San Luis Obispo County foreclosures on the rise

April 29, 2011

While the country continues to see improving foreclosure rates, the number of home foreclosures is still climbing in San Luis Obispo County, according to a report from Realty-Trac. [KCOY]

In San Luis Obispo County almost 1,300 homes are in foreclosure or approximately one in every 93 residential units. The rates are up 7.6 percent from the first quarter of 2010.

Better news in Santa Barbara County where foreclosure rates dropped seven percent over the past year.


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What is amazing is so many banks have not changed their ways. If you answer a phone call you can find yourself talking to some with a difficult foreign accent who says his name is Steve. If you say that you are recording the phone call they will tell you they can not continue with the conversation if you record the call. They have no explanation of why they can record the call but you can’t. If you request that all communication is done in writing you will still get seven calls a day. If you call the local Bank of America in Atascadero using the 466 prefix your call is routed to a Texas call center. If you request a modification you still run the risk of being told that your paperwork has been misplaced or lost. You can never talk to the same person and the waiting time can run to twenty minutes. If you ask to reduce your interest rate to the current interest rate you will be told it can’t be done unless you pay down the loan. The amount you need to pay down the loan fluctuates so you are never able to find out what the amount you need is exactly. The reason for this is the banks have to bundle the loans and then sell them to investors just like they did in 2005. The investor and the person who owns the home are never allowed to communicate so the investor never has a chance to say if they would like to lower the interest rate rather than stop receiving any money at all. If you read the fine print you will see that when you are not actually talking to the bank but often you are talking to a company who has contracted with the bank to harass borrowers. These companies have no authority to modify things, only to harass.


Very little has changed. The same lies and subterfuge that began years ago remain the same. After the initial back lash you would think that the policies would be modified but very little has changed and the problem gets worse.


see zaphod’s link below… Yves Smith explains a good chunk of the problem.


Then search for QWR’s and find a local attorney that knows what to do with them… Fight them with their own rules and system, if they deserve fighting (and BofA has a terrible track record of deserving it).


Thank you.


We haven’t seen anything yet. The cities are broke. The counties are broke. The state is broke. The Federal government is hundreds of billions in the red.


Our politicians have spent 25 percent more than they’ve been taking in for the last 20 years. Now, it’s time to pay. When pink slips go out to 10 percent of our government workers across the state and the banks start putting their shadow inventory in the market, prices will get cut in half.


And frankly, that ordinary 3 and 2 that’s currently going for 600k that will go for 300k in a year will still be too expensive.


An Atascadero co-worker & family are facing foreclosure after the one of the two banks holding paper refused to modify the loan. Like many, the valuation of their home is 1/2 that of when purchased. Neighboring homes already vacated due to foreclosure have been unsold for months & sit empty.


Read Yves Smith’s ‘Econned’.


So many problems in the Housing/Banking world. Ever since the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act, everything has been downhill since. We’re just witnessing the crash at the bottom.


More and more people will figure out that in their greedlust, banks never bothered to actually acquire the papers for the mortgages, and when one parcels out mortgages into various bad bonds, one discovers that it is impossible to divide up the paper (so it is often lost).


Homeowners that are working with their lenders on modifications (all the while the lender is just buying time to build their foreclosure case) are borderline criminal. Homeowners need to familiarize themselves with Qualified Written Requests as soon as they smell something fishy. After three unanswered QWR’s, sue for the deed.


For a good starting point, read this (link below) and start searching…

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/10/13/the-enormous-mortgage-bond-scandal/


-r0y


The statistics LIE!! There are a lot more homes that are under water, not making payments, and have not even been served with foreclosure papers. It will be a long time before this is over.


X2.


I was reading about a house yesterday wherein the owner is four months late and has moved out, but there has been no Notice of Default filed yet. Obviously, I don’t know the details, but my suspicion is that the bank does not want to further skew its ratios with REOs, so it hesitates longer than is pragmatic before filing.


Often this is because a foreclosure (mortgage default) is a double-negative on a banks books. Too many defaults and the FDIC comes in and takes over and shuts down the bank.


For example, Bank X makes 100 homeloans, and in their Asset side of the books, they have the 100 loans’ values, plus whatever deposits and other loans, etc. On the Liability side of their books are all the accounts where people have money, CDs, etc. (i.e. where people can come and claim their money).


So when a loan defaults, it is moved from the “asset” side (no longer an income for the bank) and is moved to the liability side (the bank almost never gets what the loan was for).


So a bank goes from, say, $500K asset (the loan), to -$500K (defaulted). That is a $1 million dollar change to the books. Now there can be circumstances where it’s not 1:1, but this is for clarity and brevity.


The main point: the longer a bank can hold off on a foreclosure, especially if a “bailout” or some bogus government scam is forthcoming, the less “damage” to effect their books.


Thank you for sharing this observation.