There's a 13% Chance You're Not Making Your House Payment
Remember the Housing Bubble and the gazillion bullshit mortgages that caused the entire global economy to collapse and send us into a terrible World Depression? It's still going down! The housing crash, that is -- one in eight homeowners is now either in default or in foreclosure, a new record!
And now that subprime foreclosures are "only" 43% of the failed loans, prime borrowers have an equal percentage of defaults -- 19% prime fixed-rate and 24% prime adjustable-rate mortgages. (The rest are FHA loans and whatever.)
Florida leads the nation in pathetic failure, once again, with 11% of all mortgages in foreclosure. Nevada and Arizona take the silver and bronze (of failure), and California is looking relatively less doomed with 5.2% of all home loans in default.
New home sales tanked again, mortgage rates are creeping back up, and nearly half of all existing home sales are "distressed," as in foreclosures or short sales or bank-owned or auctions. The median sale price plunged to $169,000 nationwide, 9.5% less than last year -- the biggest drop since the Great Depression and only the second decline on record since then.
In other words, Expert Economists say the bottom is here, maybe 5% more price declines this year, and everything is recovering nicely by 2010, the end. Of course, these are the same economists who never saw this coming, because of course you can just loan $400K to an unemployed dishwasher so he can "buy" a stucco box hours from anywhere because that same house will of course be worth $450K next year and the guy can refinance, forever, right?
Mortgage Delinquencies, Foreclosures, Rates Increase [Bloomberg]