Recent Stories with tag washington state

Thanks to Flickr user respres for the photo.

The big economic news reverberating around the Washington blogoshere today is the home foreclosure rate in our fine state. Per the AP report in this morning's Seattle Times:

The number of U.S. households caught up in the foreclosure crisis rose more than 5 percent from summer to fall as a federal effort to assist struggling borrowers was overwhelmed by a flood of defaults among people who lost their jobs.

Locally, it's a more complicated story. While the Seattle P-I reported the news as a shocking twist ("Foreclosure filings in the Seattle metropolitan area were up in September compared with August, bucking a trend that saw the month-to-month rate decline nationally"), Tim Ellis at Seattle Bubble actually called the trend back in August.

Ellis argued in a post on Aug. 13 that a new state law delaying foreclosures by an additionally 30 days would lead lenders to rush to foreclose, leading to a temporary drop-off in new foreclosures before the rates rose again. 

"The new law essentially makes it more difficult for a lender to foreclose on owner-occupied homes with mortgages minted from 2003 through the end of 2007," he wrote,

...and adds an extra 30 days to the process. Since a notice of trustee sale comes 30 days after the notice of default, a surge in default notices filed before the bill became law in late July could result in a continued surge in notices of trustee sale through this month.

After that, it is likely that we will see a lull in apparent foreclosure activity for a month or two as the newly-legislated time in the pipeline fills up. My guess is that by the end of this year we will probably be back to a more “normal” post-bubble foreclosure level of ~1,000 notices of trustee sale per month.

This morning, he wrote, "Not surprisingly, as the newly-mandated 30-day pipeline begins to fill up, foreclosures seem to be resuming their upward trend across the Sound." As per usual, Seattle Bubble's a step or two ahead of the real estate journalists.

The other big news this morning was the reports of the teetering fortunes of Spokane-based Sterling Financial Corp., the parent company of Washington's second-largest bank, Sterling Savings. The Puget Sound Business Journal reported this morning that "Sterling’s stock dropped more than 12 percent to $1.45 in early morning trading on the news. The Spokane-based bank ousted its chairman and chief executive Harold Gilkey, 70, who co-founded Sterling in 1983. It also ousted Heidi Stanley, the chief executive of Sterling Savings Bank."