Foreclosure

QualityFirst Real Estate, a San Diego-based real estate company specializing in REO properties, recently launched a new company Web site, providing real world expertise regarding short sales and foreclosure sales to homebuyers, buyers, and the lending community. Through this new site, buyers looking for great opportunities on a home can directly access QualityFirst's online listings of bank-owned homes for sale, the company said. And buyers looking for a home loan can take advantage of the site's mortgage information and loan calculator pages.

Short sales are being touted by some as the ""go-to"" alternative to foreclosure, but that doesn't mean there aren't risks involved in completing these transactions. In order to warn consumers and real estate agents about the potential perils and pitfalls of short sales, the California Department of Real Estate (DRE) has issued a consumer alert, Jeff Davi, DRE commissioner, announced Thursday.

Fannie Mae announced Thursday that it has entered into a new partnership with the Orlando agency of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Central Florida and the Florida Gulf Coast (CCCS) in order to accelerate response time and provide financial counseling to struggling Florida homeowners whose mortgages are owned by Fannie Mae and serviced by SunTrust. Under this partnership, CCCS will initiate a grassroots mail and telephone campaign focusing on eligible homeowners who are delinquent in their mortgage payments.

As part of its ongoing efforts to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, Chase announced Wednesday that it will host multi-day homeowner assistance events exclusively for struggling Chase homeowners in eight major markets across the United States. These events will take place over the next five months, during which up to 40 Chase counselors will work with homeowners for up to 12 hours a day for four or five days in a central location, such as a civic center or community college.

In an effort to assist struggling homeowners with their mortgages, HOPE NOW, the administration's Making Home Affordable Program, and NeighborWorks America co-sponsored a three-day homeownership preservation event last week in Uniondale, New York. The event had representatives from 16 mortgage servicers and more than a dozen local HUD-approved housing counselors on hand to provide assistance to the 2,353 at-risk borrowers in attendance.

Countdown To Buy announced Tuesday that it has entered the Georgia marketplace and will be featuring recently foreclosed properties throughout the state. This sampling of properties comes after Countdown To Buy successfully matched buyers in 25 days or less with an initial set of pilot properties located in Texas, Connecticut, and Illinois. As a result of this success, a leading institution expanded their multi-state pilot into the Georgia market.

Hoping to obtain advice on how to improve government foreclosure prevention programs, the Department of Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability, Herb Allison, made an unprecedented stop in Cleveland on Monday to hold a roundtable and hear from local homeowners and housing advocates first-hand. Allison, who is second to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, oversees both the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the Hardest Hit Fund program that is providing more than $2.1 billion to address the foreclosure crisis in 10 states. Ohio is receiving $172 million through this program, the sixth highest allocation.

In an effort to provide greater insight into the health of the U.S. economy, Standard & Poor's and Experian have teamed up to create a series of consumer credit default indices that will seek to measure the balance-weighted proportion of consumer credit accounts that go into default for the first time each month.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has launched a civil investigation into one of the state's largest foreclosure law firms. McCollum says Florida Default Law Group, P.L. in Tampa appears to be fabricating and presenting false and misleading documents in thousands of foreclosure cases per month. The case highlights flaws in the documentation of loan ownership that is impeding a number of foreclosure proceedings across the country.

Overdue loans in pools of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) continue to mount. Although the rate of increase slowed from March's breakneck pace, the research firm Trepp LLC reported Monday that the percentage of CMBS loans 30 or more days delinquent, in foreclosure, or classified as REO jumped 41 basis points last month, putting the overall delinquency rate at 8.02 percent. Fitch Ratings says the default rate for its CMBS-rated universe is even higher, hitting 8.15 percent at the end of Q1 2010.