Real Estate News – September 27, 2011
More home owners are being tricked into a forensic loan audit, a new scam that targets struggling home owners looking for a loan modification to save their home from foreclosure (via REALTORMag):
An uptick in court cases challenging the foreclosure process sent the Mortgage Litigation Index in the second quarter to its highest level on record, dating to 2007 (via REALTORMag): http://bit.ly/obRMZw
Police: Foreclosed homeowner to blame for haz-mat scare (via komonews.com): http://bit.ly/pYmEh3
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed lawsuits against four Chicago area companies and attorneys alleging they conducted fraudulent mortgage rescue or loan modification schemes that illegally charged consumers for little if any help to avoid foreclosure (via suntimes.com): http://bit.ly/qZzZ35
The supply of residential shadow inventory— homes that are at least 90 days delinquent, in foreclosure, or already bank-owned but not yet listed — is falling, reports CoreLogic (via bizjournals.com): http://bit.ly/oCOwXQ
The housing market continues to bottom, despite a fourth consecutive monthly increase in the S&P/Case-Shiller’s home price index. While the 10-city and 20-city composite indices both gained 0.9% in July over June, year-over-year numbers “indicate that the housing market is still bottoming and has not turned around,” according to index Chairman David Blitzer (via Forbes.com): http://onforb.es/nVE0j0
Government regulators may have cost taxpayers billions of dollars by settling mortgage-related claims with Bank of America before addressing questions about the methods used to evaluate the loans involved, according to a government report due out Tuesday (via washingtonpost.com): http://wapo.st/mZdL93
A pair of lawsuits filed Monday claim that Deloitte & Touche LLP, one of the nation’s largest accounting firms, should pay $7.6 billion in damages for failing through years of audits to detect massive fraud at a now-defunct Florida mortgage company (via huffingtonpost.com): http://huff.to/q54nSg
The three major credit-rating agencies won the dismissal of a lawsuit alleging that five Ohio pension funds lost hundreds of millions of dollars on risky mortgage debt because they relied on flawed ratings that made the debt appear safe (via reuters.com): http://reut.rs/ppwFpK