Foreclosures Up 48 Percent From Year Ago: RealtyTrac

By AMY MCALISTER
Published: June 13, 2008

Foreclosure filings continued their surge in May, jumping 48 percent from levels recorded one year earlier as the number of distressed borrowers continues to mushroom in key housing markets across the nation. RealtyTrac Inc. reported Friday morning that 261,255 properties were subject some sort of foreclosure activity — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — during the month, up 7 percent from April.

That number translated into foreclosure filings for one in every 483 U.S. households, the highest such rate of foreclosures since RealtyTrac began normalizing against population in January 2005.

“May was the third straight month where we’ve seen a month-to-month increase in foreclosure activity and the 29th straight month we’ve seen a year-over-year increase,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac.

“The nationwide rate of increase for default notices and foreclosure auction notices slowed in May, with default notices up just 1 percent from the previous month and auction notices down 3 percent from the previous month.”

While notices of default and trustee’s sale notices inched upward, the total number of REO properties in RealtyTrac’s property database surged above 700,000 as repossession activity doubled year-ago activity.

California, Florida lead the way
Foreclosure filings were reported on 71,930 California properties, 37,364 Florida properties and 12,959 Arizona properties during May, RealtyTrac said — the three highest state totals in May. Michigan was not far behind Arizona, however, with 12,792 properties receiving foreclosure filings during the month.

Illustrating just how bad the housing market is in the two former “bubble” states, for the second month in a row, California and Florida cities accounted for nine out of the top 10 metropolitan foreclosure rates among the 230 metropolitan areas tracked in the RealtyTrac report.

Seven California cities were in the top ten, led by Stockton in the top spot. One in every 75 Stockton area households received a foreclosure filing in May — more than six times the national average. Other California cities in the top 10 were Merced, Modesto, Riverside-San Bernardino, Vallejo-Fairfield, Bakersfield, and Sacramento.

The Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro area in Florida registered the second-highest metro foreclosure rate in May, with one in every 79 households receiving a foreclosure filing during the month; the other Florida metro area in the top 10 was Port Lucie-Fort Pierce, ranking tenth.

Las Vegas was the only city outside of California and Florida with a foreclosure rate ranking among the top ten, RealtyTrac said. One in every 96 Las Vegas households received a foreclosure filing in May, more than five times the national average and sixth among the metro areas.

Other metro areas with foreclosure rates among the top 20 included Phoenix (20), Detroit (14), San Diego (17) and Miami (19).

For more information, visit http://www.realtytrac.com.

Existing Homes Sales Expected To Crash More

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Existing home sales ticked downward in March, with much of the decline concentrated in the mid-west and the south.

Sales are now off 32% since June of 2005 and inventories remain stubbornly high.

As recession fears continue, downward pressure will likely remain for some time to come

Jim Stack of InvesTech Research

By the way, check out his newsletter, just Google it.

Oil Could Reach $200 A Barrel

Goldman’s Murti Says Oil `Likely’ to Reach $150-$200

By Nesa Subrahmaniyan

May 6 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil may rise to between $150 and $200 a barrel within two years as growth in supply fails to keep pace with increased demand from developing nations, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts led by Arjun N. Murti said in a report.

New York-based Murti first wrote of a “super spike” in March 2005, when he said oil prices

Financial Doom - Current Best Sellers

Go ahead and read those apocalyptic books on the economy if you like a good scare. But be sure you recognize fiction when you see it.

By Jim Jubak

If fairy tales express our deepest fears, then investors must be on the verge of a psychotic breakdown.

The current crop of financial gloom-and-doom books carry titles such as “America’s Financial Apocalypse,” “Financial Armageddon” and the comparatively prosaic “The Coming Economic Collapse.”

Any way you go, it means the end of the world (the end of the financial world, anyway). And that’s scary. Really, really scary.

But we need to remember that while fairy tales may reflect real fears, they aren’t reliable guides to how the world works. That’s true whether the main character is named Snow White or Ben Bernanke.

Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Bruno Bettelheim all theorized that we read fairy tales about evil stepmothers, parental abandonment in dark woods and child-eating witches to help us express and then cope with our darkest fears.

The psychological value of these tales, in this theory, lies in the formulaic, repeated return to archetypical fears in what the reader knows — even a reader as young as my 6-year-old daughter — is a fiction. It also helps that, unlike real-life horrors, these tales usually have happy endings.

This current crop of financial-disaster books should be read the same way — as financial fairy tales that represent our darkest financial fears and then allow us to cope with those fears by offering up happy endings in the form of investment strategies that can fend off disaster.

So what are investors’ deepest fears right now?

It’s a recession to 4 out of 5 Americans

A CNN/Opinion Research poll shows that the nation is becoming more convinced the economy is in a nosedive.

By Catherine Clifford, CNNMoney.com staff writer

Last Updated: May 6, 2008

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A new poll shows that more Americans than ever before think the economy is in a recession.

A national CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday found that 79% of respondents - nearly 4 out of 5 - believe the economy is now in a recession. That is up from 74% of Americans in March, 66% in February and 46% just a half-year back.