My Loans Consolidated

In many states, the real estate market has actually been showing life. However, industry watchers still fear that another wave of foreclosure is on the way. There are valid reasons for them to fear this: the continuous increase of unemployement rate, the falling home prices, the mortgage rates climbing back to 5%. These all are setting up the stage for even more delinquencies.

The independent LPS Mortgage Monitor recently reported that 10% of Florida mortgages were in foreclosure in August, which is the highest rate in the country and almost triple the national average. For the past year, Florida has been the nation’s highest foreclosure rate at 17%. The report also showed that a steadily rising number of delinquent loans have not yet plunged into foreclosure nationally, which means that in the coming months, a lot  more homes could be headed that way.

In Florida, and also in several other states, the housing sales are actually rising at the moment. But foreclosures just put more homes back into the inventory of unsold homes. In order to get the economy really going, the inventory has to be cut down significantly.

As if that crisis is not enough depressing, the number of foreclosures in Florida is so high (3 million property only last year) that there is a great shortage of foreclosure lawyers too. The shortage of lawyers to represent homeowners who are about to lose their homes has reached emergency proportions. Unlike bankruptcy, foreclosure law practice is rarely a full-time job, and it is usually handled by real-estate attorneys or legal aid services agencies.

If Florida can not draw more attorneys into foreclosure law, at least as a short-term specialty until the crisis subsides, the fear is that far more people than necessary stand to lose homes, possibly slowing economic recovery and clogging a civil court system already ravaged by states’ budget cuts.

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