News

Bolstered by favorable interest rates and low home prices, housing affordability in the second quarter remained near its highest level of the past two decades, according to an industry index developed by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo. The study found that 72.3 percent of all new and existing homes sold in the second quarter of 2010 were affordable to families earning the national median income of $64,400. Syracuse, New York was the most affordable major housing market. New York City was the least.

Fitch Ratings has upgraded the individual and preferred stock ratings of Bank of America. But the agency says the upgrades are tempered by the bank's high level of nonperforming loans and the likelihood of large volumes of mortgage repurchase requests from the GSEs and other secondary market investors, largely because of the loans the bank inherited from its Countrywide acquisition. Fitch also expressed concern about BofA's exposure to home equity loans, especially those with loan-to-value ratios above 100 percent.

The Arizona Superior Court issued a ruling this month that allows San Diego-based receivership and loan recovery specialist Trigild to sell seven Arizona apartment complexes to Standard Portfolio for $123 million. The 2,759-unit portfolio was abandoned last year by the investment firm Bethany Group and placed into receivership in March 2009. The court's ruling allows the properties to be sold without requiring the lender to foreclose prior to the sale.

Real Property Management says it has transitioned thousands of REO properties into rentals by using a lease and hold strategy. The company offers its rental initiatives to former owners of foreclosed properties or to new tenants, and says local, regional, and national banks, as well as other mortgage owners are now turning to a lease and hold strategy as REO inventories balloon.

National Catastrophe Adjusters, Inc. has been selected to administer a special allocation of funds dedicated to pay claims for real estate professionals who have lost business because of the April 20th Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This financial assistance will be administered outside of the recently established Gulf Coast Claims Facility and is earmarked for emergency payments to eligible real estate professionals licensed in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

Sales of previously owned homes in the United States plummeted 27.2 percent in July compared to the previous month, according to data released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The market was bracing for a noticeable falloff as payback for the tax credits that pulled sales forward into the spring months, but the reality was worse than projected - nearly double the decline analysts were expecting. The July plunge pushed existing-home sales down to an annual rate of 3.83 million units, their lowest level since May of 1995.

Taxpayers' tab for the government's $700 billion dollar bailout program continues to drop. New estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put the cost of the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) at $66 billion. That's nearly $45 billion less than the agency's projection just five months ago. The agency's estimates for the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac improved as well. Outlays for the two GSEs are expected to fall from $96 billion in 2009 to $41 billion this year.

Despite the continued efforts of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to find sustainable workouts for delinquent borrowers, the analysts at Standard & Poor's expect the GSEs' foreclosure inventories to continue to swell. The two companies have each already completed about 40 percent more workout volume during the first half of 2010 than they did in all of 2009. Still, the ratings agency says annualized loan workout activity (as a percentage of existing delinquent loans) remains less than half at both institutions.

Altisource Portfolio Solutions has added short sale and deed-in-lieu services to its arsenal of programs for mortgage lenders and servicers. Altisource has been providing services related to real estate mortgage portfolio management, asset recovery management, and customer relationship management for two decades. The company says this new venture will allow lenders and servicers to enhance their loss mitigation programs from a single-source, end-to-end provider.

The pace of bank closings has returned to the recessionary norm, following two consecutive weeks where we saw just a single bank failure. That temporary reprieve came to an abrupt halt on Friday, as regulators shut the doors on eight community-based lenders in one fell swoop -- four were in California, two in Florida, and one each in Illinois and Virginia. The year's failed-bank tally now stands at 118. The largest of this weekend's closings was Chicago's ShoreBank.