Foreclourses has become the new real estate Four-letter word.

In March one in every 538 households in the U.S. received a foreclosure notice with Nevada (1 in 139 homes) leading the pack, followed by California (1 in 204 homes), Florida (1 in 282 homes) and Arizona (1 in 283 homes).

And the bad news is just everywhere...CNN, Fox News, USA Today, the Web, etc. etc.

To assist homeowners Real Estate Wiki (see previous entry on launch of the new wiki in real estate) has added a bunch of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) covering questions such as:

First American CoreLogic, a member of The First American Corporation family of companies and America's largest provider of advanced property and ownership information, analytics and services, announced this week the release of REiSource, a new Web-based real estate information gateway to the most complete and accurate suite of property profiles, new homeowner and refinance lists, resale trends, mortgage leads and custom reports for title insurance companies.

As promised, and actually required, by the Economic Stimulus Bill of 2008, FHA/HUD announced their new loan amounts this past week. The new FHA loan limits are based on 125% increases of each county's median price with a minmum of $271,050 and a maximum of $729,750.This one move will make it much easier for many who are burdened with an adjustable rate mortgage to refinance if their property has not appreciate much over the past few years.

New real estate wiki for real estate industry is launched. 

History of wikis in real estate
BiggerPockets (launched in 2006) claims to be the first real estate wiki but it unfortunately closed down in May 2007 due to lack of sufficient content.  Introduced shortly therafter, and still going strong, is InmanWiki (part of InmanNews, InmanTV and InmanBlog).  

These days, we have to take our good news where we can find it. So which of today’s major stories do we focus on: the decline of existing home sales to a nine-year low, the first annual price decline on single family homes in 40 years, or the decline of mortgage rates to their lowest level in four years?

Given the seemingly endless stream of negative numbers we’ve discussed here, the interest rate news is welcome relief. Maybe it’s not worthy of a ticker tape parade, but it may well help the market in several ways:

Listening to Bernanke speak on Thursday, January 10, 2008,  I wanted to pull my hair out. Can't we just get on with it and do a 1% cut right out the chute for 2008 and then cap it for the year?  I feel like this crawling to get to a reasonable fix is delaying a market stabilization. I keep hearing that there is a threat of other countries seeing us as weak and vulnerable if we make drastic changes...oh come on!  

Charlotte, North Carolina-based, Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. bank by market value, agreed today January 11, 2008 to buy Countrywide Financial Corp. for about $4 billion. Countrywide has 9 million borrowers and fees from servicing $1.5 trillion of mortgages. This follows their investment of $2billion in August 2007 (see earlier post).BofA will acquire Countrywide for about $7.16 a share in stock, 7.6% lower than the  closing price on the New York Stock Exchange.

On 12/14/2006, I posted an article on Tax Deductible PMI:

On 3/20/2007, I updated that article to read that the 2007 deduction for private mortgage insurance had not yet been extended.

I am happy to report that legislation has been passed that will extend the tax deduction for private mortgage insurance through 2010.

The tax deduction is available to a personal residence and a non-rental second home.

On Friday, December 17, 2007, the Senate passed a bill (93-1) to increase the maximum FHA loan amount to $417,000 for a single family residence. The current limit is $362,000. 

This loan amount matches the current conforming loan amount for conventional loans.  This will give some homeowners struggling with a decline in value the opportunity to refinance their current loans into a more stable FHA loan.

According to a article published in the Wall Street Journal 61% of sub-prime loans were issued to borrowers with credit scores above 620 (the threshold for a conventional loan).  And combing through the data even more revealed that many of these borrowers had scores above 700.  Much of this can be attributed to "other" factors such as the amount of documentation, down-payment requirements etc that would have pushed a "normally" well qualified person into a sub-prime loan. 

However, the question posed here is: "Where was the real estate professional?"