FORECLOSURES ARE NOT SLOWING DOWN-GOOD CREDIT BORROWERS NOW ALSO FACING MISSED PAYMENTS AND FORECLOSURE NOTICES

Every month, the local newspaper carries a listing of all the home sales for the prior month and compares those sales to the prior year sales by price, and takes the average.

For the last year, every reporting period has shown declines in over 90% of the reporting areas, sometimes as high as 95% of the areas showing declines from the prior year.

However, homeowners are struggling to pay the mortgages on their homes, needless to say for obvious reasons. Just because your home value declined as compared to recent sales, there is no reason for someone to sell their home. In fact, there is every reason to hold on since it is likely that your home will not bring the value of the outstanding mortgage, especially if you purchased you home in the last 4-5 years.

The other reason to hold on vary and range from children in a school district, established in the neighborhood, and why sell at a loss.

real estate tends over the long run to present an excellent value and typically by the time the home is paid off, it has increased in price and can provide a retirement nest egg.

However, recently it appears that even homeowners with good credit when they took out their mortgage are in trouble having missed at least one payment in the last quarter. These are NOT the sub-prime borrowers, these are good borrowers!

Homeowners who missed at least one payment on their mortgage surged to a record in the first quarter of the year, a sign that the foreclosure crisis is far from over.

More than 10 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment in the January-March period, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday. That number was up from 9.5 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and 9.1 percent a year earlier.

Those figures are adjusted for seasonal factors. For example, heating bills and holiday expenses tend to push up mortgage delinquencies near the end of the year. Many of those borrowers become current on their loans again by spring.

Without adjusting for seasonal factors, the delinquency numbers dropped, as they normally do from the winter to spring.

More than 4.6 percent of homeowners were in foreclosure, also a record. But that number, which is not adjusted for seasonal factors, was up only slightly from the end of last year.

Jay Brinkmann, the trade group's chief economist, said the foreclosure crisis appears to have stabilized, as the seasonal adjustments may be exaggerating the change from the previous quarter.

"I don't see signs now that it's getting worse, but it's going to take a while," he said. "A bad situation that's not getting worse is still bad." Is this guy an idiot, the statistics prove otherwise.

Economic woes, such as unemployment or reduced income, are the main catalysts for foreclosures this year. Initially, lax lending standards were the culprit. But homeowners with good credit who took out conventional, fixed-rate loans are now the fastest growing group of foreclosures.

Those borrowers made up nearly 37 percent of new foreclosures in the first quarter of the year, up from 29 percent a year earlier.

The risky sub-prime adjustable rate loans that kicked off the foreclosure crisis are making up a smaller share of new foreclosures. They made up 14 percent of new foreclosures in the January-March period, down from 27 percent a year earlier.

Now it is the GOOD credit borrowers who are defaulting.