Real Estate, Foreclosure | featured news

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven't read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.

Foreclosure marketplace Web site RealtyTrac estimates that 1.17 million homes received foreclosure notices in the first half of 2011. That’s down 25 percent from the previous six months, but the group said that no one should take this as a sign that foreclosures are on the decline. Instead, the report indicates that paperwork and other processing delays have simply delayed foreclosures that otherwise would have gone through.

Inma Rodriguez lost her job, and now that she's defaulted on her mortgage, she's about to lose her home. But the nightmare doesn't end there: Once creditors kick her out, she'll still need to pay back the money she borrowed to buy her house....

A backlog of foreclosures and falling sales indicate prices may decline further, discouraging builders from taking on new projects.

JPMorgan Chase & Co has pushed out its head of home lending, David Lowman, who was sidelined in February after the bank racked up billions of dollars in losses on soured mortgages and became mired in litigation over a wave of foreclosures.

U.S. bank regulators said they will give 14 financial institutions an additional 30 days to submit plans to fix problems with their home-foreclosure practices, allowing more time to complete a broader settlement with state and federal agencies.

The nation's largest mortgage companies are operating on the assumption that they will have to pay as much as $20 billion to resolve claims of widespread foreclosure abuse, an amount four times what they had originally proposed, the top federal official overseeing the discussions told state officials Monday, according to people who participated in the conversation.

Programs already plagued by delays and poor participation were not designed to fully address unemployment, now the primary cause of foreclosures.

Home prices have reached their lowest points since the housing bubble burst in 2006, driven down by foreclosures, a glut of unsold homes and the reluctance or inability of many to buy.

Sales of homes in some stage of foreclosure declined in the first three months of the year, but they still accounted for 28 percent of all home sales.