California still leads the way in housing fraud

Quoted: The Property Valuation Fraud Risk Index is up 25% from the previous quarter and up 46% from the year-ago quarter, indicating a shift toward fraudulent schemes involving short sales, real estate-owned inventories and refinancings by borrowers with equity impaired by falling property values

Quoted: The United States Department of the Treasury is launching, with an official announcement expected next week, a new program to help ailing borrowers escape foreclosure.

Sales figures dropped about 10% in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area in August compared to July of this year.

Worrying is the number of FHA loans being used. With a minimum down of 3.5%, these have a higher default rate than other types of mortgages.

Quoted: Adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) accounted for 4.8% of the region’s purchase mortgages in August, up from 4.4% in July, while Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans accounted for 37.6% of all purchase mortgages.

Quoted: HAMP provides cap incentives to servicers for the modification of delinquent loans or loans on the verge of default. The program adjusts the caps based on performance. Since the Obama Administration launched the program in March 2009, HousingWire reported that participating servicers offered more than 570,000 modifications and started more than 360,000 trial modifications.....Last week, a House committee held a hearing to determine if HAMP would reach its target of helping 3-4m homeowners and starting 500,000 modifications by Nov. 1, 2009. In his testimony, Michael Barr, the Treasury assistant secretary for financial institutions reported that HAMP was on track to reach 4m borrowers over the next three years.

Quoted: Citigroup (C: 4.7976 -0.46%) kept 108,000 mortgages with a combined original value of $16bn from foreclosure in Q209, 29% more than in Q109, according to data just released by its servicing business.

As Robert Shiller says, positive news, but too soon to say that this data means we've reached a turning point in the economy.

Quoted: The Standard & Poor’s (S&P)/Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index showed some positive quarterly improvement, gaining 2.9% in Q209 from Q109. It marks the first quarter-over-quarter improvement in three years

Quoted: After peaking at 75% in July 2008, the net percentage of domestic banks with tightened lending standards for prime residential mortgages fell to roughly 20% in July 2009.

Quoted: The home price index (HPI) produced by Integrated Asset Services’ (IAS) saw a 1.2% monthly increase from May to June, the Denver-based default servicer announced Tuesday.

Bad financial news extends into the commercial/retail world of lending too, as commercial mortgage backed securities delinquencies increase.

Quoted: Retail loans made p $4.8bn of delinquent loans as of July 31, while multi-family and office loans rose to $3.5bn and $2.3bn, respectively. Hotel loans accounted for $2.2bn in delinquencies, while industrial loans made up $510m of delinquencies. The multi-family segment alone bore a 5.03% delinquency rate, while hotels followed with 4.3%. Office properties seemed to far the best as of July, with only 1.54% delinquent.