Foreclosure

The Homeownership Preservation Foundation (HPF) has reported a 14.2 percent decrease in calls to its Homeowners' HOPE Hotline during the month of October. The hotline provides free homeownership education and foreclosure prevention counseling. The organization says it is seeing fluctuations in call volume, often related to the number of foreclosures, which decreased during the month. The state with the most calls coming into the hotline was California.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have seen a steady falloff in the rate of loans 90 or more days overdue since early this year, but their latest figures show the rate continuing to head down for one, up for the other. Both GSEs have dialed up the pressure lately for big banks to buy back bad loans. But the lenders themselves are doing their own dialing up, only it's in the form of stronger resistance to repurchase requests. The two mortgage giants are planning to implement new lending guidelines and fee structures for riskier loans.

The Las Vegas region experienced a dip in home sales and median sale price in October, according to new figures from MDA DataQuick. A total of 3,961 new and resale houses and condos sold in the Las Vegas-Paradise metro area in October, down 7.4 percent from September and down 21.8 percent from a year earlier. The overall median sale price for all new and resale houses and condos sold in the region dropped nearly 4 percent from a year ago to its lowest level in more than a decade.

The law firm of Harwood Feffer, LLP has filed a class action lawsuit against Wells Fargo Bank and its servicer, America's Servicing Company (ASC). The suit alleges that ASC induced borrowers to default on their mortgages by telling them they would not be eligible for a loan modification if they were current on payments. Harwood Feffer claims ASC was looking to boost its revenue by assessing additional penalties and fees and collecting interest on the nonperforming loans it services.

The Government Accountability Office just completed a study of what is called ""bank walkaways"" - when a lender initiates foreclosure but then doesn't complete the process because the cost outweighs expected proceeds from the property's sale. Officials argue the practice intensifies market deterioration and complicates stabilization efforts. But the agency found that abandoned foreclosures are rare - representing less than 1 percent of vacant homes between January 2008 and March 2010 - but concentrated in specific areas of the country.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have instructed their selling agents to move forward with transactions involving foreclosed properties in cases where sales were suspended due to potential problems with the legal paperwork. The GSEs were forced to temporarily halt the sale of certain properties when news surfaced that some of the nation's largest servicers had been employing so-called robo-signers. Now that case reviews have uncovered no evidence of improper foreclosures, Fannie and Freddie are moving to proceed with REO sales.

Maine attorney general Janet T. Mills announced last week that negotiations with GMAC Mortgage LLC and Bank of America had resulted in a temporary halt in foreclosure sales in the state. The two lenders have agreed not to proceed to judgments on any pending matters in Maine until they have completed an internal review of their foreclosure procedures and discussed the procedures with the attorney general.

According to MDA DataQuick, which tracks real estate trends nationally via public property records, Phoenix-area home sales dropped to their lowest level for an October in 15 years. The decline is attributed to low new-home transactions, the slow economic recovery, and the market lull created by the homebuyer tax credits. A total of 6,903 new and resale houses and condos sold during October in the combined Maricopa-Pinal counties metropolitan area, down 6.2 percent from the month before and down 24.6 percent from a year earlier.

The Warren Group reports that year-over-year foreclosure petitions and deeds decreased in the Bay State during October. It was the first time this year that both petitions and deeds fell in Massachusetts. Foreclosure petitions plunged nearly 51 percent from October 2009 to 1,127 last month, the first month since January they have dropped below 2,000. Home sales also fell in October, down more than 28 percent. It's the fourth straight month of year-over-year sales declines.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) issued a notice this week explaining Wells Fargo's new rules surrounding short sale transactions when a foreclosure is pending. Earlier this month, Wells Fargo advised NAR that it has modified its existing guidelines to allow the postponement of a scheduled foreclosure in connection with a short sale, but only in limited situations. Specifically, Wells Fargo must have an approved short sale contract in hand, and the transaction must close within 30 days of the scheduled foreclosure sale.