Sobering Stats On Ohio
No one needs to be told about the mortgage market, and how shaky things still are. Hard hit states such as California, Nevada and Florida make the evening news, but we don’t often hear much about the hardest hit state of them all - Ohio. Ohio is in deep trouble, not only having a high rate of foreclosure and default, but also losing a lot of jobs. I guess Ohio has never been a rah-rah state, but it is a part of this nation of ours, and worth a look at.
I took a visit to the Dayton Daily News today after reading a bit about the state on Google, and here is what I see happening there.
* Mortgage Bankers Association found Ohio ranked first in foreclosure inventory at the end of 2007.
* Foreclosure filings grew by 6.7 percent to 84,751, according to Ohio Policy Matters, a Cleveland-based think tank.
* Every county in the Miami Valley had a triple-digit increase in foreclosure filings between 1995-2007 except for one - Warren County. And in Warren County? They went up 1,000% in filings. That’s right, Virginia, 1,000%.
* Montgomery County had 9.5 foreclosure filings per 1,000 people in 2007. This year, they are on track on to see more than 5,500 new foreclosures and nearly 3,300 foreclosed properties sold at auction. When it goes to auction, the property is lost to the owner.
So what is wrong with those people in Ohio, anyway? Can’t they manage their finances? Au contraire, my friends. It goes a bit deeper than that. Sure, there are folks that made bad decisions. Ohio isn’t outstanding for that. What has happened in Ohio, and probably pretty much nation wide, is job loss, death in the family, medical crisis - you name it. That is what the credit counselors are seeing in Ohio.
Unethical lenders and predators have done little to help that, either. Jim McCarthy, president and chief executive of the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center, said that “Most of the people that we’re working with were put into unsuitable loans that they could never have afforded to begin with. They relied on someone, either a broker or a loan originator, to tell them what their home was worth and what they could afford.” I can smell the greed to here.
To my line of thinking, you cannot point a finger at anyone without grouping them al in the same basket. Wall Street, bankers, lenders, real estate agents, builders and regulators can all take part in the blame, along with the people who made the poor decisions. Ohio Treasurer Richard Cordray had this to say - the responsibility for the foreclosure crisis lies square on the financial services industry. “There was a lot of greed on Wall Street, where they looked at the real estate market as a cash cow,” Cordray said. “It was a failed model, a flawed model.”
A tip ‘o the Allnut hat to the Dayton Daily News for stats and quotes.
It is the priority of the people behind mortgage assistance companies to give mortgage clients the relief they greatly need when they are facing a foreclosure problem. A lot of people have already been given this opportunity to live comfortably although they are in a “problematic” loan.
Well, Well
This is so predictable. I have been in the loan industry for almost 20 years. People still don’t get it because no one has explained it. The smoke and mirrors was rampid during the first 8 months of the Meltdown. Not one politician or financial analysit got it right. This did not start just a few years ago, it started back in 1990. This is when the large banks lied to congress about the credit scoring system. Several lobby groups such as MBA and others fought credit scoring and predicted it would fail in the end. However since large bank throw expensive dinner fund raisers for the polititians they win. Our credit scoring system failed everyone. A waitress that is only 19 but has a good credit score, thanks to her smart parents, should never be given loans like we have done. If your score was 680 two years ago you could buy anything and state your income! A lot of people ended up with loans that they now way could afford. Small investors got fired up and were able to buy anything and everything, and state thier income. No loan officer is required to think anymore. The banks made sure they were out of the equation. Just stick it in to the computer, it will shoot out the products, and you give them to the client. No questions asked. No sitting down and evaluating wether the person could pay it back, or what may happen down the road to the client. No decisions by loan officers are required. So why hire anything but the cheapest data taker to act as a loan officer? The Mortgage Banks didn’t. In the end you have a very different loan officer today than when I started in 87. The banks got thier way and they screwed America. O but guess who gets the bailout. Same people that got us in it.
I have to agree with your assessment. Things are certainly different when Pop bought the farm - had to have good credit, a certain percentage down, and be able to prove it was doable. Now, just about anyone who could get a loan got one, and we get what we have here today. Thanks for the comment.
A~