Tuesday, August 04, 2009
July 31, 2009. Governor Pat Quinn signs a mortgage scam defense bill that offers better consumer protection to those who are in search of home loans. The new law offers augmented oversight of
housing mortgage companies and mortgage loan originators by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR).
"This legislation cracks down on predatory home lending practices and make stronger the rights of those submit an application for a mortgage," said Governor Quinn. "We are sending a strong signal to scam artiste and greedy lenders: You can't do business in Illinois."
HB4011 enrolls the State in the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry (NMLSR), which supervises those submit an application for a mortgage license, provides improved reporting and enforcement activities, administers new nationally education and testing standards and sets new financial responsibility criteria and standards for the industry.
"The FBI recently ranked Illinois as #2 in the U.S. in the crime of mortgage fraud," said Brent E. Adams, Acting Secretary of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) and chair of the State's Mortgage Fraud Task Force. "Governor Quinn's action today is the initial step towards lowering our ranking and prevents this type of illegal activity."
Governor Quinn also signed two bills to guard the rights of tenants from potentially fraudulent lenders. HB3863, sponsored by Rep. William Burns (D-Chicago) and Sen. Jacqueline Collins (D-Chicago), necessitates lenders to provide notification once they get hold of a property and before their tenants are required to move. In the case of consent
foreclosures issued by the court, HB153 guarantees greater transparency by requiring the grantee's or mortgagee's name be stated on the title of foreclosure.
The bill signing ceremony was held at the home of Mrs. Lessie Towns, a 75-year-old mortgage fraud victim, who faced eviction after living in her
home for more than 40 years.
Governor Quinn was joined by Acting Secretary Brent Adams, Senator Collins (D-Chicago), Rep. Marlow H. Colvin (D-Chicago); Rep. Monique D. Davis (D-Chicago); and Mrs. Towns, mortgage fraud victim.
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
Temporary solutions for short-term financial problems:- Reinstatement: Lenders are regularly willing to "reinstate" your loan if you make up the back payments in a lump sum by a specific date. A forbearance plan may accompany this option.
- Forbearance: Your lender may be able to provide a temporary reduction or suspension of your mortgage payments for a little period, such as 3 or 4 months. After this time, your lender will work with you to create a repayment plan for the loan. You may qualify for forbearance if you have experienced a reduction in income (for example, if you have become unemployed) or an increase in living expenses (for example, higher medical bills). You must give information to your lender to show that you will be able to join with the new payment plan.
- Repayment plan: Your lender may agree to a plan that includes your standard monthly payments plus a portion of the past due payments each month until your payments are caught up.
Long-term solutions or adjustments to your loan:- Home loan modifications: Your lender may be willing to rewrite the conditions of your original mortgage loan to address your financial situation. A loan modification is designed to make your monthly payments affordable. Changes to your loan may include extending the number of years to repay and changing the interest rate, including changing a changeable rate to a fixed rate. You may have to pay a processing fee to obtain a loan modification.
- Partial claim: If your mortgage is insured by a private mortgage insurance firm, your lender power helps you file a claim. Some insurers provide a one-time, interest-free loan to bring your account up to date. The interest-free loan is due when you refinance, pay off your mortgage, or when you sell the property.
For more information Protecting Home Foreclosure visit
stop foreclosure.
The house agent is hoping to evoke modify in public policy regarding
foreclosures by putting a human face on the people who breeze up losing their homes.
Face of
Foreclosure is a Web site the group has initiated in order to collect information from people fixed up in foreclosure.
The Realtor group expects that the information gathered on the site at
homeoffersusa.com will "provide the building blocks for good advocacy and eventually, good public policy as it relates to the housing market in all its facets," according to a statement from the agency.
Florida Association of Realtor officials said the organization had received a $97,000 grant from the National Association of
Realtors to help with foreclosure prevention and promote foreclosure prevention awareness.
"I feel that to provide this a human face may vary public policy in the future in order to avoid this condition again" and for more information about
avoid foreclosure. "I believe we could have avoided these huge failures and kept a lot of these people in their houses and openly, that is departing to take a lot of changes to avoid this happening in the future.
The Tulare County's
housing market shows a region yet struggling under the weight of increasing foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies, which have shot up over 12-month duration since last summer.
Both the present countywide foreclosure rate - 3.20 percent - and the total number of house foreclosure filings -8,359 - doubled from last May to this May, according to a July report from First American Core Logic, a
real estate information service.
The mortgage house delinquency charge often used to predict possible
future home foreclosure filings, also nearly doubled over the same period, to 9.70.
The new figures were not surprising and provide merely further confirmation of a prevailing trend that's pretended homeowners across the housing range, local real estate.
"It's another sign of the tough times," locality preservation manager for the city of Visalia, where more than 1,000 of the 40,000 residential units are in some stage of
home foreclosure.
Article source: http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com