Record Mortgage Foreclosures

Articles on MSNBC and USAToday.com are among those echoing the record number of residential home foreclosures being experienced across the country, numbers which are expected to continue to worsen through the end of the year.

“Nearly 16% of borrowers with ‘subprime’ ARM loans,” the USAToday article says, “have missed at least one payment, up from 14% at the end of last year… An estimated 2 million subprime borrowers, many of them low-income and minority, are expected to lose their homes.”

Almost 20% of the homes in foreclosure nationally are attributable to Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Michigan. An article in this morning’s Enquirer relates that Ohio ranked first in home foreclosures in the first quarter of the year with 3.54% of the state’s 1.4 million mortgages, or about 50,000 mortgages in foreclosure, compared to Kentucky’s 7,400. Nationally, of 43.9 million mortgages, 1.28 were in foreclosure for the same period.

Ohio has also seen a sharp decline in the number of mortgage lenders in the state since its “anti-predatory lending” law went into effect in January, according to the Columbus Dispatch yesterday. The USAToday article, above, said there have been more than 80 lenders who have gone out of business since the beginning of the year.

There was a public hearing at the Federal Reserve Board, yesterday, which “focused specifically on how the Board could use its rulemaking authority under the 1994 Home Ownership & Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to address concerns about abusive mortgage lending practices.” In its press release, the Board said it would be considering lender disclosures and rules prohibiting or restricting lending practices at that hearing, but that they would also “gather information on how they might craft rules to stop such abusive practices, and seek information from state officials regarding their experiences with drafting laws & rules to combat predatory lending efficiently and effectively.”