Foreclosure Backlog Continues

Four years into the housing crisis and there are still 2.1 million homes in foreclosure!

The courts are so backlogged and their pace so slow that it will take many more years for all these homes to work their way through the system and return the market to some sort of normalcy.

This is testament to the Obama government’s attempt to fix the crisis by bailing out the banks and promising people that the government was going to help them with a loan modification, and giving people a sense of entitlement to stay in their homes and not pay the mortgage.

Of course, this has been spurred on by the banks’ own corruption and ineptitude with the so-called robo-signing scandal, the failure of banks to keep track of mortgage notes, relying instead on M.E.R.S.   This has given many homeowners grounds for a legal defense, creating uncertainty and a stagnant market.

It is estimated that eighty percent of those applying for loan modifications were rejected, but it took many a year or more of fighting with the bank to find this out. 

Lawyers have bombarded homeowners with promises of fighting the big bad banks but very few have actually won their cases; their rest are just staving off the inevitable and getting ‘free’ accommodation at everybodies’ expense if they are not paying their property taxes.

The result?  Opportunity for the rich to get richer and the rate of home ownership in this country plummeting.

Those who are serious about moving on with their lives and have financial hardship are doing a short sale to get rid of their upside down property.