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Sales of previously owned U.S. homes fell in April, a trade group said on Thursday, in a sign that the country's housing market is struggling to recover from the recent financial crisis. Economists polled by Reuters ahead of the report were expecting home resales to rise to 5.2 million from the previously reported 5.1 million. "The recovery is very sluggish," said the group's senior economist, Lawrence Yun, adding that unnecessarily tight credit is continuing to restrain the market. About 37 percent of the market consisted of distressed sales, which include both foreclosures and sales of homes where the bank agrees...

Groves requested relief under the Declaratory Judgment Act, as well as “other and further relief to which [she] may be justly entitled.” The trial court’s judgment does not indicate that it granted her request to “quiet title” exclusively under the Declaratory Judgment Act. Accordingly, no error appears on the face of this record. See Tex. R. App. P. 26.1(c), 30; Alexander, 134 S.W.3d at 848. We overrule MERS’s first issue. ..... Groves alleged in her petition that MERS’s deed of trust “purported to create a lien for security purposes on Plaintiff’s property as described.” This alleged lien constitutes an adverse...

On March 30, an Alabama judge issued a short, conclusory order that stopped foreclosure on the home of a beleaguered family, and also prevents the same bank in the case from trying to foreclose against that couple, ever again. This may not seem like big news -- but upon review of the underlying documents, the extraordinarily important nature of the decision and the case becomes obvious. No Securitization, No Foreclosure The couple involved, the Horaces, took out a predatory mortgage with Encore Credit Corp in November, 2005. Apparently Encore sold their loan to EMC Mortgage Corp, who then tried to...

NEW YORK (AP) - Damage from the housing bust is spreading to areas once thought to be immune. In at least 14 major U.S. metro areas, prices are now at 2003 levels—when the housing bubble was just starting to inflate. Prices will likely fall further this year, making many people reluctant to buy or sell. That would push down sales and prices more. The depressed housing industry is slowing an economy that has shown strength elsewhere. And it's starting to hurt those who bought years before the housing boom began. In some cities, people who have paid their mortgages for...

Reverse mortgages, which pay older homeowners a regular sum against the equity in their house, are supposed to shield borrowers from economic upheaval. But the popular loans have become tangled up in the real estate collapse. AARP, the seniors’ organization, filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which regulates reverse mortgages. The suit asserts that policy changes by HUD are pushing older homeowners into foreclosure. The case was filed in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia by the AARP Foundation, the organization’s charitable arm, and the law firm of Mehri & Skalet on behalf...

Join us Sunday March 6th at 12pm est as we go live on the air with Joann M. Hennessey, Property Law Today… Last weeks show was so popular they invited us back. Be sure to call in early and keep trying if lines are busy. The switchboard almost overloaded last week with all the calls so we couldn’t get to everyone. Let’s get our message out on the airwaves! Look forward to taking your calls. RADIO SHOW Joann is the Host on Property Law Today, which airs every Sunday from 12-1pm on WDJA 1420 in the Palm Beaches. Listen on...

Well-known economist Roubini announced Wednesday that there may be $100 billion of municipal-bond defaults over the next five years. His comments echo analyst Meredith Whitney's claim that there will be an enormous wave of defaults. "Roubini seems to use more of a doomsday production," said Matt Fabian, managing director of Municipal Market Advisors at The Bloomberg Insurance Portfolio Strategies Conference. "If you are going to make a prediction, be conservative. In terms of defaults, we have seen very few in the market and these have been smaller transactions." Terry Goode, head of tax-exempt research and municipal fixed income at Wells...

Inquiring minds are watching the loses pile up for the beleaguered MERS Corp. We at SurvivingCalifornia.com have been writing on this for quite some time now and people are beginning to believe that this is an incredible problem. Now a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge in New York has stated that MERS has no right to transfer mortgages: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Grossman in Central Islip, New York, in a decision he said he knew would have a “significant impact,” wrote that the membership rules of the company’s Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, don’t make it an agent of the...

A company that tracks roughly half of all U.S. home loans has no right to transfer mortgages, a ruling that could significantly affect the foreclosure process nationwide, a federal bankruptcy judge concluded. Merscorp Inc, a private company known as MERS and owned by large banks and mortgage processors, cannot act as an agent of the banks that own mortgages, wrote Judge Robert Grossman of the U.S. bankruptcy court in Central Islip, New York, located on Long Island. MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, tracks more than 60 million mortgages, and has filed thousands of foreclosure actions on behalf...

A recent ruling by a California appeals court clears the way for fraud charges against a lender that promised a loan modification but then foreclosed on the borrower. The ruling throws into question the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. Not only was the ruling a frontal assault on the empty promises made by servicers and banks, the case highlighted some despicable tactics often employed to force foreclosures.

At Calculated Risk, Tom Lawler, a real estate economist and former risk policy veep at Fannie Mae, tries to figure out how many people have actually lost their homes to foreclosure, short sales or deed-in-lieu desertions. The answer: Not enough. Lawler (who is now living the life of Riley on a Virginia farm) says the number of foreclosures that have been completed so far is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of loans that have gone bad: On the other hand, the above numbers could well OVERSTATE significantly the number of homeowners who lost their primary...

David J. Stern may be the best-known beneficiary of the foreclosure boom, having made millions in recent years from evictions processed by his law firm, the largest of its kind in Florida. But when he took part of his firm public early last year, he had plenty of help from a constellation of investors also looking to cash in on people losing their homes. Early in 2010, the back-office processing operations of Mr. Stern’s law firm were converted into a publicly traded company called DJSP Enterprises. Mr. Stern pocketed nearly $60 million from that transaction, public filings show.Behind that big-money...

I usually find the quarterly homeowner vacancy and homeownership report from Census pretty lackluster, but the latest one released this morning was anything but. Strawberry Mill Valley America's home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That's down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998

Among the many legal problems now being discovered with the foreclosure documents that banks have been using are false notarizations. The most typical variety of this problem occurs when a notary certifies that the person whose signature appears on a document really did sign it, even though the notary didn't witness the signing. While such false notarizing is criminal, I've not yet heard of any notaries being charged. However, in Maryland, Steve Lash of The Daily Record reports that 18 current and former notaries have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a foreclosure case.

MERS has screwed up the records so badly that in many or most cases no one knows who holds the notes, who is entitled to receive mortgage payments, and who has got the deed. What we used to call “mortgage backed securities” are probably mostly unsecured. It is not clear that any of the securitizations of home mortgages were done properly. In that case, the securities are not mortgage backed. Mortgage servicers do not have the right to foreclose, and neither do the securities holders. Homeowners can follow the example in Utah because, apparently, all states have a similar provision...

More than 70,000 Minnesota homeowners were behind on their mortgages and received pre-foreclosure notices last year, a warning that the housing market still faces serious hurdles in 2011. About 71,665 struggling homeowners got the notices in 2010, up 8 percent from 2009, according to the Minnesota Home Ownership Center, which released the numbers Thursday. The number of notices rose 3 percent in the Twin Cities metro area, but 15 percent elsewhere in Minnesota. The numbers suggest that despite glimmers of hope in the job market, the state could see more people lose homes this year than they did last year,...

Fred Buzzeo writes: These days everyone is sitting at the edge of their seats waiting for a real-estate recovery. Indeed, during the past ten years, everyone has become a real-estate addict. It is hard for me to walk down the street without someone telling me that the market has "hit bottom" or that the market is on the "rebound." Do I know anyone interested in this piece of property, they ask? Is the timing right? Can I put together a deal? These are the questions that I am constantly bombarded with by the real-estate "junkies" that I encounter while making...

Home values have fallen 26 percent since their peak in June 2006, worse than the 25.9-percent decline seen during the Depression years between 1928 and 1933, Zillow reported. November marked the 53rd consecutive month (4 ½ years) that home values have fallen.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In a decision that may slow foreclosures nationwide, Massachusetts' highest court voided the seizure of two homes by Wells Fargo & Co and US Bancorp after the banks failed to show they held the mortgages at the time they foreclosed. Bank shares fell, weighing on broader stock indexes, on fears the decision could threaten lenders' ability to work through hundreds of thousands of pending foreclosures. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts' unanimous decision on Friday upheld a lower court ruling. It is among the earliest cases to address the validity of foreclosures done without proper documentation....

Executive Summary: The “Great Recession” of 2007 to 2009 has taken a great toll on housing markets in most cities and metropolitan areas in all parts of the country. Though the pace and extent of the overall economic recovery of these markets is still far from certain, many places will likely resume growth and fully recover within the next decade or so. This is almost certainly not to be the case for all metropolitan areas. In fact, a number of large metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) experienced severe recessions during the latter half of the 20th century and prior to the...