Archive for November, 2010
When Caitlyn Corso’s salary as a veterinary technician was cut last year, she couldn’t keep up with her mortgage payment.
She fell into a pattern of making her $1,200 payment 30 days late. She asked for a loan modification from her mortgage servicer, Chase Home Finance.
After a four-month cycle of 30-day-late payments, Corso said a Chase employee advised her to stop paying the mortgage on her Hilliard house as a condition to seal the loan-modification deal.
Corso, 26, followed the directive in May. Chase filed for foreclosure in September.
The Philadelphia region set a record this month, though it's a bit of a dubious distinction: Thirty-one percent of houses sold here involved a cut in price.
A survey of major metropolitan areas by the real estate search engine Trulia, which has been tracking this information for 10 months, showed price reductions hit historic levels in 15 of the 50 cities studied.
Philadelphia ranked 11th among the 15 record-setting cities, with the average price reduction thus far in November amounting to 9% and the total amount of reductions equaling $73.3 million.
Singer Sheryl Crow has become the latest celebrity to get caught in the real estate crash. She can’t sell her sprawling Nashville mansion, so she has gone to the extreme — putting it up for auction at a bargain basement price.
Like so many stars who made it big, Crow splurged on huge house with top of the line features. But since the real estate market crash, they have become white elephants.
Now Crow’s house is bargain priced. The bidding has topped out at $1.1 million with the online auction set to end Nov. 24.
PNC Financial Services Group Inc. was on the brink of selling Jim Durden a foreclosed house in Weed, Calif., last month when the country’s biggest banks came under public fire for improperly seizing homes. Now, he lives in an EconoLodge.
“I can’t get the house ready for winter, can’t install the missing water heater, can’t whack the weeds down, and can’t attend to the things a new homeowner needs to do,” Durden, 65, e-mailed from the motel. He has been in limbo since Oct. 7 after moving his belongings 640 miles north from a Los Angeles apartment.
After Bank of America Corp. and other lenders delayed seizures almost two months ago to check their sworn court statements in thousands of foreclosures, a growing number of would-be buyers are struggling to close deals — a sign that the documentation mess is dragging on the market.
Sometimes, the hard times help people find their way.
Thanksgiving arrives this year with Arizona still struggling to emerge from a deep recession and a housing crash. Many people have endured economic hardship.
This year, some of them have found a way to reinvent themselves and, in doing so, find real happiness.
Many are refugees from the real-estate industry, one of the state's most powerful economic engines.
When it collapsed, they were forced to make difficult decisions about what came next.
The lucky ones learned that desperation can lead to discovery.
The mishandling of mortgage records has thwarted another attempted foreclosure in New Jersey, and this time the case has multibillion-dollar implications for a major lender.
In U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Camden, Chief Judge Judith Wizmer rejected an attempt by failed lender Countrywide Home Loans, now a part of Bank of America, to foreclose on a Haddon Heights property.
The problem, as Wizmer pointed out in her opinion, is that Countrywide, one of the firms at the center of the subprime mortgage scandal, represented that it had sold the mortgage to the Bank of New York and was acting as the loan servicer.
But Countrywide never gave Bank of New York the original document or an allonge, an attachment for endorsing the transaction, the judge said.
