Home Mortgage News and Information

If there’s anything Hayward Hancock and Cindy Hooper have learned in the past year, it’s that home has nothing to do with a house.They know now that roofs can be taken away and lost no matter how hard you fight.
When the Aiken couple got behind on payments and their mortgage company announced it would take their house in September 2010, they put all their belongings in a yard sale to raise money to save it.
Despite the $6,000 they were able to send in, Hooper stood in the yard in her …

One advantage of variable-rate mortgages over fixed-rate is that your payments can go down as interest rates fall. If you have had a variable-rate mortgage for some time, it is likely your payments have reduced considerably recently. With rates this low, mortgage advisors say, this is a good time to look at ways to pay off your mortgage more quickly.
“We recommend [homeowners] keep making the payments they were making,” says Rob Regan-Pollock, senior consultant at Invis mortgage brokerage in Vancouver. “That puts more to principal with every payment and starts …

Celebrating a birthday and Christmas on the same day. That’s how a Eutawville woman said she felt when she won $100,000 from a “Black Pearls” lottery scratch-off card she purchased at a Eutawville convenience store, according to S.C. Education Lottery Commission officials.
The woman purchased the $5 scratch-off at Strickland’s One Stop Inc. on Old Number Six Highway. It was the last top prize in the game.
S.C. Education Lottery spokesperson Holli Armstrong said the winner has asked to remain anonymous.
“She mentioned how her husband’s really lucky at playing the lottery, too. …

The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 184,700 homes started in August was down 9.7% from 204,500 starts in July. Bloomberg had reported a poll of economists had expected the August figure to be at 200,000.
Of the five Canadian regions, only the Prairies showed any positive gains in housing starts, rising 9.4% from 31,800 in July to 34,800 in August. While still down about 18% from the same eight-month period last year, Calgary totalled 1,237 units in August, up 44.2% from the 858 units in August 2010.
Winnipeg saw the most housing …

Economic uncertainty and a lack of mortgage lending led to the sluggish housing market, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) said.
More surveyors reported price falls than price rises in August, Rics said.
And an increasing proportion expected prices to drop further in the next three months.
“The risk is that the worsening economic picture will gradually begin to have a more material impact on sentiment and discourage potential house purchasers, even where mortgage finance is available,” said Alan Collett, housing spokesman for Rics.
‘Flexibility’
The prediction will bring more gloom to John Carey, …

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has produced another lackluster set of figures, this time illustrating the extent to which the UK housing market lost ground in the year to end-July.
Compared with June, lending for house purchase rose by both volume and value in July, to 48,800 and £7.3 billion respectively, but both figures were lower on an annual basis, by 12% and 13% respectively.
There were fewer loans to first-time buyers than a year earlier, with 18,200 approvals worth £2.3 billion (July 2010: 19,500 approvals worth £2.4 billion).
Loans to home …

First time buyers believe it is those who have affluent parents who are most likely to get on the housing ladder, new research has indicated.
Any first time home buyer will need to fully research first time buyers mortgages.
A Firstrungnow.com survey has indicated 92 per cent of youngsters hold this view.
Director of the website Helen Adams said there may be some truth in this, although many parents could be in a position to help as high price rises in recent years mean their own equity will be enough to support remortgages.
She …

Trusted celebrity pitchmen such as Henry Winkler, Robert Wagner and James Garner do a good job telling older homeowners about the benefits of a reverse mortgage. Here’s what they don’t tell seniors: Reverse mortgages are expensive, complicated and always changing.
The government-insured program, which is available to homeowners who are 62 and older, has helped many seniors tap their home equity for living expense. But it’s not a lifeline for everyone. It hasn’t prevented seniors from defaulting on their taxes and homeowners insurance and possibly losing their homes to foreclosure. Delinquency …

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto on Monday expressed concern over a possible settlement with some of the country’s top mortgage servicers.
Masto told the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s editorial board that she wouldn’t sign any settlement that would grant the banks broad relief from continuing mortgage investigations, especially if it could affect the state’s own civil and criminal investigations.
Attorneys general from all 50 states last year launched an investigation into bank foreclosure practices after reports that faulty documents were behind banks’ decisions to seize homes.
Since then, an executive committee of 13 …

Another Oregon woman successfully halted a post-foreclosure eviction after a judge in Hood River found the bank could not prove it held title to the home.
Sara Michelotti’s victory over Wells Fargo late last week carries no weight in other Oregon courts, attorneys say. But it illustrates a growing problem for banks  — if the loans’s ownership history isn’t recorded properly, foreclosed homeowners might be able to fight even an eviction.
“There’s this real uncertainty from county to county about what that eviction process is going to look like for the lender,” …