From Business Week “Wachovia officials say the bank has hired Wall Street investment firm Goldman Sachs Group for advice on the bank’s loan portfolio.
Wachovia Corp. spokeswoman Christy Phillips-Brown said Tuesday the firm was hired to analyze the Charlotte-based bank’s loan portfolio and evaluate various alternatives. Phillips-Brown declined to comment further.
Wachovia is in the midst of [...]

We arrived in the Bay area and are staying with family in the area.  What I find hugely amusing is the property next door that is a listed bank owned property.  I haven’t looked at any comparable sales or historical sales for the property, I just find it interesting how close foreclosures strike to home.

I took a little trip in Southern California to visit some friends and we talked about real estate which is a topic often discussed since the turning of the market.  First friend had three bank owned properties listed in their neighborhood with one more on the way.  That’s out of a total of three listed [...]

When I included the “celebrity foreclosure” section, I thought it might have maybe one post a month in that section.  But now, Evander Holyfield’s $10 million dollar home appears to be headed for the auction block.  Story from CBS News This comes just one day after the news of Ed McMahon’s foreclosure, which kind of [...]

From the L.A. Times
The is the first installment in what is proposed as a four part series, and I think it will provide a needed insight into how foreclosure can occur to almost anyone.  There’s no whining about the big bad lenders, or complaints the homeowners just needed the market to hang on a little [...]

There’s quite a bit of information on the internet talking about how the whole real estate market is on it’s way to a total collapse.  Well, maybe nobody says it’s a total collapse, but the implication is that if you buy you’ll lose everything, your children will be homeless and you’ll never recover anything you’ve [...]

In a story from Housing Wire
There’s a lot said about Mozilo, and his apparent mis-step, but the underlying concept of hardship letters need to be addressed.
If you are facing foreclosure due to circumstances out of your control, you need  hardship letter based on your circumstances, not a form letter you grabbed from the internet.  A [...]

Link to release
The Office of Federal Housing Oversight released a report today on overall price declines for the 1st quarter of 2008.  Generally, the OFHEO HPI is slower to react than the Case-Shiller index in part due to the way OFHEO uses same property sales and refinances to determine it’s index, but also due to [...]

There’s an article today in USA Today about foreclosures and the mental health impacts foreclosure can have on the homeowners involved. The piece takes more of a personal approach rather than hard numbers and statistics, which is to be expected from USA Today, but it does provide a little reminder for those working in [...]

The House passed a bill sponsored by Maxine Waters of California that will provide 15 Billion dollars to individual states for the purchase, rehab and resale of foreclosed homes. It appears this is an attempt to avoid blight in areas with high numbers of foreclosures. There’s a story if you want to read [...]