Jona "The REO Man" from Kona's (bankownedproperties) Blog

With foreclosures now making up almost 50% of all home sales nationwide and the major banks still holding most of the assets, you may wonder who has most REOs for sale. As of today (June 3, 2009), the troubled mortgage company, Countrywide Home Loans (now part of bank of America Home Loans) shows...

Washington Mutual is now offering its REOs on-line WaMu has finally figured out that in order to get of its huge inventory of 40,000 bank owned properties (second largest behind only Countrywide HomeLoans' approximately 58,000 properties), it needs to reach out directly to the public by advertisi...

Cook County (IL) Sheriff is suspending all foreclosure evictions - good or bad? Is the sheriff suspension of foreclosure evictions good or bad?  The move is made to protect innocent renters from being evicted because their landlords did not pay their mortgages.  Banks and mortgage companies repre...

Bank of America's own bail-out plan for Countrywide customers in risky loans.  Bank of America announced the creation of a proactive home retention program that will systematically modify troubled mortgages with up to $8.4 billion in interest rate and principal reductions for almost 400,000 Count...

Does this Federal Bail-Out plan affect the number of foreclosures on the market?  Is the plan going to help homeowners?  Is this plan good for America? From what I can see now, there are going to be some provisions in the bill that will help homeowners stay in their homes.  Bankruptcy court judge...

Interest rates are going down, that should surely affect mortgage rates and therefore foreclosures, right? Not so fast. The Federal Reserve interest rate cut by ¾ of a percentage point today means that short term interest are lowered. The effect on long term interest rates is not quite clear yet....

With an estimated half a million foreclosures on the market at the end of 2007, one might wonder why they are not more aggressively advertised.  You would think that lenders would do everything they can to get rid of the properties as soon as possible as every day they keep a house on the books, ...

Who is to blame for the Real Estate market downturn? Consumers for buying homes they could not afford with loans that were bouond to get them in trouble?  Lenders for allowing consumers to buy homes they could not afford at terms they knew were going to cause trouble?  The government for not havi...

Overpricing REOs is a risky move for both agents and investors because of the consequences associated with vacant homes and time on the market. Some of the problems we can expect to see with overpricing are loss of interest due to time on the market, recurring maintenance, vandalism, and decrease...