Topic: 2011 WORST YEAR EVER for new home sales

[IronDioPriest]

I'm sure the Marxist would like nothing better than for home ownership to crumble, and force people back into renting. Landlords are easier to control and regulate than homeowners, and the infrastructure to addict renters onto the hind tit of government already exists through Section 8.

New-home purchases fall, 2011 worst ever for sales

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fewer Americans bought new homes in December. The decline made 2011 the worst year for new-home sales on records dating back nearly half a century.

The Commerce Department said Thursday new-home sales fell 2.2 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 307,000. The pace is less than half the 700,000 that economists say must be sold in a healthy economy.

About 302,000 new homes were sold last year. That's less than the 323,000 sold in 2010, making last year's sales the worst on records dating back to 1963. And it coincides with a report last week that said 2011 was the weakest year for single-family home construction on record.

The median sales prices for new homes dropped in December to $210,300. Builders continued to slash price to stay competitive in the depressed market....

[Libertas]

I wish HE were done!!!

Past tense!!!

 

[Libertas]

That reminds me, I heard on the radio this AM that there is a foreclosure backlog too, processors still working through piles of stuff, so there will be a lot more distressed property hitting the market driving prices down...so pricier non-distressed sales will suffer and there is no impetus for developers to stick their necks out so I look for more layoffs and fewer and fewer new home sales for the next year or year and a half, minimum.

[Pandora]

That reminds me, I heard on the radio this AM that there is a foreclosure backlog too, processors still working through piles of stuff, so there will be a lot more distressed property hitting the market driving prices down...so pricier non-distressed sales will suffer and there is no impetus for developers to stick their necks out so I look for more layoffs and fewer and fewer new home sales for the next year or year and a half, minimum.

The foreclosure process is a scandal; banks foreclosing on properties they don't own/robo signed foreclosure documents/people being forced into foreclosure by shady practices ....

The Market Ticker has been reporting on this for months now.

[Pandora]

An example:

More and more, homeowners say that mortgages they thought were dead and buried are springing back to life, sometimes haunting them all the way into foreclosure.

"It's the most egregious manifestation of an industry that's seriously broken," said Ira Rheingold, a lawyer who is the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocate.

Diane Thompson, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, says she has defended hundreds of foreclosure cases, and in nearly all of them, the homeowner was not in default. "The record-keeping on the part of the mortgage servicers is not to be trusted."

The problems grew from a lot of sloppy recordkeeping that began during the housing boom, when Wall Street built a quick-and-dirty back-office operation to process mortgages quickly so lenders could sell as many loans as possible. As the loans were later sold to investors, and then resold around the world, the back office system sidestepped crucial legal procedures.

Now it's becoming clear just how dysfunctional and, according to several state attorneys general, how fraudulent the whole system was.

Depositions from "affidavit slaves" depict a surreal, assembly-line world in which the banks and their partner firms hired hair stylists, fast-food kids and Wal-Mart floor workers, paying them $10 an hour, to pose as bank vice presidents, assistant secretaries and corporate attorneys.

These "robosigners" became a national sensation in the fall of 2010 when it was revealed that they faked titles, forged documents and backdated affidavits so they could make up for the bypassed procedures and foreclose on properties.

They passed around notary stamps as if they were salt. They did all of this, they testified, without verifying a single word in any of the documents - as is required by law.

And it was all done, they say, to foreclose on as many homeowners as fast as possible.

No one collects statistics on wrongful foreclosures, or how many people are facing the phantom mortgage debts. But as the industry enters its fifth year of unwinding its mortgage morass, consumer groups, homeowner attorneys and foreclosure-fraud investigators say they are seeing more cases where people who don't owe the banks a dime are getting ensnared in the same hell as those who have missed payments.

They add that such problems are likely to intensify. Former industry employees have testified that they knowingly pushed through foreclosures on the wrong people.

It all casts a pall over a housing market in worse condition than it was during the Great Depression. By some estimates, 12.5 percent of U.S. homes with mortgages are either in foreclosure or the loans are at least 30 days past due, representing about $1 trillion in value.

"This is an epic problem that the economy hasn't even begun to digest," said Florida foreclosure analyst Lisa Epstein.

In some cases, mortgages that were supposed to die off in a refinancing are popping back up, while in others, the loans were paid in full. Homeowners who pay off their houses through bankruptcy programs are also falling prey.

So are homeowners who never even had a mortgage to begin with.

Read the rest.

[ToddF]

Although some of that probably is true, a lot reads like propaganda put forth by the ever available "advocates."