pa href="http://www.housingwire.com/2008/12/17/foreclosure-surge-in-ca-as-legislative-impact-passes/"ema href="http://www.banklawyersblog.com/.a/6a00d8341c652b53ef01053691653c970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"img alt="Stop-foreclosure" class="at-xid-6a00d8341c652b53ef01053691653c970c " src="http://www.banklawyersblog.com/.a/6a00d8341c652b53ef01053691653c970c-120wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;"/img/a
Housing Wire/em recently posted/a further evidence that the various state foreclosure moratorium laws are not achieving their goal of forcing lenders to modify loans with borrowers who are substantially delinquent./pblockquotepemstrongIt appears that California is now following in the footsteps of
Massachusetts. Despite recent legislation in the state that added 45
days to the borrower notice period for defaults, impacting foreclosure
activity during Sept. and Oct., new data from ForeclosureRadar
finds that November saw significant activity increases across all
stages of foreclosure. From October to November, filings of Notices of
Default increased 28 percent; Notices of Trustee Sales increased 10
percent, and properties sold at auction increased by 14.8 percent./strong/em/p
pemstrongIn other words, the extra notice period appears to have only stalled defaults, at least to some extent, not prevented them./strong/em/p/blockquotepOn the other hand, the effect of the moratorium and, more importantly (in my opinion), the traditional servicing practice of delaying foreclosures during the holiday season, have resulted in foreclosure numbers that are at historic lows. All this means, in the opinion of ForeclosureRadar, is that we'll have an "unprecedented backlog" heading into the new year. If that's correct, expect loan servicers to greet 2009 with a "foreclosure tsunami." We used the word "tsunami" because it's become a cliche, and we're inordinately fond of cliches. As Dorothy Sayers once said about a facility to quote others, our fondness indicates an incapacity for original thought. We glory in our lack of originality. Everyone has to play to their strengths, and ours is a gift for mediocrity and imitation./ppContinuing along this line, we agree with the concerns of emHousing Wire/em's publisher, Paul Jackson. He's as convinced as we are that servicers are the ones suffering from these delays, since, in most cases, they must continue to advance delinquent payments to the investors, and recoup them only when the property is sold. Over the long haul, driving up costs and increasing losses of servicers and investors will restrict credit and make it more expensive. Such concerns are not likely to deter the spread of such moratoria, however. In fact, we wouldn't be surprised to see a federal moratorium enacted next year. Politicians are nothing if not short-sighted and, as they have with prior crises for which they've been partly responsible, have thus far have been able to deflect blame long enough that once the crisis passes, no accurate accounting of blame will be made./p
pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/typepad/banklawyer3/3_bank_lawyers?a=waobQ1"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/typepad/banklawyer3/3_bank_lawyers?i=waobQ1" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/banklawyer3/3_bank_lawyers/~4/491871481" height="1" width="1"/
