Record Foreclosures Won’t Ease Soon

By Stephanie Armour

With homes entering foreclosure at a record rate, economists see no letup in the surge of homeowners who are losing their properties for failure to pay their mortgage.

For the first quarter of the year, the rate of new foreclosures hit 0.99%, the highest point since record-keeping began in 1979, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday. And the delinquency rate — reflecting those at least 30 days behind on their bills and at risk of sinking into foreclosure — reached 6.35%. That was another record.

“It doesn’t get any worse than this,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. “There’s no sign of stabilization. It’s going to continue at least through the end of this year.”

Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight, says: “I look at a lot of housing reports, and this is probably the worst report I’ve come across. We still think home prices will drop another 10%, and foreclosures will remain elevated through the end of the year.”

At the same time, Newport says, there’s some sign that home sales may be picking up in California and Florida. If so, he says, that could lead to an uptick in sales nationwide by the end of this year. But he and other economists agree that the high rate of foreclosures will persist nationwide.

The main reason is that so many adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) have been resetting this year, and in many cases they’re leaving people with higher mortgage bills. And in a sagging economy, with workers facing job losses or shrunken paychecks, many homeowners can’t afford bigger payments.

Compounding the misery, prices are plummeting, in part because of a swelling supply of homes for sale, magnified by the rising foreclosures. Stuck with foreclosed properties, banks are slashing prices to unload those homes, forcing other sellers to cut their own prices to compete. A drop in housing values, in turn, has left current homeowners with dwindling equity, spurring even more foreclosures.

“Foreclosures are creating price declines,” Zandi notes, “and price declines are leading to more foreclosures due to negative equity.”

Further exacerbating the problem is that banks have tightened lending rules to reduce their own financial risks. Fewer people, as a result, are qualified to buy.

Some states have been battered. California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada combined represent 89% of the increase in homes entering foreclosure, the MBA says.

Nationwide, the proportion of all homes in some stage of foreclosure reached 2.47%. That was yet another record in the MBA’s figures dating to 1979. (c) Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.