From the NY Times:
A Surge in Foreclosure Filings
AFTER 20 years as a lawyer, David Volman has handled enough divorces to know that many marriages collapse under financial strain. So when his practice, in Shelton, began receiving an unusually large number of divorce cases last summer, Mr. Volman took it as an omen. “Divorces go hand in hand with foreclosures and bankruptcies,” he said.
Sure enough, in the first two months of this year, Mr. Volman took on some 50 bankruptcy cases, an “enormous amount,” he said, given that in all of 2006 he handled 19.
Many of the cases involve working-class couples in the Lower Naugatuck Valley who can no longer afford their mortgages. “People are walking into my office and saying: ‘Here are the keys. Do whatever you have to do. I just want to get out of this so I can sleep at night,’ ” he said.
A slower housing market and the proliferation of risky mortgage products continue to drive up foreclosure rates across Connecticut. Preliminary figures for February gathered by RealtyTrac Inc., a national online marketplace for foreclosure properties, show a total of 1,451 foreclosure filings in Connecticut, a 61 percent increase over the corresponding period last year.
That surge followed a steep rise in January as well. The 1,287 foreclosure filings in Connecticut that month represented a 67 percent increase over January 2006, according to the company’s figures.
These figures are consistent with a report issued by the Mortgage Bankers Association last week showing that the percentage of foreclosures initiated nationwide in the last three months of 2006 was the worst for any quarter since the group started reporting the numbers 37 years ago.
“Connecticut uses the same underwriting guidelines as everyplace else, so what’s happening here is the same as what’s happening in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts,” said Thomas Egan, president of the Connecticut Mortgage Bankers Association and a sales manager with Indymac, a mortgage company. “Lending was just a little too loose, along with a real estate market that isn’t growing.”