Is Occupy Foreclosures next?
After occupying streets and parks in various parts of the country, Occupy Wall Street activists plan their next move: occupying foreclosures.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Occupy Oakland activists met this week to discuss not whether to occupy empty homes, but when and how to do it. One strategy the group is considering is contacting
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Appraisals slow housing recovery
Here's another factor working against the housing market recovery : appraisals. Real-estate professionals say that the results of home appraisals are increasingly stalling or preventing sales.
Fewer than 10 percent of realtors blamed appraisals for killing or delaying a deal prior to 2009, according to the National Association of Realtors. But in 2010, 29 percent of
How about a mortgage bailout?
It has been the elephant in the living room of our national debate since the housing bubble burst five years ago: Why not simply bail out homeowners who are upside down in their homes and facing foreclosure?
As Harvard economist Martin S. Feldstein points out in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, nearly 15
Rates yawn to jobs report
Bad news: The Labor Department says the economy added only 80,000 jobs in October. That's short of the 95,000 jobs that economists had expected.
Good news: The unemployment rate dipped to 9 percent after it had been stuck at 9.1 percent since April. And the August and September job figures were revised to show 102,000 more
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Freddie Mac wants $6 billion
Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage company, is asking for an additional $6 billion from taxpayers after experiencing a third-quarter loss of nearly $2 billion more than the third quarter of last year.
According to the Associated Press, the company's losses have increased over the past year because many homeowners have refinanced and are now paying lower interest
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Did your lender screw up?
If your house was in foreclosure in 2009 or 2010 and your mortgage servicer misbehaved, here is some good news.
You can request to have your foreclosure case reviewed by an independent firm. If the reviewer determines that you suffered "financial injury" because of the servicer's "errors, misrepresentations or other deficiencies in foreclosure practices," you may
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Troubled waters for home loans
Nearly one in four homeowners (22.7 percent) owes more on his mortgage than the home is worth, according to California research firm CoreLogic.
Almost three-quarters of the underwater homeowners have above-market interest rates, says CoreLogic, but refinancing has proven to be tricky. In an effort to address the problem, last week President Obama announced the new
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Forget loan forgiveness
You may have heard talks that lenders are being pushed to help struggling homeowners by forgiving part of the principal owed on their mortgages.
Forget it. It's not going to happen. That's pretty much what Federal Housing Finance Agency Acting Director Edward DeMarco said during an interview that aired on C-SPAN this weekend.
"The idea of reducing
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Which housing markets gained?
The market with the biggest gains in home values since 2009 is in one of the states hit hardest by the housing slump: Florida.
Zillow researched the 1,000 largest U.S. cities in a survey for Bloomberg Businessweek and found that Weston, Fla., a suburb of Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, had a 15.1 percent increase. The suburb is known
New HARP refinance announced
An improved refinance program that is expected to allow millions of underwater borrowers to refinance their mortgages was just announced.
Borrowers will be able to refinance their mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP, even if they owe more than what their house is worth. The previous