The value of homes in Miami that was high in the last 21 years has started to decline significantly due to foreclosures. The previously owned single-family homes of the area, over the last year, have declined by 28.3 percent. Miami stands second to Las Vegas in this matter whose real estate home prices fell by 28.6 percent. This decline has been mainly due to the banks that are trying to unload the distressed properties. The real estate in Florida has been asking for a price for home that is below the price that is due on mortgage. This is termed as “short sales” by them.

A newly built home near the University of Miami that cost $979,000 two years back is now $599,000. About 20 percent of the 47,000 condominiums and 24 percent of the 34,000 single-family homes for sale in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties were put up for short sales. This has created a competition among the homeowners in the South Miami neighborhood. Alexandra Swanberg made a reduction from $287,000 to $245,000 on her property in 2007. Several buyers are eagerly waiting for further decline in the price of homes.

According to Andrea Heuson, a professor of finance at the University of Miami,

“The ‘rent vs. buy decision’ is something you used to see in old real estate textbooks; the new ones don’t even have it in there because for so long it was obvious that you should buy, not rent,”.

Pasquale Pisana, a homeowner, bought a home for $285,000 at downtown Miami last year. He had plans to relocate here after selling his old home for $349,000. But surprisingly he could not get buyers and now has put up the new condo on rent at a discount. The foreclosure problem has proved heavily bad for the homeowners but very effective for the first time buyers.

Sellers who thought that they could sell their properties at great prices after some years are at real stake. The ever increasing prices of homes have made the current time a hard to believe thing for them. Once, these sellers have refused to sell their homes at a price that was below their expectations. But today they regret as they are unable to get even a single buyer for their home. According to some recent data, the sales volume seems to have somewhat stabilized statewide after several months of decline. But the problem will be totally gone only when foreclosure fades away.

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The recent rise in foreclosures are not only making homeowners lose their homes, but is causing losses to neighbor’s as well. For example, let us take the case of Valerie Guerra’s home in Liverpool. The value of her home as depreciated by more than $100,000 due to falling real estate prices, even though her husband and her have been clearing all their mortgage payments on time. Even though she had nothing to do with it, she suddenly finds herself $100,000 poorer, with a large chunk of her home value gone.

Valerie says “I certainly believe my house is worth less than what we paid, but we’re here for the long haul.” The Guerras are hardly alone. They are lucky that they are not looking to sell their home in a hurry. Even people who want to get out of neighborhoods where there have been a lot of foreclosures, are stuck because they are facing a massive drop in the price of their homes. As it is, lenders have taken over hundreds of lots in many neighborhoods in East Bay that were foreclosed, and this is now taking its toll on the rest of the neighborhood that continues to live in the same vicinity.

Though buyers tend to get some good deals from foreclosed homes being auctioned, the hard reality is that falling property prices have erased years of gains for many people who had bought homes many years back just because they live next to a bank-possessed property.

A Fremont citizen, Mary Ann McFadden, who has two foreclosures on her block adds “I’m sure the foreclosures have affected our property values. I feel sorry for the people who lost their homes.”

The McFaddens and the Guerras form a dwindling circle of homeowners that are suffering in the aftermath of a crashing real estate market that was in the middle of a so-called ‘boom’ till the middle of last year in East Bay.

A resident of Brentwood, Kareen Bell says “Our values have dropped dramatically,” Having bought their home for around $865,000 a couple of years ago, they have seen their house drop in value to roughly $600,000. There are those in Brentwood who have seen their property values fall by $250,000 in a short period of time.

You can tell from overgrown weeds, and unkempt gardens that you are in the midst of a neighborhood overridden with foreclosure. Homes all around are empty, many vandalized and used for parties, most featuring auction notices.

Kareen Bells adds “It’s scary to see people moving out all the time. The house across the street from us is foreclosed. So is the one behind our home. So is the one down the street. At least six houses near us have been foreclosed.” Things have taken a turn for the worse for these people who have religiously paid all their mortgage payments.

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In all the confusion and chaos foreclosures have brought with them, they are also creating the right time for people to invest in their new home.

Many Realtors and agents opine that buyers would like to look at such homes when they are intending to make a good purchase. Donale Bernarding, a broker with CyBer Realty, a firm with 30 agents says that they are trying to put forth the positive side of the current market situation. They have started a tour of showcasing homes to the buyers in the range of $150,000 to $400,000.

State Department of Labor Licensing and Regulation, compiling data from RealtyTrac stated that the county of Anne Arundel foreclosures add 1,122 homes from January to September 2007. It is a 383 percent increase when compared to 2006.

CyBer Realty is trying to create awareness among buyers to take advantage of this situation and helping them plan on avoiding foreclosures as well. The company has already conducted three seminars in February this year for buyers, both first-timers and others looking for property purchase. People attending this seminar were given a pre-qualification letters which served as their ticket for the bus tours conducted.

Rebecca Cymek, an associate broker and the company’s manager said that they would ideally like people to buy some properties but they are also educating people on foreclosures. She also said that the market is good to make purchases as there are too many sellers and buyers can get many costs waived off on their deals.

Anirban Basu, an economist with Sage Policy Group in Baltimore County, also agrees that this is the best time to invest in real estate purchases. He also says that this time the sellers are very open to negotiation and buyers stand a better chance to bring prices further down. Buyers can then either rent out their properties or resell them at higher prices later on.

Industry sources say that people during the boom period bought homes they could afford in the long run and many others face tight economic situation due to increase in living costs. Both of these have attributed to the looming foreclosure situation.

Mr. Basu advises that people should look at a foreclosed property like any other regular property. The property needs to be of clear title and should be of sound structure. With so many options available, buyers should find exactly what they are looking for, he opines.

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Hillary Rodham Clinton, urged for a moratorium on foreclosures for 90 days on homes with subprime mortgages and a five-year long period of freeze on the interest rates that those borrowers would have to pay.

She addressed a letter to Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, who is now ready to announce the Bush administration’s responsibility to today’s housing problems. Clinton, in her remarkable foresight, notes that today’s foreclosures continue to pose incalculable loss to the economy.

Clinton has stated that the mortgage problems have gone way beyond the state of transparency to the common people. At a news conference on last Sunday of December 2008, she has mentioned that what every Iowan should look forward to is, to have accurate information when they make decisions about undergoing mortgage payments.

Clinton has indicated that the battle within the Democrats is about how to get things done in a rougher manner. But she stresses that coming to the last month of the year she wants to start drawing contrasts from the way it has been with foreclosures so far.

Clinton has already dared to go further than her Democratic rivals and revealed what the administrators think about the decisions made on foreclosures. Obama has introduced a bill which would go on to make mortgage fraud a severe criminal offence. The bill also reinstates that such fraudulence attracts favors national funds to help the lenders who are severely in danger of losing their homes.

Obama and Edward, the two members of the Democrats are supposedly changing laws to make people live better and not lose their homes altogether. According to the Associates Press, Paulson would call for voluntary extensions on the issue of subprime mortgages at the present interest rates. In the letter to Paulson, as a part of the Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton states that he needs to impose these new laws in the form of a moratorium on all foreclosures. The moratorium would be for at least 90 days acting upon all owner-occupied homes with subprime mortgages. The letter also states for a freeze in the monthly rates on subprime mortgage rates whish are of the adjustable nature. The mortgage rate would be effective for at least 5 years until they can be converted into affordable and fixed-rate loans. The letter urges that the mortgage industry would be required to submit status reports on the number of mortgages that need to be modified to make them affordable for the majority.

With these points in mind the reformation on foreclosures is expected to be done as an essential part of Clinton’s campaign.

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Foreclosure prices have risen by 35% in 2007. The Default Research survey released in South Florida has reported that foreclosures have risen up to 35% in 2007. In Broward and Miami-Dade about 1.75% and 1.45% have respectively entered the processes of entering into foreclosures. In 2007 Broward have had foreclosures increasing by 66% and Miami-Dade has had an up rise by 27%.

There has been a foresight that 2008 will also be a year prolific with foreclosures. Serdar Bankaci, the CEO of Default Research has stated that median home prices are still lowering as home inventories are on the rise. That is in fact the perfect ingredient for the development of more foreclosures in South Florida. The previous year saw an average of about 220 foreclosures on a regular basis.

All over the Sunshine State the average median home price has been estimated to be $221,000. South Florida however remains much more expensive where the median price rate is $346,800. The higher the price for real estate the greater is the hurt in the market economy.

Many investors in real estate have experienced a loss due to this foreclosure crisis in recent times. Many of them are even willing to walk away from investing in properties. Foreclosure sales in South Florida are listed there two to three weeks ahead of the competition. This area will witness rise in foreclosures as more ARMs gets to reset and people are unable to pay in time. The bank foreclosure lists taken from a survey across Southern Florida shows that foreclosures will continue to be on the rise and will be still unable to exit from the economy in 2008.

Bankaci has also stated that as he had resided in southern Florida since 2004 he has properly witnessed the great price shift and even observed the number of condominiums that rise up on a daily basis. But the crux of the problem is as the housing units stay on the rise the demand and money begins to dwindle.

There has been great demand for rental properties who offers his clients the latest and the most updated data on foreclosures. He even stress that clients buy and rent property even when they are undergoing the ravages of foreclosures. With foreclosure real estate sale for deducted rates the investors are jumping in to buy more properties. They are even renting them and receiving a return on their investments.

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Triggering forward the explosion in home foreclosures, there is a clear dearth of positive prospects in the current real estate segment. A real estate research survey indicated a tightening in mortgage lending. This is a factor which further brought down the real estate prices in several places. The decline in home prices around the nation doesn’t seem to show any indications of a stable market recovery in the near future at all. Since then, lenders have made it more difficult for house owners to get mortgages by tightening standards. This led to an increase in foreclosures. A considerable number of people who borrowed at adjustable rates ended up facing higher payments which they were unable to pay off. These problems in the context of poor credit repayment histories brought up higher incidents of foreclosures.

Prices in the Boston area dropped in June at a slower rate than the previous month. This continued its trend of decline in real estate prices. In fact, Boston was the first metropolitan area to show a year-over-year decline, so any turnaround there could be an early sign of recovery. This turned out to be the 16th consecutive month in which real estate prices had dipped further. The number of sales in the period fell by 1.5 percent. Detroit led the metropolitan areas with the biggest price declines. There was an 11 percent drop from June of last year.

In Tuscarawas County, a two hour emergency session mobilized people to discuss the issues in a forum of Save Our Homes Task Force. This session brought in realtors, bankers, title agency personnel, lawyers, appraisers, county elected officials, educators and even community services personnel. All these people assembled to review the situation. The treasurer revealed that almost a third of those questioned was unsure about their mortgage rates as to whether or not they had a fixed rate or adjustable rate mortgage. It was immediately stressed that people should waste no time to review their mortgage and get advice. Otherwise, they would be at the mercy of predatory lending practices.

It is only the Massachusetts Association of Realtors that had a different story to relate. This group interestingly reported a starkly different view of the housing market. Strangely, their tale was of an increase in home prices. The realtors group said that the home prices increased by 1.4 percent, to a median of $357,000, from August 2006, while the number of sales rose a robust 6.6 percent.

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There was further criticism of the plan proposed by President Bush to help stem the flow of foreclosures in the country. As is commonly known, one of the main causes of foreclosures in the country are defaults on predatory or sub-prime loans by home owners who are unable to meet their monthly mortgage payments.

President Bush plans to reduce foreclosures by freezing the interest rates on many of these sub-prime loans through 2010, thereby insulating the borrowers of these loans from any increase in interest rates. CreditSights Inc. has reported that this measure is likely to cause damage to home owners as well as bond owners.

People who have invested in securities which put most of their money into residential mortgages will revisit their valuations in these securities as this move is likely to curb their potential profits for the next few quarters. Also, according to the report, losses due to these frozen interest payments are not going to be offset by lower foreclosure figures.

The subsequent credit crunch in the mortgage market is going to hurt home owners as well. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the announcement of this plan was preceded by a record number of Americans falling behind on their monthly mortgage payments, making it a two decade high. Around 1.2 million home owners are expected to borrow or take loan refinancing or make changes to their existing loan structure.

According to a report called “Robbing Peter to Pay Peter — Subprime Loan Modification Revisited”, which was published recently by the New York-based popular bond research firm said “Many of the people the modification plan is supposed to benefit — whether directly of indirectly — may be the same people the plan eventually hurts”.

This analysis by Creditsights Inc. was based on a selection of loans which had an average teaser rate of around 6 percent for the 30 year mortgage sold last year in 2006, which have slowly reset to around 9 percent this year. The analysts assume that there would be a 20 percent foreclosure rate if 50 percent of these loans were frozen, and a 30 percent foreclosure rate if they were all reset to 9 percent.

People who have invested in mortgage based securities and bonds will be hit due to losses, ratings cuts, and increased political risk due to the upcoming elections. Many of these are pension funds, state authorities, insurance companies, and other municipal authorities and institutions. This will in turn have a cascading effect on the people who are directly dependant on these organizations like pensioners, life insurance policy holders, etc. All in all, not a pretty picture.

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In recent times, the trends relating to real estate and foreclosures have been dipping and rising like a see saw. The trends are now so unpredictable. Sometimes it appears as though the trend of foreclosures has grown with such powerful momentum, yet at other times, it doesn’t seem so bad as to actually affect the real estate segment. For example, the issue of rising foreclosures drove up the revenue projections for the third quarter at the Dolan Media Corp.

A word about Dolan Media Corp seems required at this point. It is in fact a parent business publication company that also dealt with mortgage default processing services business in real estate and foreclosures.

Dolan Media has an exclusive business information division. This division is highly acclaimed as it publishes up to 60 print publications. This further comprises two segments that are comprehensive, namely business and legal newspapers cutting across 20 specific markets. This also includes areas such as Boston, New Orleans and Baltimore. Besides this extensive newspaper establishment, the Dolan Media Corp also had its own division for professional services. This division was meant to help mostly those law firms and attorneys who were actively involved in the foreclosures and real estate segment.

Dolan Media Corp suffered loss during the third quarter and even reported the loss to value at about $7.5 million. That would break it down to about 38 cents for each diluted share. For the 2006 third quarter, the same company suffered a higher loss of about 81 cents for every diluted share. Thus the loss was heavy for the company. This was subsequently followed by an increase of revenue because of processing foreclosures and thus, the company was able to show a figure that came to settle at $11.6 million.

So the increase was a good one that was influenced by expansion of opportunities in the mortgage default processing services business. The expansion is predicted to grow and benefit the increase of foreclosures in the real estate segment in areas such as Michigan and Indiana. In fact, these amazing growth opportunities served as a tremendous boost for Dolan to facilitate two acquisitions that are slated to happen in 2008. As of now, the end of 2007 would witness details relating to the first acquisition.

In fact, it is now a clearly established fact that Dolan has boosted its financial flexibility. As a result, it is extremely well positioned to pursue future growth plans.

Based on the positive momentum that spelt 33% increase in terms of year-over-year revenue figures, there is n doubt that strengths of this company has been powerfully reinforced.

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David Sloan, an economist with 4cast Ltd. says, “It is clearly well below expectations and it is also interesting that prices have declined sharply on a month-to-month and year-on-year basis.”

It was really important to find out whether there would be acceleration or moderation in the pace of this decline. We could only know that when we saw how foreclosures were rising and how September saw a sharp turn towards trouble when the prices tumbled and sales of previously owned homes fell to a record low.

According to the National Association of Realtors it was really unfortunate to find out that there was a 8 percent dip of existing homes bringing the figure to 5.04 million unit in September which was lowest on record since 1999.

“The question was, is the housing decline going to continue at this pace and foreclosures continue to rise or even moderate or accelerate? This suggests that the decline housing is accelerating, foreclosure numbers are rising and that the downside risk is certainly significant.”

There was a drop in the national median price for both existing single-family homes and condos of 4.2 per cent from a year ago to $US211,700 ($234,000) which was down 5.7 per cent from August.

The data has pushed the US stock prices and the dollar to session lows.

Although mortgage availability has improved in recent weeks, Lawrence Yun, an economist for NAR says, “Mortgage problems were peaking back in August when many of the September foreclosed homes were being negotiated, and that slowed sales notably in higher-priced areas that rely more on jumbo loans.”

We have come to see that the prices for US Government bonds rose as traders bet the dismal figures made further interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve more likely.

The realty trade group pinned September’s sales weakness on a tightening of credit in August, which was sparked by concerns over rising foreclosures on U.S. subprime mortgages extended to borrowers with spotty borrowing histories.

There was a marked slowness of pace of existing homes sales, both single-family homes and condominiums. This helped to drive up the inventory of unsold homes on the market by 0.4 per cent to 4.4 million last month.

That marks a 10.5-month supply at the September sales pace, the highest since NAR data began combining sales of single-family homes and condos in 1999.

There was a fall in the sales of Single-family home by 8.6 per cent in September to a 4.38 million-unit annual pace, close to a 10-year low, from 4.79 million in August. The association said that the sales were down in all regions.

There was a marginal edging up of mortgages last week even as interest rates sank to their lowest levels since May as shown by a separate report on Wednesday.

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RealtyTrac, a real estate tracking company has found that foreclosures have risen to alarming levels in Connecticut’s cities along with mortgage defaults, which have shot up dramatically in the last year, as house owners feel the burden of increasing sub-prime and predatory lending related costs.

The California-based real estate data provider said there was an increase of a solid 547% in the number of foreclosures for the New Haven-Milford area, an increase of around 522% for the Bridgeport-Norwalk-Stamford area, and the Hartford area saw a rise of 446 percent in just the first half of 2007, on a year to year basis when compared to 2006.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was quoted by a local paper as saying that his office has been flooded with calls for help from homeowners. “We may be on the cusp of a huge wave breaking over Connecticut. People are very understandably upset” he said.

There will soon be a mortgage assistance program launched by the attorney general’s office which will give people help and advice, and provide information to borrowers about where they can get help.

This a nationwide problem. It has been seen that around 19% of the total sub-prime loans issued in 2005 and 2006 are going to end in default and will most likely end up in foreclosure, causing an estimated 1.7 million families to become homeless. A report was released to this effect by a non-profit research organization called the Center for Responsible Lending based in Durham N.C.

According to estimates by the Mortgage Brokers Association, 550,000 sub-prime loans saw foreclosure proceedings being started against them last year. Last week, another report released by the congressional Joint Economic Committee stated that close to two million sub-prime mortgages are likely to fall into foreclosure in the following 18 months.

A lot of pain has been caused to sub-prime borrowers due to an increase in their mortgage payments, which can often go up by hundreds of dollars per month, due to an increase in the interest rates on their ARM’s. Industry experts say that many did not anticipate this increase, thereby causing that much more damage.

Here, two schools of thought prevail. While a few experts say that sub-prime lending has been predatory and misleading, other experts say that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been able to fulfill their dream of buying their own home even though they would not have qualified for a traditional loan or get financing earlier.

Due to the severity of the crisis, Congress is considering implementing new laws to regulate the lending industry.

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