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London Zoo: 1% of american households lost their houses last year

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  1.  
    • CommentAuthorKosmopolit
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008 edited
     (787.1)
    Actually thats a slight exaggeration.

    2.2 million homes were in some stage of foreclosure last year. Some householders may have kept their houses at the last minute, some may still be in the process of losing their houses.
    http://www.realtytrac.com/ContentManagement/pressrelease.aspx?ChannelID=9&ItemID=3988&accnt=64847

    IRVINE, Calif. – Jan. 29, 2008 – RealtyTrac® (realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released year-end data from its 2007 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which shows a total of 2,203,295 foreclosure filings — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported on 1,285,873 properties nationwide during the year, up 75 percent from 2006. The report also shows that more than 1 percent of all U.S. households were in some stage of foreclosure during the year, up from 0.58 percent in 2006.


    A quick reality check, in the early 1990's, Britain went through a severe housing slump and recession caused in part by a big increase in foreclosures.

    British foreclosures peaked at 76,000 in 1991.

    Even allowing for the difference in population and housing ownership rates it looks like the US housing market is in even worse shape than Britain's was in 1991.

    And according to the article foreclosure rates are continuing to rise.

    The map in the article is interesting too: amongst the states hit hardest are the swing-states of Florida and Ohio. IF Bush is blamed for this, things are going to get even hard for the Republicans this year.
  2.  (787.2)
    Weird, the link in my post isn't working but the link on the page from which I copied it is:

    http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/01/30/two-million-foreclosures/#comment-205120
  3.  (787.3)
    Try this one instead. It looks like you missed putting the entire code in the popup box, is all.

    I'm not surprised by this, I figured for worse numbers than that.
    •  
      CommentAuthorScribe
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008
     (787.4)
    Actually thats a slight exaggeration.


    Actually it's not. The number I heard was somewhere around 7% of homeowners. This takes into account that the average house has 2.2 Americans living in it and averaging that more than half the US population still rents.
    •  
      CommentAuthorARES
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008
     (787.5)
    Good, maybe housing will become affordable again unless the fucking government continues to intervene with corporate handouts.

    OMG

    WTF

    LOL

    I've ranted continually concerning this mess, having worked in the industry for almost 9 years.

    Decent money and, currently, another reason to hate The Man for creating this mess have kept me in it. If/when I get laid off, I'm going to grad school or do something creatively fulfilling. Tired of this shit.
  6.  (787.6)
    Decent money and, currently, another reason to hate The Man for creating this mess have kept me in it. If/when I get laid off, I'm going to grad school or do something creatively fulfilling. Tired of this shit.


    You should do it anyway, so you don't have to wait for the layoff. Anyway, it takes a while to get accepted, and you don't want to work at McDonald's for 6 months while you wait to start school, do you?
    •  
      CommentAuthorJaredRules
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008
     (787.7)
    It's weird, cos in downtown Seattle, condos are being built all over the god damn place. Everywhere you look there's a crane building something.
    •  
      CommentAuthorWaxPoetic
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008
     (787.8)
    Lincoln's housing bubble popped a while back, but building is still going on all around town. making things like the parking shortage on campus and the crime rates downtown even more incentive for people not to live there, even though they spend 80% of their week in town.

    foreclosure only hurts for a little while, but that's just because i'm content being a broke almost grad student with no car or cable or credit cards - not everyone wants that life, and yet more and more people are choosing to overextend themselves by building a new home before they sell the old one, or renting far away from where the majority of their lives are lived, thereby causing them to spend more on rent and gas and insurance, etc.

    @ARES, i agree with sacredchao - get out when it occurs to you to go. that's just me, but i've seen people get stuck and mcdonald's is no way to live.
    • CommentAuthorPooka
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008
     (787.9)
    almost lost my house recently...
  10.  (787.10)
    Lots of default notices get sent which do not end up in foreclosure. All it means is the homeowner is more than 45 or 60 days late making a payment. Not a good thing, but most people do recover.

    However, it is true that actual foreclosures are at historic highs. And there is going to be a lot of pain while necessary market corrections take place. I read an article recently comparing actual housing prices to what they would have been if they'd tracked the consumer price index since 1980 -- on the coasts, they're about twice what they would have been. In the midwest, they're about 20-25 percent higher.
    • CommentAuthorzenbullet
    • CommentTimeFeb 1st 2008
     (787.11)
    I thought I posted this earlier, and the scary thing is, I've been told by housing market players that the foreclosures aren't the really bad news.

    It's the number of houses that have been built, are completed, and are NOT being sold on the market.

    The interest payments alone must be so killer I can't believe they aren't just trying to dump it all.
  12.  (787.12)
    I don't think that's the bad news, either. These sub-prime loans were basically mortgages for people who couldn't pay them, which is demented in itself - but the loans, once made, were rolled up and packaged up to look better than they were. Financial institutions, mutual funds, and retirement funds bought that crap up like they did junk bonds in the '80s. That's where the trouble comes home to roost.

    When the lenders found that they could sell the top third and the bottom third of the loans as "conservative" and "high risk" products they then took the middle third and subdivided it the same way to make those loans seem more desirable. The whole thing's a cacophonous hymn to greed. And the odds are, the U.S. government is going to bail out the large financial institutions - so we'll all end up paying for it in the end while the shysters who started the whole thing go on to new ventures.
  13.  (787.13)
    The truly mad part of this, well there are so many, is that banks hate having all these foreclosed houses on their hands. Ideally they want to deal only in credit and debits, no hard property and no hard currency. You don't have to paint an electronic transaction or hire people on to bake cookies and show it to buyers. The glut of foreclosed homes are going to be sold for next to nothing just to get rid of the cost of keeping them. Some people are going to walk out of this mess with a hell of alot of cheap property.

    The whole cycle in recent years has been one huge mass of FAIL. Buyers were told this is THE TIME to buy a home and that lenders were all but handing out sacks of cash with dollar bill signs on the side. The ARM products ranged from sensible to completely batshit. A 2/28 ARM where you have a fixed rate for 2 years then whatever the hell they want for 28? The justification for that is the borrower can use those two years of reduced interest to save up some money. Money they never saved before, as if taking out a loan suddenly made them financially responsible? Money kept getting cheaper and cheaper and more people flooded the market.

    Home prices are ridiculously inflated. A year ago I was in the market and saw a 1 bedroom condo for $339,000. This was a gut rehab, mid-sized apartment. I come from a family of electricians and carpenters, for all their shine about marble countertops the place was easily inflated by a hundred grand. Still, it sold four days after I saw it.

    Curious to see if it's still occupied.

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