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Strategic Defaults: 588,000 borrowers say "Ciao baby"
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According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), pending home sales rose again, marking eight consecutive monthly gain - the longest streak since measurement began in 2001.
That led NAR chief economist, Lawrence Yun, to confidently predict his fifth or sixth bottom in housing—but who's counting... besides me.
"Home values will stabilize sooner rather than over-correcting," Yun said, "That, in turn, will mean wealth stabilization for the vast number of middle-class families and lay the foundation for a durable economic recovery."
Of course, how solid that bottom may be depends largely on the mess the housing bubble left behind. Because for many of those that bought at its peaks, the dream of home ownership has ended in the road to ruin.
So much so that it makes more sense to turn in the keys these days , than it does to keep making the payments.
From USA Today by Stephanie Armour entitled: More walk away from homes, mortgages
"When Sharon Sakson was laid off recently from her job as a television writer and producer, she burned through her savings to pay the $2,400 monthly mortgage on her home. But she soon decided it didn't make sense: Her home was worth thousands less than the mortgage she carried on it.
The home had been appraised at $390,000 when she refinanced in 2006, but she estimates it's not worth the $320,000 it initially cost in 2004. So Sakson did what a growing number of homeowners are doing today: She stopped paying and decided to let the bank take her home.
"I'm walking away from my house," says Sakson, 57, who stopped making payments about six months ago on her home in Pennington, N.J. "The bank can have it."
What Sakson did is called a strategic default, or a voluntary foreclosure, and it's fast becoming a major challenge to the government's $75 billion effort to keep distressed borrowers in their homes. Walking away from a mortgage is serious business - it can knock 100 points off your credit score and make you ineligible for a new mortgage for seven years. Yet, about 588,000 borrowers walked away from homes last year, double the number in 2007, according to a recent study by credit-scoring firm Experian and management consultants Oliver Wyman. While home prices are rising, the increases pale compared with overall drops in home prices since 2005 that threaten to push millions more homeowners into Sakson's predicament, owing more than their homes are worth and seeing little chance of rebuilding equity soon.
More will walk away, which will hamper the housing recovery, reinforce lenders' tight credit policies and drag on the economy's recovery, economists say.
‘It's increasingly a more important factor driving the foreclosure crisis,' says Mark Zandi, of Moody's Economy.com. ‘As we move forward, the job market will stabilize, and the big thing will be strategic defaults. People are going to determine it doesn't make financial sense to hold on to their homes. That's going to be a significant problem. Strategic defaults mean foreclosures could be high for a long time.'"
By the way, according to Ivy Zelman, CEO of Zelman & Associates, the foreclosure wave could reach as high as 3 to 4 million distressed homes this year, since 3.7 million homes are either already in the foreclosure process or are at least 90 days past due.
That's an important distinction, since a recent analysis of foreclosure rates by the Amherst Group showed cure rates for these loans are practically non-existent. The Amherst data noted a near 0% cure rate of all loans in foreclosure, while loans 90 plus days past due were cured only 0.8% of the time.
As for loan modifications, you can practically forget them - 70% of all loans re-default within 12 months. You can add them to the total pushing the number even higher.
As for walk-aways, it's a business decision plain and simple.
Related Articles:
Moody's: No Housing Bottom Until Q3 2010
Sorry Charlie, But Housing has Further to Fall
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