“Two years ago when the first waves of defaulting mortgages started occurring I saw a lot of ‘moral hazard’ references in comment sections. The less well to do and financially unsophisticated were scorned for being so foolish as to take on debt they should have known they couldn’t handle.
So where’s that moral hazard now. Where’s the ‘they should’a knowed better’. Oh that’s right, we hold the well off to a different standard.
Walk on a $400,000 mortgage you’re a bum and a loser. Walk on a $2 million or more mortgage, you are making a strategically appropriate financial decision.”
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Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: July 8, 2010
LOS ALTOS, Calif. — No need for tears, but the well-off are losing their master suites and saying goodbye to their wine cellars.
The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.
Five properties here in Los Altos were scheduled for foreclosure auctions in a recent issue of The Los Altos Town Crier, the weekly newspaper where local legal notices are posted. Four have unpaid mortgage debt of more than $1 million, with the highest amount $2.8 million.
Not so long ago, said Chris Redden, the paper’s advertising services director, “it was a surprise if we had one foreclosure a month.”
The sheriff in Cook County, Ill., is increasingly in demand to evict foreclosed owners in the upscale suburbs to the north and west of Chicago — like Wilmette, La Grange and Glencoe. The occupants are always gone by the time a deputy gets there, a spokesman said, but just barely.
In Las Vegas, Ken Lowman, a longtime agent for luxury properties, said four of the 11 sales he brokered in June were distressed properties.
“I’ve never seen the wealthy hit like this before,” Mr. Lowman said. “They made their plans based on the best of all possible scenarios — that their incomes would continue to grow, that real estate would never drop. Not many had a plan B.”
The defaulting owners, he said, often remain as long as they can. “They’re in denial,” he said.
Here in Los Altos, where the median home price of $1.5 million makes it one of the most exclusive towns in the country, several houses scheduled for auction were still occupied this week. The people who answered the door were reluctant to explain their circumstances in any detail.
At one house, where the lender was owed $1.3 million, there was a couch out front wrapped in plastic. A woman said she and her husband had lost their jobs and were moving in with relatives. At another house, the family said they were renters. A third family, whose mortgage is $1.6 million, said they would be moving this weekend.
At a vacant house with a pool, where the lender was seeking $1.27 million, a raft and a water gun lay abandoned on the entryway floor.
Lenders are fearful that many of the 11 million or so homeowners who owe more than their house is worth will walk away from them, especially if the real estate market begins to weaken again. The so-called strategic defaults have become a matter of intense debate in recent months.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-governmental mortgage finance companies that own most of the mortgages in America with a value of less than $500,000, are alternately pleading with distressed homeowners not to be bad citizens and brandishing a stick at them.
In a recent column on Freddie Mac’s Web site, the company’s executive vice president, Don Bisenius, acknowledged that walking away “might well be a good decision for certain borrowers” but argues that those who do it are trashing their communities.
For the rest go here…
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I’m glad the NYT gave this some coverage. People who choose to “strategically default,” at whatever socioeconomic strata, are simply doing what banks and corps do – they’re making a decision that is in their own financial interest.
I suspect the percentage of underwater mortgages is going to go up significantly in the next 12-18 months and that strategic defaults are going to become more common. Of course this feeds into the downward spiral. Actually, just about everything seems to feed into the downward spiral, LOL.
I hold no bad feelings for those that elect this as their best option.
Its so totaly ridiculous that any person of sound mind could come to the conclusion that one day hundreds of thousands of hard-working American family heads just woke up one morning and swung out of bed, looked in the mirror and said ” I think I’ll stop paying the mortgage today, I’ll risk putting my family out on the street, I’ll destroy my credit and my financial future that I have worked for all my life and damn the torpedos, yes, I think I’ll do this today.” Not just one person, but hundreds of thousands of people did this one day. It would make for a good movie, but it did not happen. What really happened???? Come on, you know….