Foreclosure

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.

The Texas housing market may be on the road to recovery. According to the latest Texas Quarterly Housing Report released Monday by the Texas Association of Realtors, both sales and prices for homes in the Lone Star State increased on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter of this year. Sales volume for existing single-family homes was 42,682 for the first three months of 2010, up 4 percent from the same period in 2009. In addition, the median home price jumped 3.13 percent from $137,200 in the first quarter of last year to $141,500 in the first quarter of this year.

Colorado lawmakers are hoping to mitigate the effects widespread foreclosures are having on local communities in the state. This week, Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law a bill that he says will secure neighborhoods against abandoned properties that have fallen into foreclosure by cutting in half the minimum time frame for a foreclosure sale, as mandated by the state.

Only 10 percent of the $41 billion of distressed commercial real estate from a year ago has been resolved and is no longer held by the lender, according to new data from the research firm Real Capital Analytics. The company's analysis shows that securities trusts and domestic lenders have settled a comparably small portion of their distress from last year. Of those loans resolved, commercial mortgage-backed securities holders are more likely to have restructured the mortgages, while domestic banks are more likely to have foreclosed.