Whenever someone tells me that housing and the economy is recovering, and that Obama is doing such a good job bringing these things back, the market is 18k...blah, blah, blah...I just chuckle...because they don't track the same information I do for my business...bottomline, we are no where near a recovery, the banks are on life support...the game is rigged.
And before someones head esplodes and starts rattling off all the good things about Obamanomics, let me just say, if your name is not Merlin the Wizard it's very little you can do to fix the mess the spreadsheet cowboys on Wall Street created....that's just the bottomline. This is not an attack on Obama's economic policy...
However, with that said ...there seems to be some kharma in the air, a little bit of payback for some of the ills of Wall Street and this information needs to be spread far and wide...
What is it you ask...Free Houses....
One thing that I rarely see acknowledged in the media is the enormous back log of dead mortagages the banks are still holding...somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 trillion if I remember correctly. Now there's a lot of theory as to why that is, but I'll have to diary that another day. I've been expecting this information to come out for quite sometime, because whenever I mention it someone tells me that housing is recovering, it's not it's all a shell game...
It took close to seven years for this to come out in the Washington Post...
The Boatengs made their last Fairwood mortgage payment on Sept. 18, 2008.
Swamped by an underwater home
If you notice it was just a single line entry, in a very long article...it didn't really catch a lot of folks attention....it should have, but it didn't..recovery right...?
Then today I see this....:
Bank of America, for example, has initiated the foreclosure process on roughly 20,000 mortgages that have not been paid in at least five years. The bank estimates that 90 percent of those homes are still occupied.
The courts are not the only source of delay. Over the years, the federal government has made 69 changes to its mortgage modification programs, forcing lenders repeatedly to scrap previous offers to homeowners and extend new terms.
Of course, the banks have also dragged out this reckoning through shoddy paperwork, botched modifications and general dysfunction as they struggled to cope with a flood of soured mortgages. Many cases were passed among lawyers like hot potatoes and lay dormant on court dockets.
It struck me as odd for a lot of reasons, the top one...I know B of A has more than 20,000 houses on their books....when they were foreclosing at a steady clip, the banks foreclosed on over 7 million houses, so far estimates suggest only 1 million have been sold....
That's a lot of property still on the books...and according to this article...
Foreclosure to Home Free, as 5-Year Clock Expires
The statue of limitations has run out in a lot of States, the three mentioned where Florida, New York and New Jersey. If you know someone who's living in this situation right now, have them call their lawyer and explore the issue.
This is a huge thing because I suspect that the statue of limitations has run out in quite a few states, so now is the time to press the issue and be on the lookout for politicians, trying to remedy the bankers error.
Now of course if it catches fire, it will surely make it harder to get a home in the future, rates will be higher and larger downpayments will be required...but the upside is, homes will be a lot cheaper...because banks will be getting rid of all the houses they can, as quick as they can instead of manipulating the market for premium prices......and it'll also bring relief to a lot of folks who will benefit from obtaining a free home.
Look into it....