foreclosure crisis

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

The foreclosure crisis has taken a turn in California’s wealthy Marin County, according to Miriam Alex-Lute at Rooflines. Marin residents waged a legal fight a few years back to keep out Habitat for Humanity, the charitable group that builds houses for low-income buyers. But now that abandoned, foreclosed houses are showing up in Marin, Lute [...]

Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported.
The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum [...]

The Florida house that former Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor bought for his family, and where he was shot and killed by an intruder, is headed for foreclosure. And his mother is struggling to hold on to her own home as well, The Washington Post reports.
When Taylor died without a will on Nov. 27, 2007, [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday put his weight behind the congressional push to extend by six months the $8,000 tax credit to first-time homebuyers.  The current credit, passed as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, expires Dec. 1.
Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) have also signed on to [...]

Well, at least one banking executive is personally feeling the pain of the foreclosure crisis: Wells Fargo has fired a top employee who moved into a foreclosed Malibu beach house and threw lavish parties all summer there, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Cheronda Guyton, a senior vice president responsible for commercial foreclosed properties, broke company rules [...]

Just when you thought it was a tough time to be a banker comes this heartwarming tale of a bank executive effectively squatting in a $12 million Malibu foreclosure. From The Associated Press:
A Wells Fargo executive who oversees foreclosed properties hosted parties and spent long summer weekends in a $12 million Malibu beach house, moving [...]

Here’s a fascinating exchange between Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Financial Services subpanel on housing, and Mary Coffin, executive vice president of Wells Fargo’s mortgage servicing division, during yesterday’s hearing to examine how effectively the administration’s voluntary mortgage modification program is preventing foreclosures. (Not very, it turns out.) The [...]

Earlier today, the Treasury Department revealed that the administration’s anti-foreclosure program — which encourages banks to alter mortgages voluntarily — has enrolled roughly 360,000 struggling homeowners in trial modifications.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) is hardly impressed.
The upper-chamber’s second-ranking Democrat issued a statement just hours later pointing out that almost precisely the same number of [...]

Even as the Obama administration is pushing mortgage servicers to modify more loans to keep folks in their homes, RealtyTrac released its monthly report today revealing more than 360,000 foreclosure filings in July — up 7 percent from June and 32 percent from a year ago.
The numbers are sure to capture some attention on Capitol [...]