Gmail - Market Matters Weekly Advisory - jmcconnin@gmail.comMAKING SENSE OF THE STORY FOR CONSUMERS
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A lender tactic gaining popularity is for the holders of mortgages or home-equity loans to require borrowers in short sales to sign a promissory note -- a written promise to pay back a loan or debt.
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HSBC Finance has implemented a one-year moratorium on the collection of deficiency balances for short sales and foreclosures that occur after April 1, due to the “current economic environment,” according to an official with the company.
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Not all borrowers who sell their homes through a short sale or lose their homes to foreclosure will receive a deficiency claim. Often, mortgage companies don’t try to collect unpaid amounts either because state laws prohibit or limit such actions or the cost outweighs the potential return. California has anti-deficiency rules that prohibit lenders from pursuing borrowers after foreclosure, but California does not have anti-deficiency rules for a short sale.
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The borrower’s situation often is the determining factor in whether the lender tries to collect the unpaid debt or not. The borrower’s employment status, assets, whether the home was purchased as an investment, and the amount of debt owed are taken into consideration.
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It is important that sellers are informed of the lenders requirements, read the fine print, and ask questions when selling their home via a short sale. According to one real estate attorney who represents financially troubled homeowners, every short sale she has worked with has had a promissory note or terms giving the lender the right to collect a deficiency. Often, the terms are buried in the sale contract, according to the attorney.
Short Sales
A Short Sale May Not Mean You're Home Free - WSJ.comHSBC Finance, part of the North America unit of HSBC Holdings PLC, has implemented a one-year moratorium on the collection of deficiency balances for short sales and foreclosures that occur after April 1, "given the current economic environment," a company spokeswoman says.
Other mortgage servicers say their actions are often dictated by their contracts with investors or mortgage insurers. Bank of America Corp., for example, will "attempt to seek a promissory note whenever it is feasible" in a short sale "in the interest of protecting investors and shareholders from the losses," a spokeswoman says. In the case of a foreclosure, the investor or insurer "is generally the one who pursues the deficiency, but we do ourselves on some-bank-owned assets," she says.
Not every troubled borrower is hit with such a claim. Often, mortgage companies don't go after borrowers for unpaid amounts either because state laws prohibit or limit such actions or the cost outweighs the potential return. Borrowers subject to a deficiency may also elect to file for bankruptcy in an effort to have the debt discharged.
How a borrower is treated can depend on mortgage company policy, the size of the unpaid debt, whether the borrower has a job or other assets, or whether the home was bought as an investment. "If there isn't a financial hardship ... that's where the investor or mortgage insurer will go after the homeowner for more," says David Knight, a senior vice president at Wells Fargo & Co.'s home-mortgage unit.
A PMI Group Inc. spokesman says the mortgage insurer "primarily target[s] borrowers who are not experiencing hardship -- but those who simply elected to walk away from the property due to its decline in value."
A Short Sale May Not Mean You're Home Free - WSJ.comA spokesman for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which acquired Washington Mutual last year, says it's the company's policy not to comment on individual cases. Speaking generally, he says, "a short sale may resolve the first mortgage, but the second mortgage ... would be a separate negotiation with the lender or servicer."
Some experts say that mortgage companies may pursue leftover debt, or "deficiencies," in greater numbers as the housing market settles. Lenders are "doing everything possible to work with their borrowers and trying to bring stability back to the lending and real-estate market," says Marc Ben-Ezra, an attorney in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., who represents mortgage companies in foreclosures. "However, the ability to get a deficiency judgment is a valuable right that I think lenders will pursue aggressively in the future as the market stabilizes."
Short sales and deficiency judgments
Rich Default on Luxury Homes Like Subprime Victims (Update1) - Bloomberg.comJumbo loans are larger than what government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will buy or guarantee, currently $417,000 in most areas. Jumbo lending slowed in the fourth quarter to $11 billion, or 4 percent of the mortgage market, the lowest quarterly figure since Inside Mortgage Finance, a Bethesda, Maryland-based trade publication, started tracking the data in 1990.
Subprime loans were made available to borrowers who never proved they could make monthly payments on time. The loans accounted for more than 20 percent of the U.S. mortgage market in 2005, up from less than 8 percent in 2003, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
Subprime Implosion
Defaults by subprime borrowers began rising in 2007. Since then, financial institutions that had bet on earning cash flow from home loans packaged into securities have announced credit- market losses and writedowns of almost $1.4 trillion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Among all homeowners, 21.8 percent were underwater in the first quarter, Seattle-based real estate data service Zillow.com said in a report today. At the end of the fourth quarter, 17.6 percent of homeowners owed more than their original mortgage, while 14.3 percent had negative equity three months earlier.
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