The December report of the Congressional Oversight Panel comes as no surprise to consumers and their attorneys; TARP may have prevented a bigger financial crisis for the United States but it has failed to stem the foreclosure crisis

I picked up two newspapers today and one said the housing market is coming around, and the other said foreclosures are up 15% from the same month last year.  The reality is the numbers don’t mean anything when people are losing their homes.  In January 2010, over 315,000 households in the United States received a [...]

As a mortgage foreclosure defense attorney, it really burns me up that homeowners are once again getting the short end of the stick.  There is a double standard going on in this real estate meltdown.  Lenders are telling homeowners that they have a “moral obligation” to pay their mortgages, and the failure to do so [...]

Borrowing for a home has been tough ever since the subprime securitized loan market collapsed a couple years ago.  Without government help through the FHA, many such loans would not be made right now.
But although the government is backing FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shoring up the mortgage market by backing many of [...]

The other day I wrote a blog containing my thoughts on the recently enacted “Hope for Homeowners Act of 2008″.  After giving the new law more thought and listening to some recent news clips, I decided to detail more problems with the legislation.  This law has no teeth because of the voluntary participation aspect.  That’s right, [...]

Mortgage Modification in Bankruptcy not Dead Yet
On December 9th the full House of Representatives will consider H.R.4173, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  A bipartisan group of Representatives will offer an amendment to that bill to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the loans of homeowners in a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy.
Much like the bill, [...]

As an attorney neck-deep in defending foreclosures throughout Florida, I am always cynical when it comes to mortgage industry claims that it is doing anything to fix the problem it created.
In a bit of unapologetic propaganda, Bank of America recently touted that it has “helped” 100,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure through its National Homeownership Retention Program [...]

Our second key player in the short sale process is the homeowner.  Obviously, the homeowner is the one player with the most at risk.  By the time they are entering the short sale process, not only are they significantly underwater on their homes, now they are also at least three months behind on their mortgage [...]

In HUD’s Interim Report to Congress on the root causes of the foreclosure crisis, the conclusions reached by the panel are a searing indictment of the mortgage and investment banking industries:
… [I]t seems clear … that the sharp rise in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures is fundamentally the result of rapid growth in loans with a [...]

In the last few months, I’ve witnessed a very disturbing trend in Florida.  When a mortgage company starts a foreclosure, one would think that they have the intention of taking back the home, putting it on the market and selling the real estate.  In other words, protecting their investment by dealing with the distressed real [...]