'Market Trends' Category
Latest Market Data For Escondido 92029
April 21st, 2010 Categories: Escondido, Market Trends
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Home Affordable Mortgage & Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative Program Facts and Stats
April 17th, 2010 Categories: Find Your Home, Homebuyer Tax Credit, Market Trends, Mortgage News, Real Estate News
HAMP program – Home Affordable Mortgage Program for loan modification. This is where the home owner must start. 80% of loan modifications fail.
HAFA program – Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative Program refers to the short sale process expedited.
HAMP starts with a phone call from the seller/borrower requesting the loan mod through HAMP. Only 20% of these requests actually get approved.
More Interesting Stats:
3 million Hamp program packages that have been sent to clients.
1 million loan mods in process. Which leaves 800,000 short sales coming up that are currently in the pipeline.
How much does the borrower’s credit get dinged by a short sale?
There is no benefit to your credit score in doing the HAFA Program.
“Vantage Score” – a new credit bureau reporting agency that a lot of lenders are now moving toward for scoring on loans. They did a survey on 400.000 clients and they broke them down into four groups of 100,000 borrowers each.
- group one – borrowers have perfect credit, then did a short sale.
- group two – borrowers are behind on their mortgage, but all the rest of their credit was good.
- group three borrowers – are behind on all credit, but the mortgage is great
- group four borrowers – trashed every part of their credit.
• On average, those in group one had their credit score drop between 110-140 points.
• Those in category number two had their credit score drop by an average of 75 points.
• Those in category number three had their credit score drop by an average of 40 points.
• Those in category four had their credit score drop by an average of 0-20 points and in some cases their credit score went up because it made their credit better.
A Foreclosure can drop a credit score by 200-300 points.
A Borrower could possibly qualify for a new loan in 2 years with a short sale Or 4 years with a foreclosure.
Currently 3.2 million homes are in foreclosure.
10 % of all loans are currently 60 days late.
30% of all homes are upside down and the number is expected to rise to 42% by end of 2010.
HAFA is not for Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. They will, however, have a very similar program out soon.
Purpose of the HAFA program is to standardize the process
Forms.
Requirements.
There are some more requirements coming that you may not have seen yet, where the borrower could be required to make payment through the process to qualify.
SSA 7 page agreement.
RASS is the form you use to submit your offer and the service provider will need to respond to you within 10 days. If they turn your offer down, they must provide a reason as to why they turned it down.
There are ways that they can opt out of HAFA as well if it is not in their best interest.
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Some Benefits From The Real Estate Bust -2009
December 28th, 2009 Categories: Brookside Escondido, Escondido, Foreclosures & Short Sales, Market Trends, Real Estate News
It’s always nice to get a different perspective on the events of the last couple of years, and one that I respect is that of my CPA, Jim Vander Spek. Jim has written columns for the North County Times for years, and recently posted an article about some of the benefits that have come out of the current market conditions. So, with permission from the author, here is Jim’s take on the Escondido real estate markets courtesy of Jim and the North County Times… 
The ongoing real estate bust with its foreclosures and drop in home values has created difficult problems for many. These have been discussed a great deal with the hope frequently expressed that prices will again rise. However, the news is not all bad. Let’s consider some benefits from the real estate bust:
Prices are down for newcomers. People are picking North County over other places in the country because it has again become affordable. My parents moved into a foreclosed Escondido home in 1965 during a similar bust. This allowed us to escape from Canada to paradise, for which I have been thankful ever since. San Diego County is a great place to live. Of course, we now have a much more diversified economy than way back then. I know of two young professional families who picked Escondido over many options because it looked like a great town and was affordable as well.
Prices are down for young families. They don’t have to move to Arizona anymore. Stopping the outward migration of young families is vital for the long-term health of our economy. We are seeing young families buying homes and setting up their lives here instead of some far away place. Let’s keep the grand kids here. Other places don’t look all that great anymore. Staying here, they can help us become even better.
Unqualified buyers no longer qualify. People are not creating impossible and inappropriate debt obligations. Further, homes are no longer being purchased with the intent to create vastly overcrowded communal habitats. Those which were purchased with this intent are rapidly being foreclosed upon and vacated.
This is great for neighborhoods and gives relief to community services as well.
Few recent massive tracts were built in North County. These are a bane elsewhere. Our healthy inventory of suddenly affordable housing stock is spread around and represents a tremendous economic asset for North County. It’ s not as though we are talking about boarded up neighborhoods.
Foreclosures provide an economic boost. Many are choosing to skip house payments for eight months or more and then end up paying half as much for rent going forward. What about the poor banks that are hurt by this? Oh well, they have good friends in Uncle Sam. Besides, they should never have made those loans to start with. Maybe they will be more careful next time.
California is a non-recourse state for purchase money mortgages, so the legal and tax consequences of such “strategic foreclosures” are often minimal. A recent Wall Street Journal article said that households abandoning mortgages are adding $5 billion a month to their cash flow, representing a “stealth stimulus.” North County is sharing in that.
McMansions lose appeal. Who needs a 3,500 square feet house to live in any way? Excess living rooms and bathrooms you could park your car in never made any sense. Who wants to pay the taxes, upkeep and utilities? People are again properly starting to look at houses as places to live instead of as unreliable, highly leveraged investments. Hard earned cash can be spent on more useful things and to accomplish important life cycle goals.
Jim Vander Spek is a certified public accountant and Escondido resident.
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