subject: Foreclosed Homes Likely to Swell Housing Market Although Feds Claim Recession is Over [print this page] Foreclosed Homes Likely to Swell Housing Market Although Feds Claim Recession is Over
Even though the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago is cautiously claiming that the current recession is over, the housing market is likely to still suffer a glut of bank-owned foreclosures in 2010.
The Federal Reserve president is predicting that the jobless rate may improve very slightly even though employment fell in the last month of the year and many other experts are forecasting that more jobs will be lost over this current year. Though the official unemployment rate is merely sitting at around ten percent, the percentage of people across the country who are either out of work of struggling with a part-time job instead of a full-time job is much higher. The unemployment rate only reflects the percent of people out of the work force who are actually looking to re-enter it at that time; after being out of a job though, many people give up the search for a while, at least temporarily.
The national GDP rose in the third quarter of 2009, a hint that indeed points towards economic recovery. However, a double-dip in the bottoming out of the economy during a recession is also very common. A general rise in GDP is a good sign, but it would also be more telling if there were rises in particular areas of the GDP that specifically support economic recovery. The anticipated increase in the GDP over 2010 is estimated to be around 3% for the year.
However, even with these signposts of economic recovery, it is still quite certain that the housing market will not be leading the way to recovery as it is inevitable that the market will be seeing an increase in foreclosed home in stock very soon. At this point, many homes are in a pre-foreclosure stage; a huge number of home owners are delinquent in their mortgage payments or struggling to meet the government criteria to have their mortgages modified. However, due to a number of reasons, only about 4% of homeowners with delinquent mortgages have been able to negotiate the process and succeed in mortgage modification with their lender.
This year we will be seeing an increase in foreclosed on inventory that the banks have been holding on to, possibly in hopes that the market would improve enough that they could recoup more of their investment in these properties. This flood of homes combined with the end of the home buyer's tax credit and the Federal Reserve program ending is going to make for a major disruption to the recovery of the housing market; it may prove to be a stifling combination of unfortunate circumstances that may well delay the normalizing of the real estate market.
