Figures provided by the Mortgage Banker's Association suggest that mortgage delinquency rates declined a bit in the third quarter of 2010, but warn that the coming winter will show little improvement for homeowners struggling to make house payments. The Association reports that foreclosures "declined last quarter amid hints of improvement in the job market, but headwinds from defaults and a rising rate of...

There is plenty of evidence here in the Louisville real estate market and elsewhere that foreclosures have a negative effect on home prices, but researchers at Harvard and MIT wanted to know precisely how much. They analyzed years of home sales data in Massachusetts and found that foreclosed homes sell for an average of 27 percent less than homes that have mortgages in good standing or are owned...

Despite mounting evidence that many of the nation's mortgage lenders failed to follow due process when foreclosing on millions of homes, the Obama administration's top housing official has told lenders they may resume foreclosing on homes. The announcement follows a temporary moratorium that gave troubled homeowners a small respite from foreclosure proceedings. Taking their cue from the feds, two of the...

Bank of America announced recently that it is delaying foreclosures on homes in Kentucky, Indiana and 21 other states. The country's largest bank reported that it is halting foreclosures to review whether it rushed the foreclosure process on thousands of homes without reading the documentation for each foreclosure. Other mortgage lenders, including Ally Financial Inc.'s GMAC Mortgage unit and JPMorgan...

A new report issued by a real estate analysis firm reports that foreclosure rates in Louisville and Jefferson County were up by more than two percent in May. The news was in the "Real Estate News and Trends" publication issued by Corelogic, which is an information, analytics and business services company. The two-and-one-quarter percent rise in foreclosures represented a jump of one-quarter of one percent...

Real estate industry watchdog RealtyTrac reports that 325,229 homeowners in the U.S. received a notice of default, auction or bank repossession in July, an increase of four percent from the previous month, but down ten percent from foreclosure numbers from July 2009. RealtyTrac estimates that one in 397 American households received notice in July. This is a staggering number, but not as staggering as the...

The Obama administration has launched a new set of initiatives to help struggling homeowners keep their homes and avoid bankruptcy. If successful, more homeowners would be able to stay in their homes, property values would stabilize and the country's deepening foreclosure crisis would bottom out. The administration's first efforts, launched last year, lowered interest rates in order to reduce monthly...

The loss of one's home to foreclosure can be devastating, and millions of Americans are intimately familiar with this kind of financial and emotional trauma. A Southern California couple is facing their third foreclosure in the past year. The couple, who lost two homes to foreclosure in March 2010, has been forced to declare bankruptcy, and is fighting to stay in their current home. The nation's...

Foreclosed homes in Louisville that have been sitting vacant and tough to sell are selling unexpectedly well at local real estate auctions. Online real estate auction company, Auction.com, held an auction at the Seelbach Hotel recently that brought out a wide range of people interested in buying Louisville foreclosed homes. "They bid on the property and if they win the property we put them in contract...

Home foreclosures have received a lot of coverage in the media for the last 18 months. The number of people losing their homes has skyrocketed as the economy has flagged. People who bought their homes at the top of the market are so upside-down on their loans that many are simply walking away from them. The situation has communities and states scrambling to deal with the steadily increasing amount of...