Souksana Sopha

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Foreclosure filings were reported on 367,056 properties in March, an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, an increase of nearly 8 percent from March 2009 and the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in January 2005.

“Foreclosure activity in the first quarter of 2010 followed a very similar pattern to what we saw in the first quarter of 2009: a shallow trough in January and February followed by a substantial spike in March,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “One difference, however, is that the increases were more tilted toward the final stage of foreclosure, with REOs increasing 9 percent on a quarterly basis in the first quarter of 2010 compared to a 13 percent quarterly decrease in REOs in the first quarter of 2009.

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realtytrac.com

WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service may not be aware of a foreclosure on your home and may require you to pay taxes on it, if you don’t file form 1099-C.

With the April 15 tax filing deadline coming up, the last thing you want to do is forget to file that form. The 1099-C form asks the IRS to cancel the debt from your home and tells the agency that the home wasn’t sold. …

Read more at: www.wtop.com

Who’s the moron in the Obama Administration? Someone needs to find out and let me know so I can name names, because the monumentally tragic absurdity known as the Making Home Affordable program, or the Home Affordable Modification Program, or any of the other wonky acronyms this administration has come up with, just went from ill-conceived to stupid. It jumped the shark, in a manner of speaking.

This past week, the administration announced, again with much fanfare, that they would be announcing some fabulous improvements to the absolute failure that is HAMP, the government’s answer to the ongoing foreclosure crisis that continues to fuel the freefall in housing prices that assures our recession’s future. …

Read the rest of the article at: mandelman.ml-implode.com

… Big borrowers are more likely to default than ordinary people, according to data from First American CoreLogic. Its loan database, reflecting more than 80% of the overall home-loan market, includes 1,700 loans with balances of $4 million or more. About 14.8% of those loans were 90 days or more overdue at the end of January, compared with 8.7% for all home loans tracked by First American. Sam Khater, a senior economist at First American, said the bigger borrowers may be more prone to stop making payments when they have lost all their home equity. …

online.wsj.com

Did you lose your house to foreclosure this year? Did your lender forgive some of your mortgage debt because you sold it for less than it was worth? If so, you could be facing a big tax hit. It is IRS policy to tax forgiven debt you are personally responsible for as if it is income. Say, for example, your credit card company settled a $10,000 debt for 50 cents on the dollar. You’d have a debt forgiveness of $5,000, which the IRS would count as income, just like your wages. …

www.veteranstoday.com

Underwater on their mortgages and angry at banks, more borrowers are choosing to hand over the keys, even if they can afford the payments.

articles.latimes.com

The supply of foreclosed homes that banks need to sell is rising again, signaling further downward pressure on home prices in some parts of the U.S.

Mortgage analysts at Barclays Capital in New York estimated that banks and mortgage investors held a total of 645,800 foreclosed homes in January, up 4.6% from 617,286 a month earlier.

According to Barclays, the supply peaked at around 845,000 in November 2008 and then declined through 2009. …

online.wsj.com

housingdoom.com