Revealing Foreclosure Story on ABC Television- Watch the video

Foreclosure rates on the rise...

Foreclosure Story (actually a short video on foreclosures) on ABC Television reveals the interesting uptrend in the foreclosures which is directly tied into the adjustable rates.

Sometimes I think to myself, adjustable mortgage rates are plain stupid. But then if you are an investor, taking advantage of low rates, especially when investing in a foreclosure property for the short term, is the best way to go.

Take a look at the foreclosure video on ABC by clicking here





filed under: foreclosure investing

ARMs Starting To Hurt... Causing Increases To House Foreclosures

House Foreclosures on the rise due to increase in ARM rates

I read an article today at www.rockymountainnews.com titles "Those Arms Starting To Hurt"
It goes into many of the factors I've been discussing which contribute to sharp increases in home foreclosure rates in the past few month.

Here is a snippet of the article:

"Thousands of Denver homeowners gambled on adjustable rate mortgage loans three years ago.

The higher payments are expected to cost many homeowners in the metro area tens of millions of dollars in higher mortgage payments and drive up the already near-record number of foreclosures

In Colorado, 28.5 percent of homeowners have 5 percent or less equity in their homes, and 47 percent have 15 percent or less equity, according to a report released earlier this year by Christopher L. Cagan, director of research and analytics at First American Real Estate Solutions in Santa Ana, Calif.

Only Tennessee homeowners, on average, have less equity in their homes, the report said.
Last year, more than 14,000 Denver-area homeowners defaulted on mortgages.

Increasingly, people who locked in three-year ARMs with rates in the 4 percent range are finding loan rates rising by 50 percent or more.

Jalowsky estimates that 75 percent to 80 percent of homeowners defaulting on their mortgages in the Denver area took out ARMs in recent years.

"It is absolutely mortgage roulette," Bartlett said. When you combine ARMs, 100 percent financing, negative amortization, seller-paid closing costs, rising rates, falling prices, rising inventory and a continuing sluggish Denver economy, you have a recipe for 1987 to 1990 revisited."

Sometimes the rates change every month.

If you only make the minimum payment, the interest you don't pay is added to your loan amount. Now, he said, he is getting phone calls from people who want to refinance out of option ARMs into fixed-rate mortgages.

Now, people are wondering why they didn't lock in fixed rates at 40-year lows around 5.5 percent.

Cagan also doesn't think the hangover from people overindulging in low-rate ARMs will bring the economy to its knees.

The question he hears: "Do I swap my low rates for a 6.75 percent, fixed-rate loan today and pony up the extra dollars, or do I hold on to the low rate until the last minute, knowing that there's a good chance that rates will be even higher when the rates reset?"

Filed under: foreclosure investing

New Google Software Shows Interesting House Foreclosure Trends

New Google Software Shows Interesting House Foreclosure Trends


Google recently unvailed an aboslute awesome piece of software that just blew me away.
What Google has does, in essence, is to open up their database and show trends for any give keyword.

So I wanted to show you what I uncovered when I searched for Home Foreclosures.

I plugged in the word "foreclusre" and I see this graph. And the graph pops up...

Here's the direct link:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=foreclosure&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

I see a downwards trend toward the end of 2005 and a sharp spike in the beginning part of 2006. The same trend is also visible for end of 2004 and beginning of 2005.

A sharp decline in search for "foreclosure" followed by an increase.

You can repeat this with many other words or word combinations.
I tried "foreclosure Investing" , "Foreclosure Help" and "Stop Foreclosure" and noticed a sharp decline for stop decline with the last word.

Foreclosure investing returned no results oddly enough!

I also ran some stats on "House Foreclosure" and want to show you some interesting stats and graphs that pop up for the term "House Foreclosure"

Note the cities popping up for House Foreclosure.

Not sure if you can use any of this data but you can use Google Trends to mine a ton of Real Estate and Foreclosure as well as all other data.

Good luck and happy investing

filed under: Foreclosure investing