Foreclosure

Huntington Bank and Columbus Housing Partnership have joined forces to stabilize homeownership in Central Ohio. The two have formed the Huntington Homeownership Alliance, a three-year, $10 million project that will provide the area’s residents with homeownership counseling, foreclosure avoidance services, and more affordable mortgages.

More than 4,000 foreclosures were prevented in Minnesota last year as a result of the state’s nonprofit foreclosure counseling network, according to a study released by the Minnesota Home Ownership Center.

The National Fair Housing Alliance , headquartered in Washington, D.C., has issued a report claiming that housing discrimination in the United States has spiked for two reasons: the worsening foreclosure crisis and Internet advertising that violates fair housing laws.

The Ford Foundation has committed $50 million to a new nonprofit venture to help municipalities purchase banks’ foreclosed homes. According to the Wall Street Journal, the investment is one of the largest made by a foundation to help alleviate the effects of the housing crisis.

Jacksonville, Florida’s Lender Processing Services (LPS), Inc. released its latest LPS Mortgage Monitor this week, which provides mortgage industry performance indicators as of March month-end. Among the findings, LPS reported that the number of newly delinquent loans declined in March to 7.

On Tuesday, RealtyTrac announced a strategic alliance with global real estate portal Enormo that will give Enormo’s international user base of potential homebuyers and investors unique access to RealtyTrac’s database of U.

RealtyTrac on Wednesday that cities in California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona accounted for the first quarter’s 26 highest foreclosure rates among metro areas with a population of 200,000 or more.

The city of Detroit has implemented a new vacant property procedure that allows city inspectors to board up vacant, foreclosed homes at the cost of the property owner. The city says the ordinance is intended to secure and protect vacant properties for the safety of the community.

According to new research by Standard & Poor’s released this week, $250 billion of securitized mortgages are presently in bankruptcy, foreclosure, or REO, and the company says the performance of private-label securities – those that banks keep on their books – are expected to decline even further.

RealtyTrac released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report for the first quarter of 2009 on Thursday, which showed that one in every 159 housing units in the nation received a foreclosure filing during the first three months of the year.