KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Wednesday March 23 Housing and Economic stories

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TOP STORIES:

Greece Debt Default Bets Increase as Spain Exits 'Sick List': Euro Credit - (www.bloomberg.com) Investors are becoming more discriminating about European creditworthiness, increasing bets that Greece, Ireland and Portugal may restructure their debts while Spain and Italy survive the euro region’s deficit crisis. The average annual cost of protecting of Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds in the credit-default swaps market for five years exceeded the average of Spanish and Italian contracts by a record $496,000 this week. That’s up from $384,000 on Feb. 2 and $77,000 a year ago. Swaps on Greece signal a 60 percent probability of default in five years. The division between peripheral nations widened this week after Greece was downgraded deeper into junk by Moody’s Investors Service and speculation increased that the European Union will fail to agree on a comprehensive package to end the crisis.

Councilman: Why I stopped paying my mortgage - (huntingtonhomes.ocregister.com) Huntington Beach Councilman Keith Bohr has released a written statement about his attempts to get a loan modification on his $2.5 million Edwards Hill home, how it wound up in foreclosure and why he filed a lawsuit against the lender. . Here's what he says happened: "My wife and I bought our home in the spring of 2005 for approx. $2.5m, with a traditional 20% cash downpayment of approximately $500k a traditional loan, not a subprime loan. We also invested in excess of $500,000 remodeling the 15-year-old home. "As we all know the recession hit and our home of course has lost approx. 30% from the purchase price and the value is now considerably below the loan amount. In early 2010, I began communications with Wells in an effort to renegotiate a loan modification. "After many months of little real progress I was informed by several people in the business and a couple of Wells employees that Wells will not truly negotiate as long as my loan is current. So, I then stopped making my payments in the later part of 2010 and sure enough we started making some good progress, but have not yet successfully obtained a loan mod. Please note we are not looking for principal reduction or any forgiveness of any deliquent payments, we are just looking for a market interest rate and new 30 year term.

Owners struggling to sell their time shares - (www.latimes.com) Time shares are tough to sell, even in the best of times. But now the shared vacation properties and their hefty annual fees have become nearly impossible to unload and are breeding a horde of scam artists preying on eager sellers. Nearly 8 million people — about 7% of U.S. households — own a time share, a vacation property owned by many people who take turns using it. The slow economic recovery, and the fact that the first generation to buy time shares 35 years ago has been retiring, means many people are looking to sell. Craigslist, EBay and specialized listing service Redweek are chock-full of offerings. But how much they're worth is a different issue. One Florida listing service estimates that most time shares are selling for no more than 10% of the original price. Some owners are lucky to get pennies on the dollar. "We've never seen the resale market where it is now," said Brian Rogers of the Timeshare Users Group, a consumer advocacy group in Jacksonville, Fla., that runs the listing service. Most owners "huff away mad" when told their time share has depreciated like a Yugo, he said.

Haiti candidate Martelly lost three S. Florida properties to foreclosure - (www.miamiherald.com) Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly has a list of liens and foreclosures in South Florida, which he says were the products of bad investments. The $900,000 Palm Beach County home Haitian presidential candidate Michel Martelly bought in 2005 and lost in foreclosure. It was sold in a bank sale in January. A long-time entertainer who is vying to become the next president of Haiti has defaulted on more than $1 million in loans and lost three South Florida properties to foreclosure in just over a year, public records show. Among the houses Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly lost was the 5-bedroom 6,000-square foot Royal Palm Beach home the singer shared with his wife and four children until he returned to Haiti in 2007. Records show he and his wife Sophia bought the brand new two-story house on Wellington View Drive in the summer of 2005 for $910,000. They took out two loans, including one for $637,000, according to Palm Beach County records. Martelly stopped paying one of the mortgages’ $3,251 payment on Nov. 1, 2008, the files show.

Property auction rates fudged by failed campaigns - (www.news.com.au) Good to see the real estate agents are equally crooked in the US and Australia. EMBARRASSED agents are covering up a growing failure to sell homes at auction by not telling reporting bodies about their failed campaigns. Figures compiled by research agencies Australian Property Monitors and Residex over the past three weeks show that between 10 per cent and almost 50 per cent of auction results across Sydney went unrecorded. The reason was embarrassed real estate agents wanting to avoid reporting of failed auction campaigns, said leading property analyst Louis Christopher, managing director of SQM Research. "We are having a very high percentage of auction campaigns going unreported to the reporting bodies, and we strongly believe those unreported auctions are actually failed campaigns," Mr Christopher said. Sydney clearance rates from last Saturday were recorded at between 61 per cent and 65 per cent by leading data property collection agencies. But the true figure is far worse. Director of Sydney's largest independent auction house Damian Cooley of Cooley Auctions strongly agreed. He said agents avoided calls by data collection agencies to stop properties that passed in being recorded in data base and newspaper listings.