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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (61167)	3/18/2005 11:34:59 AM
From: twmoore	Respond to of 74559

Thought you might be interested in this. Foreclosure postings increase for April (TEXAS) Star-Telegram ^ / Mar. 18, 2005 / Andrea Jares • Homeowners are increasingly running into trouble with home-equity loans and owing more than their residences are worth, according to an analyst of the North Texas housing market. Houses headed to foreclosure are increasingly the result of defaults on home-equity loans and houses that aren't worth what their owners owe on them, according to an Addison-based company that compiles foreclosure figures. Area foreclosure postings continue to run at unusually high levels, said George Roddy Sr., president of the Foreclosure Listing Service. There are 3,111 houses posted for foreclosure for the April 5 auction, according to the service. That is a 4.1 percent increase from the 2,989 houses posted for foreclosure a year ago in Tarrant, Denton, Dallas and Collin counties. In Tarrant County, 997 homes are on the foreclosure list, a 1.5 percent decrease from a year ago. When foreclosures started rising a few years ago, Roddy said, most of the defaulting owners had lost jobs or taken large pay cuts. Now there seems to be a rise in home-equity defaults and people who owe more than their houses are worth, especially if they made small down payments. The service said 18.3 percent of the properties on the foreclosure list had debt exceeding the property value. And 5.7 percent were home-equity loan defaults. Home-equity loans allow borrowers to use their homes as collateral but also allow the lender to take the home if payments aren't made. "This problem with foreclosures has kind of moved from the economic lacking to basically an overexuberance in lending, in my estimation," Roddy said. Taxes are another factor. The number of people losing houses because of unpaid taxes is twice what it was a year ago, said Jim Brown, who has compiled a foreclosure list available at the Tarrant County Courthouse. There are signs that foreclosures could start tapering off. Employment, an indicator of future foreclosures, has been looking up, said Ted Wilson, a partner at Residential Strategies, a Dallas company that analyzes housing activity. Fort Worth gained 15,800 jobs from January 2004 to January 2005, Wilson said, citing Texas Workforce Commission numbers. "As for people who may have been losing a house because of a lack of employment, that should be changing," he said. Andrea Jares, (817) 685-3851 ajares@star-telegram.com