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• Q2 jumps by 67 percent year over year • Buyers done in by ‘creative mortgages’ according to figures released Monday by Foreclosures.com, a Central Valley-based real estate investment advisory firm and publisher of foreclosure property information. "Year over year at the end of the second quarter of 2006, foreclosure activity in California has increased more than 67 percent," says Alexis McGee, president of Fair Oaks-based ForeclosureS.com. The once hot housing markets in Las Vegas and Phoenix are cooling off rapidly and defaults there are on the rise as well, she says. "Both Las Vegas and Phoenix were impacted by...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Americans are carrying a lot of excess weight and desperately want to slim down. No, not their waistlines -- in the size of their homes. "Steeply deteriorating." "Hard landing." "Kaput." These are some of the terms used by analysts to describe the slowing of the U.S. housing market. And with the glory days of home-price appreciation now over, some homeowners are declaring, "Downsize Me!"A huge gap between the supply of homes for sale and demand for housing means prices are leveling off -- and could tumble. David Horwitz and his wife, Diane, are the type of...

Many brokers thrived last year amid record home sales, but this year the industry has taken a turn for the worse. TAMPA — The sneeze came first: Home sales in the Tampa Bay area dropped by a third from last year’s peak. For symptoms of the developing head cold, plunge into the exhibition hall at the Tampa Convention Center, where the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers is holding its annual trade show. Puffed up to handle record-breaking home sales of last year, which poured money into savvy brokers’ pockets, the residential lending industry and affiliated businesses are mostly deflating this...

Urge to cash in on the housing bubble has spawned an industry of schemers: Every boom has a dark side. The merger mania of the 1980s produced insider trading scandals. The '90s stock bubble was busted for biased investment research. And so it is with real estate, the hottest market of the past eight years. The urge to cash in on rising home values has spawned a growing share of hucksters, schemers and rip-off artists. Learn how to avoid ten of the biggest real estate rip-offs or view Video: Real Estate Rip-OffsClick HereSo far, it is tough to know exactly...

Law allows lenders to go after personal savings as well as the house, unlike original mortgage. Homeowners behind in their mortgage payments after hocking the house to pay for a major remodel or a new boat or car may be in for a rude awakening. If they previously refinanced and their lender decides to foreclose, they may not only lose their house, but the bank also may be able to go after their other financial assets including stocks, savings and their paycheck. And even if the bank doesn't go after their other assets, a foreclosure may mean a big tax...

IT WOULD SEEM TO HAVE IT ALL: four bedrooms, a guest house, a pool and a rock waterfall. But the vacation home in Naples, Fla., hasn't been drawing much interest from buyers, so the seller recently threw in that most modern of amenities: the $1 million price cut. That's brought the asking price down a full 25%. "If you want to sell, you've got to go back to '04 prices," says Chip Harris of Coldwell Banker Previews International, which is handling the property. * * * After a long string of double-digit annual price increases, a number of second-home meccas...

NORTHEAST FLORIDA -- The rise in foreclosures that analysts predicted would follow an easing in lending restrictions, low interest rates and creative mortgage products has emerged in metropolitan Jacksonville. Recently released data from California-based RealtyTrac Inc. showed the five-county metro area experienced a 39 percent increase in foreclosures over last year's first quarter, or 3,579 foreclosures for the first three months of this year compared with 2,570 for the same period in 2005. The increase was just above the national foreclosure increase of 38 percent for the first quarter, which RealtyTrac analysts said could mean foreclosures going above 1.2 million...

29% of borrowers who took out home loans in 2005 owe more than the value of their houses US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said today in Chicago, that he is concerned about the rising number of home loan delinquencies in the US. His remarks coincide with a report in today's Wall Street Journal that soaring housing prices and aggressive mortgage lending have saddled American home buyers with ever greater levels of debt, and early signs are now emerging that more people are unable to keep up with their monthly mortgage payments. The Journal says that recent studies by several...

Slowdown in residential building and home sales will be felt throughout the economy; weaker jobs and consumer spending expectedNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - You don't need to be in the market to buy or sell a home to be affected by the cooling housing market. [Everybody studies home sales] * * * because the sector has lifted * * * consumer spending and economic activity. This week has brought several new readings indicating that the super-heated real estate market of 2004 and 2005 is rapidly fading in the rearview mirror. Housing starts and building permits were down sharply in April, and...

South Florida was once so hot speculators flocked to buy and flip properties. Now the market has cooled so much they're walking away from $80,000 deposits (Welcome to Miami). The U.S. housing market has endured a boom of historic proportions over the past few years. Adjusted for inflation, real price increases have been the highest on record, letting consumers extract equity in their homes to fund spending like never before. But many of the hottest markets in California and Florida have cooled. Jacqueline Thorpe travelled to Florida's east coast and found the mood souring faster than in Silicon Valley in...

Tennessee ranks among the top 10 foreclosure rates in the nation for the first quarter of 2006, according to recent figures. Foreclosures in Tennessee were on the rise in the first quarter of 2006, with a 92 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 147 percent increase from the first quarter of 2005, according to RealyTrac's 2006 Q1 Foreclosure Market Report. The report shows a total of 11,718 properties which were in some state of foreclosure in Tennessee during the first quarter of 2006. National numbers show 323,102 properties in foreclosure for the first quarter of 2006, for increases...

Do higher house prices make a country richer? The answer is simply “no”. If the market value of the stock is raised, those who own it are made better off by as much as those who will buy their houses from them are made worse off. Higher prices merely redistribute income among residents, principally from the young to the old. So why do fast-growing economies tend to have soaring house prices and slow-growing ones the opposite? The answer is not that higher house prices make a country richer, but the opposite: the wealthier the country, the more expensive its housing....