The Year in Foreclosures NYT

The Year in Foreclosures NYT


Last week offered some sobering news on the housing market: Even with broad government support for housing, data from the National Association of Realtors showed that the median price of single-family homes continued to decline in 2009. RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties, said foreclosure filings rose by 15 percent in January compared with a year ago.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Select Editorials on Financial Regulation

Foreclosure is generally a long process, with multiple filings as delinquent borrowers fall ever further behind. What is most ominous about the latest RealtyTrac numbers is that nearly 88,000 people had their homes repossessed in January, a 31 percent increase from a year ago. The big jump indicates that many foreclosures that were in process in 2009 are now beginning to move to repossession and, eventually, auction. With more than four million homes in that pipeline, the foreclosure crisis shows no sign of abating.

Worse, as The Times’s Peter Goodman recently reported, the Obama administration’s antiforeclosure plan (which pays cash incentives to mortgage companies that lower monthly payments for troubled borrowers) may be doing more harm than good for some borrowers.

Before a lender will permanently modify a loan under the plan, eligible borrowers must go through a trial period — several months in which they keep current on reduced monthly payments. For some borrowers, even a reduced payment is too onerous, leading to redefault. Others reported being denied a permanent modification even after keeping up the trial payments. In both cases, the borrowers do not avoid foreclosure, and are out the money they have paid during the trial period. That is money they could have spent moving to a rental home or for other purposes.

There is an emerging consensus among financial experts and policy makers that the key to successful modifications is to reduce the amount of the borrower’s loan balance, rather than merely reducing the monthly payment. The goal is to lower the payment while restoring equity, thus giving borrowers both the means and the incentive to keep up with their payments.

Administration officials have resisted that approach, in part because they believe it would be too expensive. Another obstacle is the lenders themselves. In general, a lender is unwilling to take losses by reducing principal unless the owners of the second mortgage on a home also take a hit. For banks that own the second mortgages, such losses would be huge — something they clearly would prefer not to face up to.

Banks’ unwillingness to take losses on second mortgages may also be holding up so-called short sales, in which a lender agrees to retire a first-mortgage debt by taking the proceeds from the sale of the home, even when the amount is less than the mortgage balance.

Last April, the Treasury detailed a plan to get second-mortgage owners to write down their debt once the first mortgage is modified. But until recently, when Bank of America signed on, no banks had cooperated.

Unless the banks can be compelled to get on board — allowing principal reductions to become the norm — the antiforeclosure effort may have more success in letting banks postpone their losses than in helping Americans keep their homes.