Bank Owned Foreclosures

Foreclosures are nothing new in this country. For as long as people have been borrowing money to purchase land there have been banks out there foreclosing on the properties and as a result there are bank owned foreclosures out there. This always has been the case and it always will be the case. What has changed lately is that the number and frequency of the foreclosures, the rate if you will, has increased at a staggering rate to the point where it is beyond epidemic proportions. What used to be a few per month is, in some states, well in the thousands or tens of thousands per month.

That means that the number of bank owned foreclosures has gone up exponentially. The property is being foreclosed faster than it can be disposed of and even if there were buyers, the chances are that with the current state of the economy, there would not be any credit for the many folks who might wish to buy it which puts this country in dire straits and in a bit of a conundrum when it comes to the problem.

You have property being taken from the owners and turned into bank owned foreclosures and there are people that want them, including the original owners, who can’t get the credit they need to make the purchase. That is leaving the banks holding property at an alarmingly fast rate, property that they have little to no chance of selling of and certainly none whatsoever of getting rid of it as fast as it is coming in.

If you have any doubt that the bank owned foreclosures is at the heart of the current financial crisis in this country, check the foreclosure rates of the banks that are in the worst financial condition and there is a good chance that you will see they have a lot of bank owned foreclosures on the books and that the liquidity of those particular institution are less than good which in turn is causing them to tighten up on releasing credit to qualified individuals and to lower credit limits to existing customers and that in turn causes other businesses to have financial issues. Hence the country spirals into a bad economy where only the strongest will come out unscathed.

Bank owned foreclosures are something that is not going to go away and due to the stiff Federal government regulations surrounding mortgages and foreclosures there is little possibility that relief is on the horizon for the near future. What needs to happen is that it needs to become easier for banks to release the bank owned foreclosure property to the people that can use it and Federal funding assistance on this end of the spectrum would go a long way to relieving the current problems and restore the credit issues in this country.

There will be no quick fix, it took a long time for the United States to dig the hole it is in with the bank owned foreclosures but it can be done if we start taking steps to do so today.