Foreclosures Continue to Rise
October 31st, 2009 | by admin |Foreclosure news continues to dominate national headlines as the unemployement rate keeps climbing. Reports say that almost 6% of homeowners are either in the rears on payments or at the cusp of foreclosure. This number has doubled as compared to just a year ago. The MBA (Mortgage Bankers Association) has stated that it sees this news as very “troubling”.
In April, 342,000 properties in the US were foreclosed. California posted 96,500 of the total foreclosures of the country. Data is cited from RealtyTrac – a web-based company. Senior citizens are also greatly affected with a reported more than 600,000 of them are delinquent on mortgage payments or have already foreclosed properties. According to the AARP, when you look at subprime loans, senior citizens are 17 times more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than those with prime rate loans of the same age.
Subprime loans contribute a big factor in the number of foreclosures in a community. This was illustrated in a recent study showing that areas which had large numbers of subprime loans also had increased numbers of foreclosure filings as well. The foreclosure news seems to dominate the airways and subprime loans account for nearly 50 percent of those cases.
Other factors affecting foreclosures in a localized area were also studied. They considered home value, race and income but arrived at a conclusion that subprime lending is the major factor for foreclosures. Unemployment also added to the increase of foreclosure rates. Many people simply do not have enough income to keep ahead on their mortgage payments. That’s why MS Foreclosure and other areas as well are skyrocketing. This fact has lead agencies such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to take up the cause of unemployed homeowners and recommend for more lenient policies in their behalf.
Many more Americans are still at risk of having their properties foreclosed. (Note: When doing your research online make sure to search for ‘forecloser‘ as well as it is a very common miss-spelling.) But the government has already issued several legislations and policies to minimize the situation. And the progress of these programs is still nowhere to be found because it takes more time than unexpected. Until these plans have proven to be effective, we may have to brace ourselves for more foreclosure news to come in the future.
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