From Chicago Sun Times

The multi-million dollar home of former Chicago Bulls player Eddy Curry in southwest suburban Burr Ridge is in foreclosure, according to a filing Monday in Cook County Circuit Court.

Bayview Loan Servicing filed a foreclosure notice against Curry, his wife, Patrice, Morgan Stanley Credit Corp., the People of Illinois and Kay Bros. Enterprises Inc.

According to the filing, Curry and his wife took out a $3,719,316 mortgage on the home at 6655 Lee Court on July 3, 2006. The mortgagee named on the filing is Eddy Curry.

From Puget Sound Business Journal

When her Edmonds condo went on the market, Mindy Moore thought she had managed to avoid foreclosure.

Moore listed the home in Edmonds for about $30,000 less than she owed on the mortgage. She thought the “short sale” agreement signed with the bank meant the bank would absorb the loss.

Then she discovered that her lender, Bank of America, might still come after her for the difference. That means she may have to let the bank take back her property, or file for bankruptcy because she can’t afford to pay up.

Experts say the wording, which was recently and quietly added to Bank of America’s short-sale agreement, could have major ramifications for a large group of distressed homeowners in Washington and across the country.

Well, allrighty.  Short sales are difficult enough without throwing in some verbiage requiring possible repayment from borrowers attempting to minimize the financial damage to all of the parties involved.  There are certainly borrowers who could afford to make good on their loan, and it certainly would take some effort to determine the identity of those borrowers.  But really, how difficult is it to read a credit report?  Credit reports will give a fairly decent snapshot of almost anyone’s financial standing.  BOA can’t pull credit and decline those short sales where the borrower isn’t in real trouble?

Home prices throughout California and in the Las Vegas area fell from a year earlier in May as a glut of foreclosed property pushed down the value of single- family houses and condominiums.

The median price for an existing, single-family detached house in California declined 30 percent to $267,570, the California Association of Realtors said today in a statement. In the Las Vegas area, the median price for houses and condominiums fell 44 percent to $135,000, San Diego-based MDA DataQuick said in a separate statement today.

About 73 percent of all existing houses and condos sold in the Las Vegas-Paradise area were foreclosures last month, up from 56 percent a year earlier, and such sales accounted for 51 percent all existing-home transactions in California, MDA DataQuick said. Foreclosure sales represented 40 percent of California resales a year ago, the research company said.
Full story from Bloomberg

Of note, 73 percent of Las Vegas properties were foreclosures and 51 percent of California properties were foreclosures.  Foreclosures are the market that private sellers are chasing.

Rising unemployment is complicating the Obama administration’s effort to reduce foreclosures and stabilize the housing market.

The first wave of mortgage delinquencies was sparked by borrowers who took out subprime mortgages and other risky loans that became unaffordable, causing them to fall behind on their monthly payments. But the current wave is increasingly driven by unemployment or underemployment, economists and housing counselors say.

The Obama foreclosure-prevention plan was “built around the subprime crisis model, not the unemployment crisis model,” said Michael van Zalingen, director of homeownership services for the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago.

Complete story at WSJ

A growing number of home-mortgage holders in foreclosure are taking their lenders to court, where they are posing fundamental questions about the banks’ legal right to repossess their homes, said an attorney addressing a packed crowd of lawyers Thursday at the State Bar of Arizona 2009 Convention in Phoenix.

“I’m actually going to raise more issues than I have answers for, because that’s what’s happening here in Arizona,” Tucson attorney Beverly Parker, of Southern Arizona Legal Aid, told an audience of about 200 inside a meeting room at the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa.

Lenders have sought to avoid expensive litigation in their efforts to foreclose on thousands of mortgage holders who have fallen behind on their payments, Parker said, opting for the non-judicial trustee’s-sale process.

Complete article from Arizona Republic

There was a post in the Foreclosure Discussion Forum on this site that reminded me of how far California goes to collect what they think is owed to them.  We moved from California several years ago and took two vehicles with us.  Being responsible citizens, we reported both vehicles as having left the state of California so we wouldn’t have to pay motor vehicle fees to two states.  Life goes on, then out of the blue California slaps a lien on an account we still maintain in California.  Our first notification was our bank sending us a notification of the lien which was for something like $125.00.

We call the bank, they verify it, so we start with the state of Confusion California and try to determine why they are trying to charge us for a vehicle that isn’t in their state.  Apparently, the person who handled the first vehicle paperwork was overloaded with having to do two vehicles at a time so they never entered the second vehicle paperwork into the system.  After providing multiple copies of verifications that the second vehicle was in fact no longer in California and had not been in California for a long time, we were able to get the lien removed.

Did we get the money our bank charged us refunded?  California doesn’t work that way.  If we wanted to get reimbursed the $35.00 or so the ban charged us, we’d have to complete the state paperwork for that along with the $30.00 processing fee.  I really enjoy some of California, but the public sector is a nightmare.

California’s 90 day foreclosure moratorium came into effect yesterday along with various media pieces taking note of it such as this one from the L.A. Times What the Times glosses over is the part where the moratorium is only effective if the lender does not have a loan modification program in place.

Perhaps a little more realistic reporting is provided by Matt Padilla at the O.C. Register
The law also says it does not require a bank to “provide a modification to a borrower who is not willing or able to pay under the modification.” I am not sure what “able to pay” means if the target debt-to-income ratio is 38 percent? Maybe if borrowers have to make other hefty payments — on cars, credit cards etc. — then they are out of luck.

Realistically, I think this is more “feel good” legislation that does not address the underlying causes of the foreclosure crisis or provide a solution to unaffordable payments, it simply provides “evidence” of politician’s activity to include in the next political campaign.  Unfortunately, I’m sure we’ll see just as many of those homes on our foreclosures page as we would without this legislation.  Perhaps California legislators should spend a little more time on budget issues instead.

From the AP

Thousands of Americans who have generally kept up with their mortgages are still in danger of losing their homes because they made a fateful trade-off in this shaky economy — they let their homeowner association dues slide.

Many homeowners are learning to their surprise that condo and neighborhood associations that oversee security patrols, mow lawns, plant flowers and clean the community swimming pool may have the right to foreclose when dues aren’t paid. That right is often written into the purchase agreement signed by the homeowner.

I’ve never really understood the desire to live in an association controlled community but I must confess I currently live in one.  The major restrictions, as I recall, are that your trees can’t be more than 24 feet high, you can’t have a clothesline visible to your neighbors and your landscaping isn’t supposed to be a mess.  Reasonable concepts I think and it’s less than $50.00 a year.  Unlike the AP story there’s not much chance of that turning into a hardship for anyone.

When the association fees become significant there’s a much greater risk of foreclosure due to the non-payment of association dues.  I remember a specific condo development in the mid 90s that had very steep dues considering the price of the units, but there were quite a few visual amenities such as waterfalls and streams throughout the complex.  The problems start when a few owners leave or stop paying dues creating a cashflow problem for the association which leads to deferred maintanence which leads to more people leaving and/or not moving in.  The cashflow problems start to snowball and the complex turns into kind of an eyesore.

I’ll stick with the low/no association dues and involvement, it seems to have worked out alright up to this point.

From the Associated Press

The federal government is exploring how to put Florida hurricane evacuees in foreclosed homes if a Katrina-like storm devastates the region and shelters, hotels and other housing options are full, The Associated Press has learned.

Government doesn’t have an exclusive right to lame ideas, but they certainly seem to come up with a good percentage of them.  It’s a given that disaster victims might need temporary alternative housing and there are currently a significant number of foreclosed homes which might, or might not be vacant.

But, the inventory of foreclosed homes isn’t a constant, there are always homes joining the ranks, other homes entering escrow and some will be sold and returned to private ownership.  Keeping track of foreclosed homes, with weekly status updates from many different lenders would be a very significant task.  There’s no way to tell where a disaster may strike, of course, so this constantly updated list of available properties would have to be maintained for every area where a disaster is possible.

Two things stand out as significant problems with this concept.  One is the idea that FEMA wants to keep disaster victims in their area.  Did anyone bother to think that many homes in affected communities will be damaged, possibly including the foreclosed homes considered for temporary housing?  A second issue is the motivation of the lenders who own the homes.  Lenders normally try to sell their foreclosed homes as quickly and efficiently as possible.  What possible incentive could they have to rent homes out for a limited time period unless there was a very significant premium paid by FEMA?

The article does have a line saying the “plan” would only be implemented in a large catastrophic event anywhere the housing situation was devastated and only as a last resort.  Good job, FEMA.  Those are three conditions that are very improbable to occur simultaneously.

I just got back from a little drive through California which happens to be one of the hardest hit states in foreclosure volume.  What did I see while driving around California?  Pretty much the same thing I see on a daily basis.  People going to work, eating in restaurants and even going to the movies.  I will admit I did not venture into the Inland Empire or drive to Merced both of which are being hit pretty hard, but the overall impression was that foreclosure activity isn’t having huge impacts on daily life in California.