Faster foreclosures and loan mods mean less money for homeowners

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The LA Times has a story today about the accelerating foreclosure process. The bottom is that banks are ramping up their foreclosure activities, after allowing them to lag for various reasons over the past few years. 

There's a day-of-reckoning quality to this. Absent some kind of massive federal assistance program to homeowners who are either losing or about to lose their houses — beyond what's already been enacted — this means that the housing market will soon be hit with a large number of "real estate owned" (REO) properties. 

I blogged recently about a Federal Reserve white paper that proposes a solution to this foreclosure crunch, in the form of investor-owned rentals. The rental market is picking up and there's a need for more single-family residences, which shouldn't be surprising given all the families that are losing their homes to foreclusure. 

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