A 53 year old Massachusetts woman killed herself after faxing her mortgage company that she was going to do so. Her family home was due to be foreclosed upon later that afternoon, and in a last gasp desperate attempt to save the home, she committed suicide. This is a tragic story, no doubt about it, [...]

Maybe you've seen the commercials or ads for reverse mortgages. While they can mean financial freedom for many seniors, there's a lot you need to consider before signing on the dotted line. A reverse mortgage is a special type of home loan that lets you borrow money against your house that isn't repaid until you move [...]

Housing prices dropped 4.8 percent in May from the previous year according to the Office of Federal Housing Oversight. The most severe hit occurred out west where housing prices fell 14.5 percent while prices actually rose in the West South Central region of the country (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana). What does this mean? Overall the [...]

There were four back-to-back panel sessions on the topic of Foreclosures at Real Estate Connect this morning. Here are some sound bites and quotes. There are 25,000 homes per MONTH in California that are going back to the lender.  This is going to create a glut of housing inventory for many months into the forseeable future.  [...]

The house passed the Freddie/Fannie bailout disguised as the homeowner rescue bill today by a nearly two-to-one margin. The bill provides $300 billion in money earmarked for helping consumers in trouble with their mortgage and explictitly guarantees the debt of the GSE's through loans an cash infusions from the government. You can read more at CNN.com. I'm typing this from the new WordPress app on my iPhone at the airport. There's very little you can besides type so unfortunately I can't put in any links but at least now you know (like you hadn't heard already...) Share This

(Update: The House passed the bill, and the Senate is expected to approve it later this week. For the full story, CLICK HERE.) The Wall Street Journal reports that President Bush has dropped his threat to veto a housing and mortgage aid bill that would allow the government to insure up to $300 billion in refinanced [...]

Candy Spelling, widow of TV mogul Aaron Spelling, has bought a record setting Los Angeles Condominium for the tidy sum of 447,000,000. The new condo will be on the top 2 floors of The Century, a new condominium in Century City right across fro the Century Plaza Hotel. Candy Spelling caught heat for putting her [...]

If you are wondering why the housing credit crisis happened, and the implicit role the government, media, and press played in it, please read this editorial by Paul Gigot at the Wall Street Journal. He and his staff have been on this story since 2001. That is right, 2001. While the rest of the media and [...]

As we've said ad nauseum, the Fed can only do so much with interest rates.  They can cut the living daylights out of the short term rate, driving down things like credit cards and HELOCs and pushing up things like food prices; but they don't control the long-term interest rates associated with most mortgages.  So it makes perfect sense to us here at Blown Mortgage that long-term mortgage rates are racing upwards as worries of inflation and problems with the GSE's put a premium on long-term risk. From the New York Times: The average interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to 6.71 percent on Tuesday, from 6.44 percent on Friday, according to HSH Associates, a publisher of consumer rates. The average rate for so-called jumbo loans, which cannot be sold to Fannie Mae and

You wonder why it is hard to resell homes today? Just take a look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae has 5 billion worth of unsold property on it?s books. That is not properties in foreclosure, that is 5 billion dollars worth of property they have already taken over and have to pay  [...]