Bankers: Foreclosures at record pace, and rising

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News item from AP, based on stats from mortgage bankers, who are in a position to know: ‘Home foreclosures and late payments set records over the first three months of the year and are expected to keep rising, stark signs of the housing crisis’ mounting damage to homeowners and the economy.’

More: ‘The latest snapshot of the mortgage market, released Thursday, showed that the proportion of mortgages that fell into foreclosure soared to 0.99 percent in the January-through-March period. That surpassed the previous high of 0.83 percent over the last three months in 2007. The report by the Mortgage Bankers Association also found that more homeowners slipped behind on their monthly payments.’

I’ve been saying lately that this is not necessarily a national problem, even though these are national statistics. It sure looks like a regional problem to me. Hear me out on this or, rather, hear the AP: ‘California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona accounted for 89 percent of the total increase in new home foreclosures.’

One last tidbit: The percentage of sub-prime adjustable-rate mortgages on which payments were late rose to 22.07% from 20.02%, the previous high.

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