no longer on your credit report, but let’s say you have a $200,000 loan you took out two years ago, in that time, you would’ve paid about $35,000 in interest. You get a credit for the 35,000, and let’s say you had attorney fees to fight the bank, let’s say $10,000, I don’t think it would be that high but we are just throwing out numbers here. And $5000 in closing costs when you bought the house, so that total is $50,000. You get a credit for $50,000 off of the $200,000 loan, which means you still owe $150,000 on the house. You have to pay the difference.

You have to pay back to the bank $150,000. So its nice that we filed suit and won but frankly in this market where are you going to get the $150,000 from? I think it would be very difficult to find a bank or lender right now that will lend you $150,000 for your house. Chances are you may be several months behind on your payment and although the lender cant show your payment history because the loan was rescinded more than likely the new bank is going to say they need a mortgage payment history. And you say you have been in the house for two years, but the loan got rescinded and they say you need payment history, you cant produce it.

In this marketplace today you are not going to get that loan done. And so the attorneys know that and that’s why once they get the lenders attention they say to the lender, we dont want to rescinded the loan, we dont want to incur a ton of attorney fees but we will if we need to, if you dont want to play ball with us. What we want to do is to work together to get the best possible loan modification for our clients. So we can keep them in their home, keep their family intact.

The reality of a it is, here what we are doing we are working with a national network of attorneys that care about you and you first.

You can go to http://mortgageanswerman.com where there’s going to be information about everything including, one thing I’ll add really quickly. I have something there that is known as a Decision Matrix. The Decision Matrix will walk you through step by step by step, every single step of the process regarding what you should do with your property, should you do a short sale, should you do loan modification, should you just let the bank foreclose? Is bankruptcy an okay idea for you, or not? What are the tax consequences?…

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