I have often heard stories about quite a few home owners stopping payment on their mortgages and remaining in the home for over a year before the dreaded foreclosure actually happens but have not seen a better article giving facts than David Streitfeld’s “Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting” in The New York Times. Here are a few excerpts:
Foreclosure procedures have been initiated against 1.7 million of the nation’s households.
The average borrower in foreclosure has been delinquent for 438 days before actually being evicted, up from 251 days in January 2008, according to LPS Applied Analytics.
More than 650,000 households had not paid in 18 months, LPS calculated earlier this year. With 19 percent of those homes, the lender had not even begun to take action to repossess the property — double the rate of a year earlier.
In Pinellas and Pasco counties, which include St. Petersburg and the suburbs to the north, there are 34,000 open foreclosure cases, said J. Thomas McGrady, chief judge of the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit. Ten years ago, the average was about 4,000.
In Florida, the average property spends 518 days in foreclosure, second only to New York’s 561 days.
Though I don’t have factual information to confirm this, another Realtor who I respect told me recently he has one client who has been in the home for 27 months without making a payment. Even though in a recent California Association of Realtors newsletter I recently read in which it stated nearly 70% of home owners in distress will continue to pay their mortgages, the above facts gives me pause. How do you feel about this?
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