Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The California Legislature is now aggressively collaborating in the banker's coup detailed by Government Sachs. Here are the details:
On Feb. 27, 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the
California Foreclosure Prevention Act, authored and announced by California Assembly Member Ted Lieu, a Democrat representing California's 53rd Assembly District. The California Democratic Party Caucus website still proudly proclaims that Lieu's legislation is "one of the most comprehensive and significant pieces of legislation in the country to stem the tide of
foreclosures and get our economy back on track," but it's probable to save as many homeowners as the state lottery, if that.
Why? The law that Lieu's Assembly Bill 27 creates is supposed to give homeowners an additional 90 days to somehow cope and/or
negotiate home loan modifications. However, at the very same time, the law requires the California Departments of Corporations,
Financial Institutions and Real Estate to automatically grant "temporary exemptions" to any mortgage lender that submits a "substantially entire application" claiming it has a "comprehensive loan modification program" in place.
And all the major banks, which are foreclosing on 90 percent of the
distressed loans in California, lined up for exemptions on June 15, the day the act went into effect, and got exemptions within 24 hours.
Article source: http://www.sfbayview.com
Monday, July 20, 2009
If keeping your home is not an option, you may want to consider these alternatives:
- Sale: Your lender will generally give you a specific amount of time to find a buyer and pay off the amount you owe on your mortgage. Your lender may need you to use a real estate professional to help you sell the property.
- Pre-foreclosure sale or short sale: If you can't sell the property house for the full amount of the loan, your lender may accept the amount you get for the selling price, still if it is less than the amount you owe. You may owe income taxes on the difference between the amount you owe and the amount you are able to pay back. Check with the Internal Revenue Service for tax information.
- Assumption: A good qualified buyer may be allowed to assume (take over) your mortgage. Ask your lender whether this choice is available to you.
- Deed-in-lieu of foreclosure: You may be able to "give back" your property to the lender, who then forgives the balance of your loan. Again, there may be income tax consequences, so check with the IRS. This option will not save your home, but it is less damaging to your credit rating. Some lenders compel certain restrictions on taking back property. For example, they may need that you try to sell your home at a fair market cost for at least 90 days.
Bay Area house prices rose month-over-month for the third straight time as sales reached their highest level in three years in June, fueling hopes that the limping
real estate market is slowly beginning to heal.
Whether the nascent recovery gathers strength or sputters in the months ahead will depend on the broader economy, the job market and
foreclosure levels, economists say.
The median price paid for an existing, single-family home across the nine-county region was $360,000 in June, down 29.4 percent from a year earlier but up nearly 7 percent from May, according to San Diego research firm MDA Data Quick. A total of 6,518 existing, single-family homes traded hands last month, up 27.8 percent from a year ago.
Data Quick attributed the improving numbers to the increasing availability of mortgages and a growing perception among buyers that prices have bottomed out. Realtors have been noticing the same trends.
"We don't expect people to go out and flip a house today and make a lot of money," said Rick Turley, president of the regional division of Coldwell Banker. "But buyer confidence seems like it's on the rise, people feel good about long-term investment in
San Francisco Bay Area real estate."
San Francisco prices held up the best among the Bay Area's counties in June, falling just 8.4 percent from a year ago, according to DataQuick. Solano County fared the worst with a 34.5 percent drop but also experienced the largest spike in sales, up 71.9 percent.
Transactions across the region have now increased on a year-over-year basis for the past 10 months. Just above
37 percent of the resold homes had been foreclosed upon in the last 12 months, well off the peak of 52 percent in February.
The data indicate that low interest rates and prices are spurring buyer demand, which in turn is keeping inventory in check, two critical components of a recovery, said Esmael Adibi, director of the Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University in Orange. "That is the very important, positive development and I believe it's going to continue,"
Still, Adibi and others stressed that the month-over-month price increases themselves don't necessarily indicate values are stabilizing. Instead, the trend could largely reflect a change in the mix of homes trading hands. DataQuick noted that the percentage of properties that sold for more than $417,000, the traditional "jumbo mortgage" threshold, rose to 28.8 last month, its highest level in nearly a year.
When a greater portion of the properties selling are in the high end, it can pull up the median even if prices are actually declining. The median means that half of the homes traded for more than that amount and half for less.
Article source: http://www.sfgate.com