Some Countrywide/Bank of American borrowers may be eligible for cheaper loans beginning December as a result of the Homeownership Retention Program, the state Attorney General's Office announced this week.

The program applies to borrowers of certain loans that originated between Jan. 1, 2004, and Dec. 31, 2007, who are behind on payments or likely to fall behind. It also includes money for borrowers who lost their homes and those who face foreclosure.

"My office is taking every possible step to help our state's residents survive a series of devastating blows to our economy," Attorney General Rob McKenna said in his "Ask the AG" column. "By working together, we'll weather this financial tempest as we look forward to better days ahead."

Those who qualify will receive a letter from the Attorney General's office and Bank of America in December. More information is available at my.countrywide.com/media/FinancialAssistance1.html.

Countrywide won't start foreclosures on homeowners who likely qualify for loan modifications. Those who face foreclosure are encouraged to call Countrywide at 1-800-669-6607.

Updates one the program are available at www.atg.wa.gov/countrywide.aspx.

Anyone who is not a Countrywide customer but who is still concerned about if they are able to make their mortgage payments should visit www.atg.wa.gov/foreclosure.aspx for information, McKenna wrote. Counseling is available at www.homeownership.wa.gov or 1-877-894-HOME.

Foreclosure filings in Pierce County for August rose 17 percent from the previous month, a 60 percent jump from last year.

Statistics provider RealtyTrac release foreclosure listings this week, showing a slower pace than previous months. Foreclosure filings nationwide rose 27 percent compared to last August, but the climb was smaller than June and July.

Washington rose five spots to No. 21 for foreclosure filings this month. Nevada, California and Arizona rated the highest, with the three states combined accounting for more than half of the nation's foreclosures.

In Pierce County, 687 received at least one foreclosure notice in August, that is one out of every 450 homes.

All but four Washington counties saw a rise from last year. King County saw a 60 percent climb from last year. Thurston County is up 52 percent.

The tricky thing with these statistics, however, are that they not a solid representation of foreclosures. RealtyTrac follows default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

Here is some more bad news for the housing industry.

More people in Washington are behind on their mortgage payments this quarter, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The delinquency rate for residential mortgage loans in Washington rose to 3.38 percent at the end of the second quarter, up from 2.98 percent at the end of the first quarter. The amount of loans being foreclosed in the state also rose to 1.04 percent from 0.89 percent.

Washington is still doing much better than most of the country, ranked for the quarter at No. 45 in delinquencies and No. 44 in foreclosures started. The state also has 14 percent nonprime borrowers, compared to 19 percent nationwide, according to the D.C.-based group.

California and Florida continue to be the hardest hit. The two states accounted for 39 percent of all foreclosures in the second quarter.

The national delinquency rate for the second quarter was 6.41 percent, a jump last year's 5.12 percent. This quarter's rate is the highest since the agency began recording statistics in 1979.

"The national foreclosure numbers continue to be driven by the hardest hit states continuing to get much worse," said Jay Brinkman, MBA's chief economist and senior vice president for research and economics, in a news release.

Yesterday, I had foreclosure numbers for the second quarter. Today, RealtyTrac released July stats, which continued to put Washington near the middle of the pack.

The state was No. 26 in the nation last month for such filings, which include auction and default notices, with one filing for every 977 households. The U.S. rate is one filing for every 464 households. Washington's filings increased by 56 percent over July 2007 while U.S. filings increased by 55.1 percent, according to RealtyTrac.

The No. 1 state? Nevada, with one filing for every 106 households.

I talked with a few people recently who spend their days working with foreclosures from different sides of the issue, plus I have some numbers showing foreclosure filings in different areas around Pierce County.

Pam VanderLinda, an agent with Parkside Realty who specializes in foreclosure sales, said business took off in the second quarter this year. Banks hire VanderLinda to list foreclosed properties.

“It’s been crazy busy,” said VanderLinda, who’s getting about 10 new homes a week to put up for sale. This time last year she said about three to four a month came in.

Most of the foreclosures she's seeing are for homes financed in 2005 and 2006, she said.

“I just think the prices were too high, everything was selling and everyone was jumping in on it and all of a sudden it crashes. I do a lot of work for Fannie Mae, and they are taking huge hits on a lot of the houses,” she said.

VanderLinda, who said she’s working 12 hours a day six days a week, expects to stay busy for awhile.

“I don’t think it’s going to get any better until about 2011,” she said.

Windermere agent Erik Tinglum works at Foreclosure Solutions, which helps investors find foreclosure properties. He specializes in Pierce County.

He said the increase in foreclosures locally and nationally falls across every price range.

“It’s pretty clear the increase is due to some poor decisions on the part of borrowers, some of them were doing nothing more than accessing their equity,” he said. “Now we see there’s been a devaluation and so people aren’t able to refinance.”

That said, foreclosures here aren’t nearly as bad as they are in some other places, he said. For the second quarter of the year, Tacoma had one foreclosure filing for every 179 households compared to one for every 171 households in the U.S., according to RealtyTrac. But look at somewhere like Miami and you'll see one foreclosure filing for every 62 households.

Today’s foreclosures come from a mentality shift that occurred two to three years ago, he said.

“That mentality was pandemic. All the way across the board. People started looking at homes as a checkbook. They didn’t look at it as a place to raise a family, it became an opportunity to make money. And certainly a home is the largest investment a family will ever have. But to consider it a checkbook was very short sighted,” he said.

People interested in buying foreclosure properties need to watch out for numerous red flags, he said: location, liens, multiple failing mortgages.

“You’ve got to have some serious ice in your veins to do this and be successful at it,” he said.

When I asked Tinglum if he had any reservations about making money off other people’s misfortunes, he said, “I wrestled with that, thought of that from a moral standpoint. The reality is that home is going to be foreclosed on and I cannot prevent that from happening. There’s increasing opportunity with banks trying to put together forbearance agreements of all kinds. The reality is those that come into foreclosure need to be put back into the marketplace.”

Teresa Seeley, the housing coordinator at Consumer Counseling Northwest in University Place, works with homeowners in danger of defaulting on their mortgage. Most she sees are loans with rates that adjust; some adjust so many times that the borrower can handle one upward adjustment but not the subsequent ones.

Often, she calls the lender to bargain for more favorable loan terms.

“The other day I spent an hour on the phone with Countrywide and they would have rewritten the loan except for a $2,700 collection. She should have never been put into the home in the first place,” Seeley said.

That loan’s interest rate, now at 9.45 percent, shot up after two years and is now scheduled to reset every six months, Seeley said.

Some loans do get redone. But when banks won’t work with a borrower, Seeley said filing for bankruptcy protection is an option. The best thing homeowners facing mortgage troubles can do is talk to someone before they miss a mortgage payment.

“If I can get them when they first think they’re late, that would be wonderful. But usually we get them two or three months late,” she said.

If you’re facing mortgage problems, you can reach Consumer Counseling Northwest at (253) 588-1858. Or try the state homeownership hotline at 877-894-4663.

Here are second quarter foreclosure numbers, according to RealtyTrac, which compiles foreclosure filings, including auction notices and defaults. Typically, I would include the percentage change from the previous year, but RealtyTrac only provided the change from the previous quarter.

A large luxury home built in Georgia by the reality TV show "Extreme Makeover" is about to be offered up at a foreclosure auction, according to an Associated Press story. How do you lose a free home for which you're even given money to maintain? Use it as collateral for another loan.

Here are some additional details from the AP:

More than 1,800 people showed up to help ABC's "Extreme Makeover" team demolish a family's decrepit home and replace it with a sparkling, four-bedroom mini-mansion in 2005.

Three years later, the reality TV show's most ambitious project at the time has become the latest victim of the foreclosure crisis.

After the Harper family used the two-story home as collateral for a $450,000 loan, it's set to go to auction on the steps of the Clayton County Courthouse Aug. 5. The couple did not return phone calls Monday, but told WSB-TV they received the loan for a construction business that failed.

The house was built in January 2005, after Atlanta-based Beazer Homes USA and ABC's "Extreme Makeover" demolished their old home and its faulty septic system. Within six days, construction crews and hoards of volunteers had completed work on the largest home that the television program had yet built.

The finished product was a four-bedroom house with decorative rock walls and a three-car garage that towered over ranch and split-level homes in their Clayton County neighborhood. The home's door opened into a lobby that featured four fireplaces, a solarium, a music room and a plush new office.

Materials and labor were donated for the home, which would have cost about $450,000 to build. Beazer Homes' employees and company partners also raised $250,000 in contributions for the family, including scholarships for the couple's three children and a home maintenance fund.

ABC said in a statement that it advises each family to consult a financial planner after they get their new home.

The newest foreclosure numbers released this morning put Tacoma at No. 43 among the top 100 metro areas in the country for foreclosure filings, according to RealtyTrac. For the second quarter of 2008, Tacoma’s filings increased 112.8 percent over the same time period last year. That compares to – and is less than – a national increase in such filings of 121.4 percent, RealtyTrac reported. Foreclosure filings include auction and default notices and bank repossessions.

Here’s a look at some of the areas on the top 100 list for the second quarter of 2008, their ranking, how many foreclosure filings each had for how many households and the year-over-year change.

Foreclosure filings continued their upward swing here last month, so much so that numbers released Thursday placed Pierce County No. 1 in the state.

According to research firm RealtyTrac, there was one foreclosure-related filing for every 483 Pierce County households in June, an increase of 75 percent from the same month in 2007. Nationwide, foreclosure filings were spread among one in every 501 households.

Pierce County took the top spot in RealtyTrac’s monthly release after two consecutive months of placing second.

Washington, on the whole, remains near the middle of the pack for foreclosure filings, which include auction and default notices and bank repossessions, according to RealtyTrac.

I am often asked where one can find information on homes in the foreclosure process (or already bank owned) that are for sale or being auctioned. As far as I know, there is no clearinghouse of free info for such homes, other than county records.

ForeclosurePoint, though, now gets pretty close with addresses and square footage and other stats on homes with foreclosure filings. But if you want the parcel number or auction date, the Web site says you'll have to pony up. Whether or not you pay ForeclosurePoint, you'll have to take a moment to register. (RealtyTrac also provides some of this information, but it looks like you have to pay for addresses.) ForeclosurePoint also has teamed up with Zillow so some of what's listed has Zillow's estimated value attached. And you can match that up with what ForeclosurePoint has determined will be the estimated opening bid at auction.

Happy hunting. And, if you spend a good deal of time perusing ForeclosurePoint, let me know what you think.

The latest foreclosure stats show Washington state holding its middle-of-the-pack place in the nation, ranked No. 27 for foreclosure filings in May by RealtyTrac, which tracks default and auction notices and bank repossessions.

Washington saw a 17.6 percent rise in foreclosure filings compared to the same month in 2007, according to the report. Nationwide, RealtyTrac said filings rose year-over-year for the 29th consecutive month and in May record the highest foreclosure-filing rate since the report began in 2005. One in every 483 households received a foreclosure filing during the month, according to RealtyTrac.

UPDATE
Pierce County was No. 2 in the state for foreclosure filings, according to RealtyTrac, with one for every 574 households. Interestingly, though, that number was a 6 percent decrease from the same month in 2007. Cowlitz County came in No. 1.

The latest foreclosure report from the Mortgage Bankers Association created a stir this week, but I wanted to get the local stats before I passed along the info.

Here’s the big perspective from The New York Times:

About one in 11 American mortgages were past due or in foreclosure at the end of March, according to a report released Thursday, a figure that is rising fast as home prices fall and the job market weakens.

The first three months of 2008 marked the worst quarter for American homeowners in nearly three decades, according to the report, issued by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The rate of new foreclosures and past-due payments surged to their highest level since 1979, when the group first started collecting the data.

All told, about 8.8 percent of home loans were past due or in foreclosure, or about 4.8 million loans. That is up from 7.9 percent at the end of December. (About a third of American homeowners do not have mortgages.)

Delinquency and foreclosure rates started rising from historically low levels in late 2006 and have picked up speed in nearly every quarter since. Analysts say at first past due mortgages represented mostly high-risk loans made to borrowers with blemished, or subprime, credit. Now, as the economy has weakened and home prices have fallen in many parts of the country, homeowners with better loans are also falling behind.

By the three major measures highlighted in the quarterly report, Washington is faring far better than the rest of the country.

In the first three months of 2008, here’s how mortgage delinquency rates broke down in the states with the highest rates, Washington and everywhere else. These are for all mortgages on properties consisting of one to four units, except those insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
Mississippi: 9.4 percent
Michigan: 7.84 percent
Georgia: 7.36 percent
Washington: 2.98 percent
U.S.: 6.35 percent

As measured by the number of loans in foreclosure:
Florida: 4.6 percent
Nevada: 4.12 percent
Ohio: 4.1 percent
Washington: 0.89 percent
U.S.: 2.47 percent

As measured by loans starting the foreclosure process:
Nevada: 1.93 percent
Florida: 1.86 percent
California: 1.59 percent
Washington: 0.45 percent
U.S.: 0.99 percent

This housing crisis story has many of the ingredients of a typical foreclosure: an owner with poor health, a difficult repair issue (mold contamination), a house that won't sell and a housing market that's seen better days. In this case it's the mansion of TV star Ed McMahon, which has been on the market for two years.

Here's what the LA Times reported this morning:

McMahon, the longtime sidekick to Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show," defaulted on $4.8 million in mortgage loans with a unit of Countrywide Financial Corp., which filed a notice of default in March, according to ForeclosureRadar, a company that sells default data pulled from public records.

The 85-year-old pitchman for various products, including American Family Publishers, is the highest-profile person to be caught up in the nationwide real estate downturn and mortgage crunch.

"He's not alone. There are plenty of people affected by the weak economy, bad housing market or bad health," McMahon's spokesman, Howard Bragman, said late Tuesday.

Bragman said McMahon fell and broke his neck about 18 months ago and has been unable to work since.

"The ideal situation would be that he would be healthy and able to earn a living to pay for his house," Bragman said.

The six-bedroom, five-bath home on Crest Court is listed for sale at $6.25 million, said real estate agent Alex Davis of Alex Davis Estates, who has the listing. It's been on the market for two years, he said.

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