From the New York Daily News:
When it comes to the one-two punch of risky mortgages gone bad and a housing slump, New York has largely bucked the national trend.
But there are troubling signs city homeowners are increasingly feeling the same pain afflicting much of the country.
Foreclosure filings this spring, while actually down in much of the city, jumped 92% in Queens. Foreclosure filings also rose substantially in Manhattan in the second quarter, although the actual number totaled just 255.
“From where I sit, foreclosures are a tremendous problem,” said Carol Finegan, a foreclosure prevention counselor at nonprofit Brooklyn Housing & Family Services.
RealtyTrac, an online real estate database, reported 6,083 foreclosure filings citywide during the second quarter, including default notices issued after two or three consecutive missed mortgage payments, as well as property-auction notices. The figure was up 4% over the second quarter of 2006.
Some experts argued that the number of foreclosure filings represent a miniscule number of the city’s 3.2 million households. And filings actually dropped 15% in the Bronx, 19% in Brooklyn and 51% in Staten Island. But in Queens, the number of filings spiked to 2,555.
Like foreclosure figures, sales figures vary from borough to borough. Nationally, prices are down and the numbers of houses for sale are up.
American Home Mortgage is GOING DOWN Today. They have to get their second quarter numbers out, 6-30 by 8-8, when they went public they hired a big four firm and are SOX compliant. Falsification of the earnings statement coming up is punishable by up to 20 years in jail by the CEO adn CFO and a one to ten million dollar PERSONAL fine. They approved the dividend Friday and they pulled it back at 10pm Friday when the auditors start repricing their alt A loans and informed then they can’t afford to pay the Dividend. This will be the true story of ALT A collaspe when the “K” comes out, AHM watch the horror today.
“Subprimemania is spilling into the real economy,” said Jochen Felsenheimer, head of credit derivatives strategy at UniCredit SpA in Munich. “IKB’s statement was an end for those who believed this is a derivatives linked problem only.”
http://www.defaultschool.com/index.php
HA HA – learn to sell foreclosures for real estate brokers with nothing to do.
This ain’t a surprise. The problem is that the statistics in Manhattan and Brooklyn are more than misleading. In Manhattan, most of the people who buy housing tend to be well-to-do, while in Brooklyn, gentrification is skewing the numbers so that the poor and middle-class sell to affluent customers. Also, a significant chunk of Brooklyn is becoming Manhattanized…with the attendant mix in the population. Simply put, the only numbers that mean anything on a national scale are the middle-class buyers of Queens…and that looks ugly.