Home sales in Southern California increased by 65 percent in September, making this increase the biggest year-on-year in two decades according to MDA DataQuick the reason for this was bargain hunters buying properties at discounted prices and taking full advantage of the foreclosures.

In Ventura, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties a total of 20,497 existing and new condominiums and house sold in September.

The homes that were sold in Southern California in September fifty percent of them had been foreclosed upon in the previous 12 months. This was up 13 percent from the same time last year.

Riverside County saw the largest sales of foreclosed homes, with San Bernardino coming in as the second largest. The average home sale price in Southern California is down 33 percent from the same time last year at $308,500. The average home a year ago would have cost $505,000. These results are caused by the surge in foreclosure sales.

Source: Bloomberg

An investment firm in California are slashing interest rates and forgetting about legal fees, past due rent and thousands of dollars in late charges. 200 homeowner’s subprime mortgages in Massachusetts will benefit from the change.

Attorney general, Martha Coakley, said yesterday whilst unveiling a deal with WMD Capital Markets LLC, “Just shows you what can be done, the banking industry looks beyond just saying: ‘Let’s foreclose.”

Recently, Fremont Investment & loans, a lender knows for aggressively pushing subprime mortgage during the housing boom was brought out by WMD, and Coakley sued Freemont last year, and won an injunction that limited the firm’s right to foreclose on its 2,200 Massachusetts customers.
Freemont recently sold 490 of its Bay State Loans, 200 they sold to WMD and the other 290 to Carrington Mortgage Services.

At injunction had been extended against Fremont to loans that Carrington bought, through A Suffolk Superior Court. The deal yesterday releases the mortgages WMD purchases from the court order.
WMD agreed in exchange to decrease the interest rates for the borrowers levels back to the 5 percent to 8 percent “teaser” rates that the loans originally carried. In the last 12 months rates had shot up to in some cases 12 percent.

They have waivered about $7,000 to $10,000 per mortgage of loan-origination charges, late fees, past-due interest and foreclosure-related legal expenses. Plus for their clients who cannot afford the lower-cost loans, they have agreed to pay them $10,000 to $25,000 to help them relocate someone else as long as they moved out quietly.

Source: Bostonherald

Read more about U.S. mortgages