Foreclosure

In an announcement Tuesday, Real Estate Disposition, LLC (REDC), a real estate auction company based in Irvine, California, said it sold 100 percent of the San Lorenzo condominiums it auctioned in the Little Havana area of Miami this last weekend. In just two-and-a-half hours, the company auctioned a total of 65 condos at 110 percent of reserves and 88 percent of retail before a crowd of 375 potential buyers.

In the latest of a string of homeownership preservation events offered by HOPE NOW, representatives from more than a dozen mortgage servicers and several local HUD-approved housing counselors were on hand last week in Nevada to assist more than 2,300 struggling homeowners who attended workshops offered in Reno and Las Vegas.

Following the severe flooding in Rhode Island, HUD recently instituted a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures of Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-insured mortgages in four counties across the state, including Kent, Newport, Providence, and Washington. While the foreclosure suspension is only mandated for FHA-insured mortgages in these counties, Rhode Island's Attorney General, Patrick Lynch, is asking all lenders to consider voluntary moratoria on non-FHA mortgages as well.

Last November, the board of commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, agreed to include a $3 million amendment in the county's budget in order to create a mortgage foreclosure mediation program. The program, which applies to Cook County residential properties that are owner-occupied, single family homes or individual condominium units and owner-occupied residential properties with four units or less, officially launched on Monday.

Countdown To Buy, a next-generation online real estate marketplace, announced Monday that it has entered into a new pilot program with a leading lending institution of offer a sampling of foreclosed properties located in Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. In addition the company has received additional properties in both Connecticut and Texas from existing clients after successfully generating accepted offers is 25 days or less on all properties placed on the platform.

With refinancing in the commercial real estate (CRE) sector hard to come by and delinquencies continuing to rise, special servicers of commercial mortgages are dealing with large influxes of new troubled loans. Primary and master servicers ranked by Standard & Poor's reported that delinquent CRE loans hit a new all-time high at the end of 2009. A separate study by the research firm Delta Associates says that the aggregate value of distressed commercial real estate in the U.S. has now surpassed $187 billion.

West Palm Beach, Florida-based Ocwen Loan Servicing, a provider of residential and commercial loan servicing, special servicing, and asset management services, announced Friday that it has seen marked success in its fight against foreclosure after just three months of using MKDirect, a MortgageKeeper Referral Services product that connects homeowners to high-quality nonprofit government services.

Despite servicers' efforts to modify unprecedented volumes of troubled mortgages and a large-scale government-led program put in place to stem the nation's viral foreclosure epidemic, they haven't been enough to keep up with the rapid pace of loan deterioration, according to new data from Lender Processing Services (LPS). An LPS market report released Monday shows that the total number of delinquent loans as of the end of February was 21 percent higher than it was a year earlier, and the foreclosure rate represents a 51 percent year-over-year increase.

According to Bank of America's monthly Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) progress report to the Department of Treasury, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank has completed nearly 33,000 permanent HAMP modifications, including more than 12,000 since the previous monthly report. As of April 8, 2010, 32,900 Bank of America customers had been placed into completed mortgage modifications with affordable payments under HAMP, up from 20,666 reported a month earlier. This marked the bank's most productive month to date.

The administration's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) program was officially implemented on Monday, but many real estate professionals still have questions about the logistics of this new initiative. In an effort to answer these questions and provide Realtors with the latest HAFA information, Springboard Nonprofit Consumer Credit Management, a HUD-approved housing counseling agency headquartered in Riverside, California, has launched an online HAFA resource center.