Analysts Question a Threat by Fannie
Fannie Mae’s decision to begin punishing people who walk away from their unpaid mortgages could prove difficult to sell to the public and might be impossible to execute, housing and lending experts said Thursday.  A Fannie Mae spokeswoman said that the goal of the new punitive policies was to force defaulting homeowners to work with their servicers to surrender their houses through either a lender-approved short sale or by formally giving up the deed.

Homeowner association foreclosures skyrocketing
What’s worse is that Tony is not alone. The number of HOA's seizing homes for late payments is going through the roof. According to Bexar County foreclosure sales records, supplied by rexreport.com, the number of HOA foreclosures has jumped 78% in Bexar County, when you compare 2008 to 2009.  Lawyer Tom Newton is the man behind almost all of San Antonio's HOA foreclosures.  News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooter Brian Collister spoke with Newton back in 2007 when he foreclosed on a disabled couple’s home.

No Help in Sight, More Homeowners Walk Away
“People like me are beginning to feel like suckers,” Mr. Koellmann said. “Why not let it go in default and rent a better place for less?”  After three years of plunging real estate values, after the bailouts of the bankers and the revival of their million-dollar bonuses, after the Obama administration’s loan modification plan raised the expectations of many but satisfied only a few, a large group of distressed homeowners is wondering the same thing.  New research suggests that when a home’s value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying.

Why Treasury Needs a Plan B for Mortgages
AFTER months of playing pretend, the Treasure Department conceded last week that the Home Affordable Modification Program, its plan to aid troubled homeowners by changing the terms of their mortgages, was a dud. The 10-month-old program is going nowhere, the Treasury said, because big institutions charged with implementing it are dragging their feet.“The banks are not doing a good enough job,” said Michael S. Barr, assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions, in an article published last Sunday in The New York Times.

Quarter of borrowers in anti-foreclosure plan are behind
About 25 percent of borrowers helped under the administration's massive foreclosure prevention plan have already fallen behind on their new mortgage payments, according to government data that raise new questions about the program's effectiveness. The delinquency figures reflect the latest troubles of the program, known as Making Home Affordable. Earlier this week, Treasury officials announced a campaign to put new pressure on lenders to do more to move struggling homeowners into loans with easier terms. So far, more than 650,000 borrowers have been enrolled into the initial, or "trial," phase of the program and have seen their payments lowered by an average of $640 a month, or 40 percent. But a recent survey of large mortgage servicers published by the Treasury Department found that that more than 25 percent of borrowers in the program were not current on their trial payments.

Huffington Post
Gretchen Morgenson: Lobbyists Win Again In Securing Tax Break For Home Builders
The New York Times ’s Gretchen Morgenson points out that lobbyists have won another victory that will lead to billions in taxpayer dollars being handed over to firms that helped spur the economic crisis. The Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009, which President Obama just signed into law, contains “a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004,” Morgenson reports.

A Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency
While the Federal Trade Commission was receiving gut-wrenching documentation of predatory lending abuses at a unit of Citigroup, the Federal agency mandated to level the playing field for low income homeowners, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was quietly awarding 19,968 mortgages of homeowners in distress to Citigroup to dispose of as it saw fit.  HUD legally became Citigroup’s joint venture partner in at least two of the deals, retaining a minority interest.

Ruling by judges rattles mortgage industry
Law and custom have long required that property transactions be recorded with a county clerk or “recorder of deeds,” along with information about the person who holds the mortgage...Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, set up a company that would do it all electronically. It is called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS)...Once people started defaulting on loans, MERS would announce the default on behalf of its bank clients. Consumer activists and attorneys for homeowners began questioning whether MERS, which represents banks but has no direct financial interest in the loans, could legally trigger foreclosure, but judges were generally not sympathetic to the argument.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON:The Mortgage Machine Backfires
The opinion spotlights a crucial but obscure cog in the nation’s lending machinery: a privately owned loan tracking service known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System. This registry, created in 1997 to improve profits and efficiency among lenders, eliminates the need to record changes in property ownership in local land records... Dotting i’s and crossing t’s can be a costly bore, of course. And eliminating the need to record mortgage assignments helped keep the lending machine humming during the boom... In April 2006, Mr. Kesler filed for bankruptcy. That July, Landmark National Bank foreclosed. It did not notify either MERS or Sovereign of the proceedings, and in October, the court overseeing the matter ordered the property sold. It fetched $87,000 and Landmark received what it was owed. Mr. Kesler kept the rest; Sovereign received nothing.

Landmark Decision Promises Massive Relief for Homeowners and Trouble for Banks
A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark Natioal Bank v. Kesler,  2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose -- on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS. Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound.