Housing Market | featured news

President Barack Obama will not sign legislation that could have made it more difficult for homeowners to challenge unjustified foreclosure actions, the White House said on Thursday.

The number of people who signed contracts to buy homes rose in August for the second straight month but remained far below last year's pace.

Bank of America, the country's largest mortgage lender by assets, said on Friday that it was reviewing documents in all of its pending foreclosure cases to evaluate if there were errors made.

For the lucky few who are buying homes, this may be good news: The data show people selling homes are increasingly abandoning their original asking prices.

Sales of U.S. homes rose 7.6% in August -- recovering from their steep descent in July, when the end of a popular government stimulus program drove sales to their lowest levels in more than a decade.

Construction of new homes and apartments surged 10.5 percent in August from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That's the highest level since April.

The GOP gubernatorial candidate promises to cut spending and suggests that lower taxes and less regulation will spur business. But experts say the bleak economy is mostly due to the real estate crisis.

Federal Housing Finance Agency is seeking billions in repayment from banks that sold bad loans to the mortgage giants to help offset taxpayer losses, but some financial institutions are balking.

Lenders took back more homes in August than in any month since the start of the U.S. mortgage crisis.

Permanent modifications, which lower mortgage payments to 31% of a borrower's pretax monthly income for five years, have been given to only about a third of the 1.3 million borrowers in trial plans since the program's launch in April 2009. Most of the lawsuits allege that the three- or four-month trial payment plans are contracts, and that Bank of America and other servicers broke them by not giving permanent modifications to homeowners who made their trial payments on time and provided the necessary documentation.