J.P. Morgan Chase has been one of the lenders working with homeowners in the Making Home Affordable Program. Over the past months, homeowners have seen an increase in the number of permanent home loan modifications that have been made from Chase, which has helped many to obtain a more affordable home loan payment.

However, there’s still the problem of foreclosures that many homeowners are facing when they are either denied a trial modification or have their modification trial period cancelled. According to the July 2010 Making Home Affordable servicer report, 11,977 foreclosures were begun by Chase, through June 2010. There are also 2,062 completed foreclosures, according to the July report, for homeowners who had their trial modification canceled.

These numbers in foreclosure starts and foreclosures completed for homeowners who had their trial modification canceled were up from the June 2010 report which indicated Chase had started 10,927 foreclosures and completed 1,119 foreclosures through the month of May. Yet, there is also homeowners that were denied a trial modification who also faced foreclosure. The foreclosure starts for homeowners who were denied a trial modification through the Making Home Affordable Program from J.P. Morgan Chase totaled 8,928 while completed foreclosures numbered 1,374.

Full story is available on Red, White, and Blue Press

Ah, to be a Real Housewife of Orange County. While many of her O.C. neighbors are being sucked down the foreclosure drain, Alexis Bellino — she of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” fame — and her husband, Jim, have been spared the pain and humiliation of losing their home in default of their $4.6 million loan. Perhaps there is enough pain and humiliation associated with starring in this show and the forces of karma needed to restore balance to the universe? It certainly isn’t an everyday occurrence that Chase Bank gets to be a shining knight in loan-modification armor.

The Bellinos reportedly were behind $83,000 in payments on their Newport Beach home, according to The Orange County Register. The 4,200-square-foot house was set to be auctioned off on the old courthouse steps earlier this week, but the Bellinos were able to seal a loan modification deal with Chase. The newspaper confirmed the arrangement with Jim Bellino.

Their story appears pretty typical, up to a point.

Full story is available on Housing Watch

Some think foreclosure is black and white.  You either have enough money to pay your mortgage or you don’t and you lose your home.

But sometimes there is a middle ground.

The only problem is those options are often hidden by piles of complicated paperwork.

The workshops set up today are designed to help Hoosiers fill out all those forms so that when you start to talk to your bank you know what to expect, and you have all the answers that they ask for.  Those answers could be “the” answer to saving your home.

“The lenders have a lot of different options,” said Jay Kenworth of the Lt. Governor’s Office.  “They don’t want to see foreclosures either. Nobody does. It doesn’t make anybody any money. So what banks will do is look at your situation and say ok, we see that this is the problem and maybe we can alter the terms of your loan or maybe we can lower the principal or maybe sometimes the best option is to sell your home. ”

Full story is available on wthr.com

A little over a month ago I posted some data from RealtyTrac that supposedly painted a picture of what is being foreclosed upon in Chicago. The only problem is that the last graph I posted looked rather suspicious since it indicated that almost all of Chicago’s distressed properties were studios. In fact, someone on Cribchatter challenged the legitimacy of that data and it has been haunting me ever since. Finally I realized that with recent changes to the multiple listing service I could actually produce my own analysis, with one important caveat. While RealtyTrac reports on foreclosure activity I can only analyze what is for sale and what has sold. One might expect that in the long run these converge but there is no guarantee.

So, here is a snapshot of foreclosures and short sales in Chicago for the last 30 days. First, there have been 1418 closings in the last 30 days (not a lot). Of those 39.5% were either short sales or bank sales (a lot). However, compare that to the fact that “only” 16.7% of Chicago homes that are on the market are distressed and that tells you that a disproportionate percentage of the homes sold are distressed. In other words, today’s buyers are bargain shopping. No surprise.

Full story is available on Chicago Now

With whole neighborhoods in distress after a tsunami of foreclosures hit South Florida, the federal government’s quarter-billion dollar fix-it program is now beginning to pick up steam, just as crucial deadlines loom around the corner.

The Neighborhood Stabilization Program, originally launched as part of the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act, was designed to combat the side-effects of rampant foreclosures by propping up neighborhoods left in disrepair after the housing market collapse.

The strategy: Buy up foreclosed properties to renovate and resell or rent, hopefully encouraging low- and middle-income residents to settle into areas known for abandonment and blight.

“NSP was kind of like a `stop the bleeding’ [effort] for the foreclosure crisis,” said Matthew Martin, planning specialist for the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University, and co-author of a recent study on NSP’s impact in Florida. “It wasn’t intended to completely turn things around, but to simply stabilize things.”

Full story is available on Miami Herald

me on Washington Place that she purchased in 2006.

The single mother would still be working three jobs to pay off her mortgage and support her four children if she hadn’t had to evict a tenant who failed to pay rent and fallen behind on her mortgage payments.

Facing foreclosure, Smith turned to the Affordable Housing Centers of America, formerly ACORN Housing, for help. “If I would have known what I know now I wouldn’t be in this situation,” said Smith, who is now pursuing a college education to get a job that will help her keep her home for the long term.

Full story is available on ctpost

Since a lot of the homes in the Valley are worth less than what’s owed on them, walking away from the mortgage has become an option for some.

That means your house goes into foreclosure.

The mortgage holder or bank takes it over and sells it for what they can.

A short sale is similar but you have to reach an agreement with the bank to accept less than what is owed.

So which one affects your credit most?

Both will hit your for about 7 years.

Full story is available on abc15.com

Foreclosure is a losing proposition all the way around.

Families lose homes and injure their ability to borrow money for years to come, if not decades.

Lenders incur legal fees, real estate fees and property management fees as they wait for sales that will only partially recoup their original investments.

Property values drop further in neighborhoods where foreclosures occur. Vacant homes attract vandals and squatters.

Ultimately, the entire community is destabilized.

For these and other reasons, foreclosure should be a last resort and reducing the growing rate of foreclosures is the shared responsibility of homeowners, lenders, real estate professionals, community organizations and government.

The situation is critical and is about to become more so.

Full story is available on Arizona Daily Star

Bank-owned homes around Lincoln could see a future as rentals until the housing market turns around.

That’s according to Century 21 Select manager and broker Gene Thorpe, who said Friday that a top REO (real estate owned) agent in the area told him some banks are planning, for now, to rent out foreclosed homes in lieu of selling them.

This is a by-product of the housing boom mid-decade, according to Thorpe, since some former homeowners may not have been able to afford the homes they bought that were subsequently foreclosed.

Lynda Armes, a mortgage banker at Maidu Financial, said banks are selling foreclosed homes to hedge-fund groups, who then rent the homes to the owner who has been foreclosed on.

Armes said the hedge-fund groups get the homes “at discount.”

“Banks are bundling (mortgage-backed) securities and selling them to hege-funders in groups,” Armes said. “The hedge funders own the properties.”

Full story is available on Lincoln News Messenger

The sale of previously owned homes in the United States dropped 27 percent in July to their lowest level in 15 years and US foreclosures are up.

Over a year ago US President Barack Obama implemented the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) which was designed to help unemployed homeowners avoid foreclosures by allowing bank to lower interest rates and mortgages.

Reports show that the program has not quite succeeded. According to Realty Trac nearly 300,000 homes have been foreclosed upon and only about 30,000 have received aid from the HAMP program.

Economist Max Fradd Wolff from The New School in New York said the program has failed because it is the wrong program; it is merely a “band-aid on a bullet would.”

Full story is available on RT.com