This is the time and place to post observations about your local areas, comments on news stories or the New Jersey housing market, open house reports, etc. If you have any questions you wanted to ask earlier in the week but never posted them up, let’s have them. Also a good place to post suggestions, requests for information, criticism, and praise.
For readers that have never commented, there is a link at the top of each message that is typically labelled “[#] Comments“. Go ahead and give that a click, you might be missing out on a world of information you didn’t know about. While you are there, introduce yourselves to everyone.
For new readers that have only read the messages displayed on the main page, take a look through the archives, a substantial amount of information has been put online in the past year. The archives can be accessed by using the links found in the menus on the right hand side of the page.
The local housing market has followed its expected downward course this year, and predictions it would begin to recover about this time have proved overly optimistic.
Many in the industry agree that prices are approaching or have already hit rock bottom, but there is some dissent on how much things will worsen before they improve.
Between the second quarter of 2007 and the same period this year, existing single-family home prices dropped just over 3 percent statewide, and sales dropped 18.53 percent, according to the New Jersey Association of Realtors’ Home Sales Report. Figures for the second quarter of 2008 were released this week and are preliminary.
Locally, prices throughout Burlington County dropped just over 4 percent since this time last year, and sales went down 15 percent.
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“I guess it’s déjà vu from 2007,” said Bill Dressel, executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities. “The housing market and development in general as it relates to the public/private sector partnership has gone south.”
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“We are fighting our way through a recessionary period as it relates to low housing starts and just a dismal financial picture as it relates to the business community overall,” he said.
Joseph Seneca, professor at Rutgers Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy said there were some encouraging signs in the New Jersey real estate market, including a statewide increase in home sales in recent months, a fairly constant level of unsold inventory, and a slow decrease in prices, which he said probably helps the market.
But he emphasized the starker picture for the national economy, which he said has a large impact on the state. Rises in mortgage prices, credit standards and the large, if fairly stable, inventory of unsold houses are all national issues. So are the financial problems of large institutions, which he said have “no end in sight.”
“There are lots of foreclosures continuing nationally, and that adds more inventory to the market,” Dr. Seneca said. “House prices continue to fall, creating negative conditions for equity for homeowners.
“Foreclosures will continue to rise, and a good amount of the sales we’ve seen, particularly of existing homes, are fire sales of foreclosed homes being conducted by banks. So the housing market remains on a downward trajectory and prices are likely to continue to erode into 2009, nationally and in New Jersey.”
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Experts generally agreed that the market is attractive for buyers with good credit who did not buy a house recently. “If you have equity in your home and we can price your house to sell, we can sell your home,” said Jeanne Roveda, broker/president of Century 21 B&R Realty in Upper Freehold. “Have prices adjusted? Yes, they obviously have. If you bought your house in 2005, 2006 or 2007, you may not be able to get what you paid for it.”
“We’re actually at a much slower market than 12 months ago,” said Donna Reichert, one of the owners of Coldwell Banker Winzinger Reichert and Associates on Route 130 in Bordentown. She estimated prices had fallen 20 percent in the area.
She added that things have picked up in recent weeks, “but people have to be realistic to expect what to sell their house for.”
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Dr. Seneca’s forecast was slightly bleaker than those expressed by real estate agents. He said that others’ previous predictions of an economic turnaround in the second half of this year has been “postponed,” possibly to the last six months of 2009.
“And a big reason for that is the housing market hasn’t recovered, and with these negative factors,” he said, “the near-term outlook is for further weakness.
“I think there’s more correction in prices to come because of the very large inventory on the market and the still-increasing number of foreclosures putting more supply on the market, both nationally and in New Jersey,” Dr. Seneca said.
A widely watched index released Tuesday showed home prices dropping by the sharpest rate ever in the second quarter, but the data for June suggest the severity of the housing slump may be waning.
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index tumbled a record 15.4 percent during the quarter from the same period a year ago.
The monthly indices also clocked in record declines. The 20-city index fell by 15.9 percent in June compared with a year ago, the largest drop since its inception in 2000. The 10-city index plunged 17 percent, its biggest decline in its 21-year history.
However, the rate of single-family home price declines slowed from May to June, a possible silver lining, the index creators said.
“While there is no national turnaround in residential real estate prices, it is possible that we are seeing some regions struggling to come back, which has resulted in some moderation in price declines at the national level” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P.
Home prices dropped 7.3 percent in the New York metropolitan area, which includes North Jersey, from June 2007 to June 2008, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index reported today.
While that was a significant drop, it was less than half the decline seen nationwide. And some analysts saw signs that the market may be reaching a bottom
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“Not one market is showing a positive return over the past 12 months,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s.
But Patrick O’Keefe, former head of the New Jersey Builders Association, said there are signs that the market may be bottoming out in New Jersey and the Northeast as a whole. For one thing, Case-Shiller reported that prices in the New York metropolitan area inched up 0.2 percent from May to June of this year, the first time in almost two years that they haven’t dropped month over month.
“It would be premature to conclude that a rebound is underway,” said O’Keefe, now a director with J.H. Cohn, a Roseland accounting firm. He said housing sales and prices in the region will likely remain flat into 2009.
U.S. house prices declined at a slower pace for the fourth straight month in June, signaling that the worst housing slump in more than 25 years may be starting to stabilize.
Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell 0.5 percent from the previous month, with nine areas reporting a gain compared with seven in May, the S&P/Case-Shiller index showed. Prices were down 15.9 percent from the previous month, less than economists had forecast.
The figures add evidence that the drag on the economy from the housing slump is lessening, while officials and analysts predict that a rebound remains at least a year away. A private report yesterday showed that sales of existing homes in the past three months averaged the same rate as the previous period.
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S&P/Case Shiller also released quarterly figures for nationwide home prices. That measure showed a 2.3 percent drop in the three months through June from the previous three months, compared with a 6.8 percent decline in the first quarter.
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Unlike half the metro areas in the 20-city index, the New York metro region did not see double-digit declines from a year ago but fell 7.3 percent, data show. Prices did see a 0.2 percent uptick from May to June for the metropolitan area, which also covers Long Island, parts of Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, according to the Case-Shiller report.
Homes sales tumbled in most big Northeastern cities last month — with only Passaic, N.J., showing a healthy jump in activity — while sales of distressed properties dragged down median prices in the entire region, according to two reports released Monday.
Sales of existing homes in the Northeast declined nearly 12 percent in July from a year ago, the National Association of Realtors said. The median price in the Northeast was $278,700, down almost 5 percent from July 2007.
That reflected the national trend: sales dropped more than 13 percent year-over-year, while the median price decreased 7.1 percent to $212,000.
But the Associated Press-Re/Max Monthly Housing Report, also released Monday, showed July sales dropped by at least 20 percent in five of the nine Northeast cities tracked. The report analyzed home sales recorded by all real estate agents in those cities, regardless of company affiliation.
In the one bright spot, Passaic, sales jumped 38 percent over July last year. But the rapid sales pace could be stymied by glut of properties coming onto the market. The supply of unsold homes grew 32 percent to 10.6 months, and the median price slid 6 percent to $400,000.
Home-Price Watchers Hope Drop Slows
By MAYA JACKSON RANDALL
August 25, 2008; Page A2
This week’s housing-market data won’t erase the souring situation surrounding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but there still might be a way to make lemonade.
Start with the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price-index report due out Tuesday. It will likely show continued price declines across the country as the housing slump drags on. Those are the lemons. To sweeten that up, look to the rate of price declines in hard-hit markets such as those in California and Florida. If the rate of declines slows, as some experts expect, there is your sugar.
The data are likely to be “negative pretty much across the board” and home prices are unlikely to bottom out until 2009 or 2010, said Mark Vitner, a Wachovia senior economist. But Mr. Vitner expects the rate of decline in home prices to begin to moderate “at some point in the second half of the year.” That could signal the worst is behind us, though Mr. Vitner says he thinks the market could easily sit at the bottom for at least a year.
At the same time, it would be souring if the rate of declines accelerates. All eyes are already on Fannie and Freddie, and data showing home prices plummeting more than expected wouldn’t help the mortgage giants.
“The more housing prices fall, the more foreclosures we get and the more each one of those costs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” says University of Maryland business professor Peter Morici.
The week is chockablock with housing data. Existing-home-sales data, released Monday, will be interesting to watch. While economists expect a slight uptick in sales, it could be bittersweet — the result of troubled banks having to sell foreclosed homes at a deep discount. “I think the story there is simply that you have a lot of foreclosures and banks are pricing the homes so they sell,” said Global Insight U.S. Economist Patrick Newport.
On Tuesday, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight will release its monthly home-price data through June. Additionally, the Commerce Department Tuesday releases data on July sales of new homes. Last month’s decline in sales was the fifth in six months.
Home sales in the U.S. probably teetered near a 10-year low, property values dropped and consumer spending cooled, signaling the economy has taken another turn for the worse, reports this week may show.
A total of 5.435 million new and existing homes were purchased in July at an annual pace, according to the median estimate of economists polled by Bloomberg News. June’s 5.39 million rate was the weakest since at least 1999. Spending probably rose 0.3 percent in July, half the prior month’s gain.
The real-estate recession will persist into next year as stricter lending rules and higher borrowing costs shackle demand. At the same time, equity is disappearing as home prices fall, and wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, depriving Americans of the means to maintain spending, the biggest part of the economy.
“The economy is going down a shaky path,” said Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAGlobal Inc. in New York. “We’re not going to see a rebound in housing anytime soon. Consumers are living hand to mouth, and the outlook for spending is very weak.”
In a painful sign of the worsening real estate downturn, foreclosure actions in North Jersey nearly tripled in the first five months of 2008 over the same period in 2007, an analysis by The Record has found.
At the same time, the volume of housing sales has plummeted this year. And North Jersey home values, which held steady while many of the nation’s housing markets steeply declined in the last two years, have begun to crack.
Median home prices declined 2.3 percent in Bergen County and 8.2 percent in Passaic County in the first half of this year, compared with the same period in 2007, according to a Record analysis of public property records.
“If you bought your house less than five years ago, you’ve seen a decline in the price,” said Crystal Burns, an agent with Re/Max Advantage Plus in Teaneck.
Still, the region’s housing prices have held up better than the nation’s, where average prices have declined more than 15 percent, according to the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index of 20 metropolitan areas.
But the rising foreclosure numbers are a sign of trouble. About 2,800 North Jersey residential properties — roughly one out of every 135 — were in some stage of the foreclosure process from January to May 2008, compared with about 1,000 — or one in 385 — a year earlier, according to The Record’s analysis of data from RealtyTrac, a California company that follows the market. Those numbers range from initial notices that a homeowner is in default on mortgage payments to a sheriff’s auction of the house to satisfy the debt.
And 335 actually lost their homes to foreclosure in the first five months of this year, a seven-fold jump from the January-May 2007 period. Most of those properties went back to the lenders.
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Social service agencies are being flooded with calls from homeowners in distress.
“Some people we can help, because there are some lenders that will negotiate,” said Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, head of NJ Citizen Action, which does housing counseling.
“But about half of the people who come in here can’t be helped,” she continued. “They don’t have the money to pay the current loan. They don’t have enough equity to refinance. And they don’t have a lender who’s agreeing to negotiate. Those people are eventually going to get foreclosed on.”
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“We haven’t even hit the worst part of the problem,” said Salowe-Kaye.
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Lisa Molnar of Skylands Appraisals in Ringwood said prospective buyers “are just terrified. They think, ‘Why would I buy a house if values are going to decline?”
This is the time and place to post observations about your local areas, comments on news stories or the New Jersey housing market, open house reports, etc. If you have any questions you wanted to ask earlier in the week but never posted them up, let’s have them. Also a good place to post suggestions, requests for information, criticism, and praise.
For readers that have never commented, there is a link at the top of each message that is typically labelled “[#] Comments“. Go ahead and give that a click, you might be missing out on a world of information you didn’t know about. While you are there, introduce yourselves to everyone.
For new readers that have only read the messages displayed on the main page, take a look through the archives, a substantial amount of information has been put online in the past year. The archives can be accessed by using the links found in the menus on the right hand side of the page.
A year into the financial crisis, the news is grim and there are signs of even worse troubles ahead. The mortgage bust continues and has begun to spread to loans for construction and commercial property, as well as credit cards and auto loans.
There may soon be more bank failures and a spate of corporate bankruptcies. That means that unemployment will almost certainly rise — employers have shed nearly half a million jobs this year — and those who keep their jobs will have to cope with fewer hours, measlier raises and evaporating bonuses.
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The country cannot afford more delay and more posturing. Before the crisis gets any worse, Congress must take several steps.
Lawmakers need to start crafting the next stimulus bill — without repeating the mistakes of the last one.
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Congress also needs to ensure that a $4 billion grant to states and cities to buy up vacant properties is quickly and efficiently distributed.
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Congress also cannot wait to see if its anti-foreclosure measures work. It must begin to vet other ideas and be ready to move quickly if the crisis worsens. Most important, lawmakers should be ready to reform the bankruptcy law so that homeowners can have their mortgages modified under court protection.
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The work doesn’t end there. The Bush administration and federal regulators need to develop a framework for resolving future financial failures before they occur. That is essential for rebuilding confidence in the system.
Millions of Americans are already suffering. And we fear millions more will be hurt before this crisis ends. They cannot wait until after the election for help.
From 2003 through 2007, while the nation’s private economy soared, only tax-supported government jobs grew robustly in Jersey. Private employment increased a meager 1.8 percent, mostly in low-wage service jobs. In 2006, when the country was in the midst of an economic boom that produced government surpluses everywhere, Jersey faced a crushing $4.5 billion budget shortfall that prompted an embarrassing shutdown of state government.
Jersey’s decline has been rapid and astonishing. In the ’60s, one study judged it to be among the most business-friendly states because of its light tax burden. That helped attract a steady stream of businesses and residents from New York and produced robust economic growth.
Although there were occasionally signs of trouble over the years (like the pension shenanigans of Gov. Christie Whitman, in which government shirked its long-term obligations), the state’s real decline started with the election of Gov. Jim McGreevey and a Democratic-controlled Legislature in 2001.
McGreevey, aided by the Legislature, raised taxes and fees an astonishing 33 times, totaling $3.6 billion, amid a recession. The state also passed a heap of new labor-friendly, anti-business laws that rapidly worsened conditions.
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The fallout has been swift. In 2002, the Beacon Hill Institute rated Jersey 26th among the states in overall competitiveness; by 2004, it had plummeted to 44th. Recently, corporate executives surveyed voted it one of the states where they’re least likely to expand.
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Despite the constant stream of bad news, reform has been difficult because the kind of big-government, tax-consuming politics ruining Jersey have given too many residents a stake in the system.
The rapid growth of state and local government - whose employment increased by 15 percent from 2000 through 2006 alone - has created a huge public work force not about to vote for eliminating its perks and benefits.
Meanwhile, the state’s recent tax increases have fallen almost entirely on upper-income residents, so that those earning more than $200,000 a year (just 4.9 percent of households filing tax returns) are paying 60 percent of all income taxes. Jersey has even managed to make its onerous local property-tax system progressive by instituting a state rebate program - but only for those earning below certain incomes.
The effect of all of this is to make Jersey a place where businesses and a few residents pay the freight. So many people are on the public dole that reform becomes virtually impossible.
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he question for New Yorkers is whether their pols learn anything from this. While for years people pointed to Jersey as a business environment New York should emulate, Jersey now stands as a cautionary tale. With Albany’s own dysfunctional politics, only Wall Street’s enormous earning power and Gotham’s international tourist appeal has insulated New York (and only Downstate) from Jersey’s fate. But with a prolonged crisis now possible in financial markets, New York may face the prospect of a Jerseyfication of its own budget and economy.
IT MAY BE CURTAINS SOON FOR THE MANAGEMENTS and shareholders of beleaguered housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac . It is growing increasingly likely that the Treasury will recapitalize Fannie and Freddie in the months ahead on the taxpayer’s dime, availing itself of powers granted it under the new housing bill signed into law last month. Such a move almost certainly would wipe out existing holders of the agencies’ common stock, with preferred shareholders and even holders of the two entities’ $19 billion of subordinated debt also suffering losses. Barron’s first raised the possibility of a government takeover of Fannie and Freddie in a March 10 cover story, “Is Fannie Mae Toast?”
Heaven knows, the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, both need resuscitation. Soaring mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures have led the companies to gush red ink for the past four quarters, and their managements concede the outlook is even grimmer well into next year. Shares of Fannie Mae (ticker: FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) have lost around 90% of their value in the past year, with Fannie now trading at $7.91, and Freddie at $5.88.
Similarly, the balance sheets of both companies have been destroyed. On a fair-value basis, in which the value of assets and liabilities is marked to immediate-liquidation value, Freddie would have had a negative net worth of $5.6 billion as of June 30, while Fannie’s equity eroded to $12.5 billion from a fair value of $36 billion at the end of last year. That $12.5 billion isn’t much of a cushion for a $2.8 trillion book of owned or guaranteed mortgage assets.
What’s more, the fair-value figures reported by the companies may overstate the value of their assets significantly. By some calculations each company is around $50 billion in the hole. But more on that later.
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Note, too, that Fannie and Freddie have nonpareil lobbying operations and formidable political strength, owing to their hefty donations and penchant for hiring former political operatives. Besides, the agencies claim they’ve landed in their current predicament through no fault of their own. As Freddie Mac Chairman and CEO Richard Syron recently put it, the GSEs have been hit by a “100-year storm” in the housing market, accentuated by some higher-risk mortgages that they were forced to buy to meet government affordable-housing targets.
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This is the time and place to post observations about your local areas, comments on news stories or the New Jersey housing market, open house reports, etc. If you have any questions you wanted to ask earlier in the week but never posted them up, let’s have them. Also a good place to post suggestions, requests for information, criticism, and praise.
For readers that have never commented, there is a link at the top of each message that is typically labelled “[#] Comments“. Go ahead and give that a click, you might be missing out on a world of information you didn’t know about. While you are there, introduce yourselves to everyone.
For new readers that have only read the messages displayed on the main page, take a look through the archives, a substantial amount of information has been put online in the past year. The archives can be accessed by using the links found in the menus on the right hand side of the page.
Existing U.S. home sales fell to a 10- year low in the second quarter and the median price for a single- family house dropped 7.6 percent as the real estate recession deepened.
The median price tumbled to $206,500 from $223,500 a year earlier, the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors said today. Sales of single-family houses and condominiums fell 16 percent to 4.913 million at an annualized pace.
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There were 4.49 million U.S. homes for sale at the end of June, the highest in a year, according the Realtors’ association. At the current sales pace, that represented 11.1 months’ worth, up from 10.8 months’ worth at the end of May, the trade group said in a July 24 report.
Foreclosures are depressing home prices, contributing to job losses and weakening consumption as fewer people borrow against the value of their home, New York-based analysts at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said Aug. 7.
Median home prices fell in more than three-quarters of U.S. cities in the second quarter, the latest sign of the breadth of the housing market decline, according to new data Thursday.
Nevertheless, home sales rose in areas where the market is flooded with foreclosures, indicating that borrowers are taking advantage of steep discounts.
Nevada and California, battered by a housing market bust, were the only states to show sales gains in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, according to a report by the National Association of Realtors.
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Nationally, sales fell by 16.3 percent in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago.
In recent months, the biggest home sales gains “have been in some of the markets with the steepest and fastest price drops,” said Lawrence Yun, the trade group’s chief economist. “Buyers in these areas are responding to deeply discounted home prices.”
The Realtors group said median prices for existing single-family homes dropped in 115 of 150 metropolitan areas in the April-June period, while 35 metro areas saw prices increase.
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Nationally, the median home price — the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less — fell to $206,500 in the second quarter, down by 7.6 percent from the same period a year ago, when the median sales price was $205,700.
From the WSJ:
NAR: Metro-Area Home Prices Slide
By DONNA KARDOS
August 14, 2008 12:42 p.m.
early one in four metropolitan areas in the U.S. saw home prices rise in the second quarter, according to data released Thursday by the National Association of Realtors, though the group’s president said foreclosures are distorting data.
NAR’s results, which come from its survey of 150 metropolitan statistical areas — saw 35 areas with higher median existing single-family home prices than a year earlier. That sounds a bit better than what’s been said elsewhere in the market in recent months, though it also means 115 — or 77% — of the areas studied saw price declines.
NAR also said the median existing single-family home price fell 7.6% nationally in the second quarter. It blamed foreclosures and short sales — which accounted for a third of transactions — with pulling prices down.
Breaking the country down into four regions, the West logged the biggest drop, 17.4%, while prices in the Northeast declined 9.6%, dipped 0.9% in the Midwest and fell 4.1% in the South. Prices fell the most in parts of California and Florida, with several areas reporting declines of more than 30%.
Bank repossessions almost tripled in July and U.S. foreclosure filings increased 55 percent from a year earlier as falling prices cut homeowner equity, accelerating the housing decline, RealtyTrac Inc. said.
Bank seizures rose 184 percent, the most since reporting began in January 2005, the Irvine, California-based seller of foreclosure data said today in a statement. More than 272,000 properties, or one in 464 U.S. households, got a default notice, was warned of a pending auction or were foreclosed on. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest rates.
“It’s getting worse,” Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s executive vice president for marketing, said in an interview. “The number of properties that have been foreclosed on by the banks and still haven’t sold is the highest we’ve ever seen.”
Total filings rose 8 percent from the previous month to 272,171, just shy of the record 273,001 set in May, said RealtyTrac, which has a database of more than 1.5 million properties. Through July, 775,244 properties were owned by banks, compared with about 445,000 for all of 2007 and about 224,000 in 2006, Sharga said.
The number of homeowners stung by the dramatic decline in the U.S. housing market jumped last month as foreclosure filings grew by more than 50 percent compared with the same month a year ago, according to data released Thursday.
Nationwide, more than 272,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice in July, up 55 percent from about 175,000 in the same month last year and up 8 percent from June, RealtyTrac Inc. said. That means one in every 464 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing last month.
U.S. foreclosure activity in July rose 55 percent from a year earlier as a slump in once-sizzling housing markets forced yet more borrowers to default on their mortgages, according to a monthly report.
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That means one in every 464 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing in July, the firm said. Bank repossessions (REOs) rose 184 percent year-over-year. Default notices were up 53 percent, and auction notices rose 11 percent.
“The sharp rise in REOs, combined with slow sales, has resulted in a bloated inventory of bank-owned properties for sale,” James Saccacio, chief executive of Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac, said in a statement.
RealtyTrac now has more than 750,000 properties in its active REO database, or about 17 percent of the inventory of existing homes for sale reported in June by the National Association of Realtors, RealtyTrac said.
The son of a 88-year-old Saddle Brook woman whose house had been sold at foreclosure was arrested after pulling a gun on sheriff’s officers this morning.
Two Bergen County sheriff’s officers eventually talked John Brennan into giving up the weapon, and he was taken into custody.
The homeowner, Beatrice Brennan, was walked out of the house and taken away by ambulance.
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eatrice Brennan had lived on the Adriana Street cul-de-sac for decades, neighbors said.
But the house had been refinanced and the loan couldn’t be paid, a real estate agent at the scene said.
The home eventually was sold May 16 at a sheriff’s sale.
The movers, Moving For Less of Union, showed up around 9:45 this morning and were told by two sheriff’s officers posted at the scene to wait until 10 o’clock, under the court’s order, said mover Anthony Shpilnan.
Moments later, John Brennan emerged from the house.
He pulled a .22-caliber handgun from his waistband, and the officers drew their weapons, said Ben Feldman, a spokesman for Bergen County Sheriff Leo McGuire.
Some additional information from the Bergen Jersey Foreclosure Blog:
It seems that the woman lived in the home for decades but had recently refinanced the existing mortgage. The foreclosure judgment was over $400,000. According to the foreclosure notice, it looks like the loan was taken out by John J. Brennan, the man that was arrested, not his mom, who owns the house, according to the tax records.
The last transfer seems to be a quit-claim deed. It might be that the son refinanced his mom’s home for some reason.