Upside Down Mortgage

Posts Tagged ‘crisis’

Predatory Lending Housing Crisis

Recently homeowners in my corner of Harlem held a soiree in someone's garden. We form a warm group of 130 people who represent the changing neighborhood -- black old-timers with a growing number of whites. Everyone brought a dish or bottle and the talk over the macaroni was cheerful. Did anyone know a good contractor? How did the Little League do this summer? A door prize, a box of Godiva chocolates, was awarded to the longest resident -- Dina Morrison, 93, who has lived with her older sister in the same place for 67 years.  No one mentioned foreclosures.

Foreclosure crisis? What crisis? Not in Harlem.

Harlem is full of the sort of people who are losing their properties all over New York City, namely little old ladies and working-class African-American families. But the nation's black capital has been insulated from the sub-prime meltdown by the very thing usually blamed for destroying communities of color -- gentrification.

While the dreaded G word has priced some residents out of the 'hood, we've seen a paradoxical upside. The house values that have skyrocketed over the past 15 years in Harlem scared off many predatory lenders who targeted other black areas. These $1-million-plus price tags have also given homeowners who are struggling to keep apace with mortgage payments the option of selling out before the bank closes in.

"There tends to be a tight connection between property values and foreclosures," explains Josiah Madar, from the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

He and other experts understand little about the mechanisms of abusive lending, other than the stark racial component.  Eight of the ten top neighborhoods hit by foreclosures in the city are overwhelmingly non-white. A map representing the worst afflicted areas -- among them Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, North Bronx, South Jamaica -- says it all. Each filing is a dot, and the aforementioned areas resemble solid metastasizing cancers, with several hundred foreclosures each.

Yet the area comprising Hamilton Heights, which claims some of Harlem's most prized Victorian brownstones, had just eight foreclosure notices, so few one can discern the individual specks.

It appears that the conmen who besieged other black neighborhoods steered away from Harlem, wagering that anyone who lived in a valuable townhouse would be too financially sophisticated for their tricks. Unlike in the outer boroughs where the racial demographic is similar but house values lower, Harlem residents didn't report a barrage of flyers pushed through mail slots that promised zero interest rates. The scam artists who solicited people to over-borrow just didn't approach Harlem as aggressively. Take a look at the numbers. Only 0.8 percent of all home-purchases mortgages in the Hamilton Heights area in 2006 were sub-prime, versus 34 percent in Bedford-Stuyvesant and 39 percent in East New York. (EDITORS -- These are the latest available figures.) Refinancing loans from risky lenders were likewise lower here.

"It was all a matter of the assumptions of the predators," said Dwayne Jones, lending director of the Parodneck Foundation, a housing advocacy group. "They did not come to Harlem." He credits the large concentration of organizations like his, as well as social networks like our homeowners' association, for raising awareness among less savvy member of the community.

Those Harlemites who did borrow more than they actually owned could take the money and run. That's what our next-door neighbor did. Literally a week before the bank jumped to possess her 1888 row house, she sold the property for a nice packet to a white family and found something cheaper. Granted, it's disruptive to move but she was spared financial ruin.

The added positive effect is that properties like hers do not sit vacant during New York's long foreclosure process. We see a vicious cycle in foreclosure-hit areas, where empty houses sink the cost of those nearby. As anyone who lived through Harlem's dark ghetto days knows, no one wants to live next to a boarded up building that tempts drug dealers to loiter. Moreover, few people want to buy a boarded up building with a leaking roof, which is often the case as banks rarely maintain the properties they seize.

This is not to say that gentrification is great for everyone. Of course it has a bad side. Most Harlemites rent apartments and do not dwell in fancy mansions. The locale is losing its status as the last outpost of affordability in Manhattan. Those suffering are victims not of the white professionals who buy shells and fix them up. No, the destructive forces are the big developers who scoop up rent-stabilized apartment buildings and then try to force out tenants by doing improvements and jacking up the price. Some of these investors borrowed more than the value of their properties, and now risk default. Then what happens to the residents living on the premises?

For the time being, though, homeowners like Dina Morrison are in a good place. There's talk among the homeowners of a jolly Christmas party, just like every year of plenty.

©2008 Judith Matloff

About the Author:

Judith Matloff is the author of Home Girl -- Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block (Random House.)

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - How Gentrification Saved Harlem

Remarks on predatory lending

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Subprime Video

The current mortgage rate credit crisis is a golden opportunity for real estate investors to turn a quick profit, provided they're looking in the right areas of the country. Rising foreclosure rates are quickly becoming a problem for banks and communities across the country.

The President, Congress and the Federal Reserve working to make an amicable rate freeze on Adjustable Rate Mortgages to slow the problem. Yet, even with this effort a total of 437,498 foreclosures were filed in the first quarter of 2007. According to Realtytrac.com, this is an increase of 100,000 foreclosure filings compared to the first quarter of 2006. Imagine what the first quarter of 2008 holds for the real estate investing market!
Savvy business investors interested in pre foreclosure investing can turn these rising foreclosure rates into a golden opportunity. Investors can buy a record number of distressed properties in short sales deals, and flip them with minimal renovations for a high return.

States with the Highest Rates of Foreclosures
Areas such as Nevada, Colorado and Georgia are ripe with opportunities for pre foreclosure investing. According to realtytrac.com in 2007, these states reported an average of one foreclosure filing for every 75 households. That is triple the national average of pre foreclosure properties.

New real estate investors can find these pre foreclosure opportunities in even greater numbers in California, Florida and Texas. According to Realtytrac.com, these states have reported the largest totals of foreclosure filings in the country. California alone reported 80,595 foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2007. This is double the number of foreclosures in the state with the second highest numbers of foreclosures, Florida which came in with 45,156 foreclosures in the first quarter.

Who’s to Blame?
Many real estate investing experts blame the rising foreclosure rates on the practice of subprime lending. Also known as near prime or second chance lending, this practice involves giving higher rate loans to homeowners with spotty credit, lower incomes and other problems that preclude them from better home mortgage loans. Naturally, these homeowners will have a harder time keeping up payments on their property mortgages.

This unprecedented number of foreclosures has created a problem for the banks. Banks do not want to have foreclosed properties on their portfolios. They simply do not have the time or interest in maintaining these homes until they can be sold. In addition, banks must reserve enough cash to cover that mortgage should it foreclose entirely in every single one of those some 400,000 pre foreclosure properties in default. That’s millions, even billions of dollars that the banks can’t use to make their own profits on!

What it Means for Real Estate Investing?
As you can imagine the banks want to sell those properties, those mortgages or to have their homeowners to catch up bad loans. Investors can easily negotiate great short sales with the banks to pick up these pre foreclosures at a discount. Never before has pre foreclosure investing held so many opportunities for success.

Pre foreclosure investing is an excellent way to take advantage of these foreclosure filings. By negotiating with the banks on short sales deals you’ll be able to pick these properties before they are foreclosed on, and you’ll be helping the homeowner avoid bankruptcy.

Foreclosure rates are skyrocketing, and this is merely the first wave of a credit crisis that's been looming for the past three years. As other credit products eventually adjust to realistic market conditions, the number of opportunities for short sales on foreclosed properties is going to increase. Being a savvy investor, that's something you can capitalize on in pre foreclosure investing.

Learn more about protecting your short sale position at Realestateinvestor.com. We feature an instant network of investors, shortsalers and buyers for the real estate investor. In addition our real estate resources, tools, documents and videos are some of the most helpful one the web.

Colin Egbert is an experienced Real Estate Investor with plenty of short sale techniques to aid fellow investors in their quest to succeed and make huge profits. He's the author of the ebook "Getting Started with Short Sales" providing the tools needed to start your own real estate investing business. Colin is also the CEO of Realestateinvestor.com a website dedicated to helping investors make the most of their business.

About the Author:

Colin Egbert is an experienced
Real Estate Investor with plenty of short sale techniques to aid fellow investors in their quest to succeed and make huge profits. He's the author of the ebook "Getting Started with Short Sales" providing the tools needed to start your own real estate investing business. Colin is also the CEO of Realestateinvestor.com a website dedicated to helping investors make the most of their business.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Pre Foreclosure Investing - Rising Foreclosure Rates are a Great Opportunity

Market Meltdown - An Elliott Wave Look at Subprime Sentiment

Loan Modification Watchdog

Two bills designed to address some of the problems resulting from the economic crisis have been signed by President Obama. The first deals with mortgage fraud and the other with helping families who are involved in a foreclosure situation save their homes.

Look out rip-off artists, enforcers of the new mortgage fraud bill means serious business. Almost half a billion federal dollars has been authorized to spend on targeting charges of mortgage fraud. Agencies the likes of the Secret Service, U.S. Postal Service and HUD are all getting additional funding to increase their security measures.

The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act now sanctions the government to go after companies or individuals currently out of reach. Currently, an incidence of mortgage fraud can result in investigation, prosecution, civil penalties and prison time at a federal level, opposed to the prior gentler state penalties previously enforced. This new Act applies to all types of mortgage fraud, no matter how minor the offence.

In the past, these schemes defrauded home owners, realtors, lenders and builders out of billions of dollars each year. The FBI intends to send a message that mortgage fraud will not be tolerated and it is expected that offenders will receive stiff penalties in order to set an example to others.

The second bill, simply entitled, "Helping Families Save Their Homes Act," is intended to simplify the process for homeowners to receive foreclosure financing and modifications to existing loans. It also makes it easier for the lender to offer these types of options and hopefully prevent an impending foreclosure.

The new law also offers protection for renters who find themselves living in a home whose owners are facing foreclosure. Under the old rules, tenants would have to move immediately following foreclosure, now they have the option to continue renting for a term negotiated with the lender. This makes sense on so many levels. Now hundreds of families who otherwise would have found themselves on the street, still have homes. Lenders no longer have to deal with the problems associated with the upkeep of an empty home. Hopefully this will reduce occurrences of complete neighborhoods of foreclosed houses sitting vacant and facing ill repair and vandalism. In many cases, reliable tenants are happy to stay on and maintain the property.

The law provides additional homeless relief, makes better use of local organizations in this role, and allows them more latitude when allocating federal funds for assistance.

Part of the reason that mortgage fraud became so widespread was attributed to the lack of a single watchdog affiliation to oversee the the sketchy subprime loan offerings, underwriting and lending schemes. Instead there were a number of small agencies, each only seeing part of the problem, but no single unit had the power to actually deal with the issue as a whole. Currently, the Obama administration has a plan in the works to establish a single federal agency designed to watch over everyone involved; from the small brokers to the major lenders.

About the Author:

Search Sandy Springs GA condos at TinaFountain.com, the home of Sandy Springs real estate experts.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Mortgage Fraud Bill Signed, Sealed & Delivered