After a long decline last year, the number of delinquent mortgages in the District had started to trend upwards in the first few months of this year. But in March, according to the latest report from NeighborhoodInfoDC, the number dropped again, putting the kibosh for the moment on a possible repeat foreclosure rash. D.C.'s still [...]
Brought to you by NeighborhoodInfo D.C., which released a paper on the impact of residential foreclosures on schoolchildren in late May. The above represents the number of "exiters" between the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years, or kids who left the school system over that period. The folks at the Urban Institute figure that 29 percent [...]
Forgive this momentary foray into the kinds of things decided in the White House, not the Wilson Building, but this is a real estate blog, and there is some big real estate news afoot: Yesterday, House Republicans voted to end the Obama administration's troubled foreclosure rescue program, affectionately known as HAMP. The White House is [...]
This past Saturday, a few hundred prospective homebuyers gathered in a subterranean room in the Grand Hyatt downtown for an old-fashioned property auction: 117 Washington-area properties were on the block, for starting bids ranging from $5,000 to $329,000. The Auction.com staff were in a festive mood, making the most of an economic catastrophe that had [...]
The geniuses at Google have done it again: They've created a way to map foreclosures electronically, with links to the websites where they're advertised. It feels a little bit like an invasion of privacy (in a good way, of course).
In D.C., there are previous few red dots west of the Park, but clusters in Manor [...]
Well, that was fast. In today's blizzard of Council votes, Councilmember Muriel Bowser shoved through an emergency version of legislation she introduced a couple weeks ago that would require mediation between a lender and the person about to be foreclosed upon, and require the new owner to rent the property back to the old owner [...]
Help is on the way from multiple sources today for homeowners at risk of foreclosure.
Firstly, Attorney General Peter Nickles is trying to tackle the problem of foreclosure notices, the pieces of paper homeowners get when lenders plan to take back their properties. The issue is this: With the amount of buying and selling of mortgages [...]
So, the mortgage system is in turmoil. Revelations about how banks have done business for years have sent state attorneys general–and the District–scrambling to make sure loan documents were property reviewed and signed before people lost their houses. But it's not just the banks that paid little attention to the paperwork: Housing counseling services have [...]
It was the kind of deal nobody in her right mind would refuse: It’s 2005, and the owner of an apartment building in Columbia Heights wants to sell. But instead of dealing with a new landlord, the District of Columbia government offers residents an alternative. Waiving its normal credit standards and contribution requirements, the city [...]
Tomorrow, 18 District properties–several in Congress Heights, a few in Columbia Heights, Old City, Deanwood, Barry Farms, and Woodridge–are going on the block as part of the Department of Housing and Development's second-annual property disposition auction at the Washington Convention Center. There are all sorts of rules associated with buying and rehabbing these houses and [...]
