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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What I learned today will have devastating ramification for the real estate marketing and in turn the entire financial and stock market and the broader economy as a whole.

If true…our real estate fate is seal. There will be more housing and real estate foreclosure carnage ahead. The road is long.

Prepare yourself and protect your family from this coming economic catastrophe.

PLEASE RATE, LINK, SHARE and SPREAD the word so others can learn about the real nature of our real estate and economic crisis. Don’t be a sponge to the talking heads that spew only that which benefits them and their bosses. Wake up!
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From L.A Times:

Bulk of bank-owned homes aren’t even on the market yet
“Banks to unleash flood of REOs” at Inman News looks at the effect of foreclosures on the housing market this year:

Inventories of unsold homes are likely to swell in coming months as lenders begin to push a growing backlog of repossessed homes up for sale — often in communities already awash in distressed properties….

Because it can take weeks or months for lenders to put repossessed homes on the market, the impact of real estate-owned (REO) properties on inventories lags behind foreclosures. Government efforts to recapitalize banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other bailout measures may also have taken some of the heat off of lenders to unload REO properties at fire-sale prices.

But with the emphasis of TARP and other government relief efforts now expected to shift to creating jobs, helping troubled borrowers avoid foreclosure and providing incentives for home buyers, lenders could soon unleash a torrent of real-estate owned, or “REO” properties — even in markets already flooded with an oversupply of homes for sale.

“It’s almost like a tsunami — you can see it coming and you know it’s going to hit but you can’t get out of the way,” said Ann Stickel, vice president of affiliated services with Sarasota, Fla.-based brokerage Michael Saunders & Co.

So how many bank-owned properties aren’t even on the Multiple Listing Service yet? RealtyTrac senior vice president Rick Sharga puts the number at 75%. That’s a lot of houses.

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Tags: “The dollar collapse” “housing crisis” “financial crisis” subprime hyperinflation inflation economy “economic collapse” “stock market” “stock market collapse” “real estate” fed “federal reserve” money “fiat money” gold silver commodities housing bubble 2009 2008 downfall investing for sale training agent agency selling subprime Peter Schiff Jim Rogers Gerald Celente Alex Jones Ben Bernanke

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Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) — The collapse in commercial real estate is preventing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke from declaring the economy and financial markets are healed.

Property values have fallen 35 percent since October 2007, according to Moodys Investors Service. Thats making it tough for owners to refinance almost $165 billion of mortgages for skyscrapers, shopping malls and hotels this year, pressuring companies such as Maguire Properties Inc., the largest office landlord in downtown Los Angeles, to put buildings up for sale.

Negative Fundamental

Demand for commercial space comes from employment and the income generated by that employment, said University of Pennsylvania Professor Joseph Gyourko, director of the Wharton Schools Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center in Philadelphia. Mounting job losses are a really significant negative fundamental, signaling that conditions are going to be tough for the industry for a while, he said.

That may spill over into mounting losses at some banks. Forty-seven percent of loans at the 7,000-plus smaller U.S. lenders are in commercial real estate, compared with 17 percent for the biggest banks, according to New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

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Rogers said that the only solution to the market crisis was to let failing banks and speculators go bankrupt and stop pumping endless amounts of liquidity into the system, labeling it outrageous that responsible investors and taxpayers are being made to bail out crooks on Wall Street.

“The way to solve this problem is to let people go bankrupt,” Rogers stressed, “All of this pumping money into the system is not going to save it – see what the market is saying, it’s saying we don’t buy that, let people go bankrupt,” he added.

“Then you will hit bottom and then you start over. The people who are sound will take over the assets from the people who aren’t sound and we will start over. This is the way the world has worked for a few thousand years,” said Rogers.

Rogers warned that the reliance on governments printing money would not aid a recovery and would only lead to the problem becoming worse in the future.

“We’re setting the stage for when we come out of this of a massive inflation holocaust,” he said.

Rogers said that excesses of credit and people becoming over-leveraged meant that they would now have to take some pain.

“Never before in world history were people able to buy houses with no money down, many people bought four or five houses with no money down and no job and then they did it with cars and student loans and credit card loans, you just think we say well that’s too bad we’re gonna start over nobody loses his job, be realistic,” said Rogers.

Rogers said that the G7 leaders, who are meeting this weekend, should “go down to the bar, have a beer and leave the rest of us alone, let the people who are sound succeed and let the other people fail.”

“What I’m afraid of is they’re gonna keep doing what they’ve been doing – which the market hates, you can see the market hates it – because this is going to unleash rampant inflation around the world, rampant confusion in the currency markets and you’re gonna have currencies gyrating all over the world,” said Rogers, repeating that the central bankers were unleashing an “inflationary holocaust”.

A CNBC expert then expressed his confusion at Rogers’ argument that overprinting of currency caused hyper inflation, seemingly displaying less grasp of basic economic cause and effect principles than a 5-year-old would.

Rogers again made the point, “When you print gigantic amounts of money and you flood the world with money, throughout history that has led to inflation.

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