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发帖数: 701 | 1 Foreclosure starts in the Washington suburbs rose last month following
federal budget cuts that may have made it harder for some homeowners to pay
their mortgages, even as defaults fell across the country, RealtyTrac said.
Initial foreclosure filings climbed 144 percent from August in Fairfax
County, Virginia, and more than doubled in Prince William, Loudoun and
Fauquier counties, the real estate research firm said today. Fairfax’s jump
was the biggest in the U.S. among counties with populations of 1 million or
more.
This year’s across-the-board budget reductions have led to “sequester pain
” including work furloughs that began in June, according to the Bipartisan
Policy Center. Homeowners may be hurt further by the partial government
shutdown as President Barack Obama and House Republicans wrangle over
spending, said Brian O’Reilly, president of Collingwood Group LLC.
“There is no question that the sequester has had an impact on the economy
in Washington,” O’Reilly, whose Washington-based firm advises financial
clients, said in a telephone interview. “And against the backdrop of the
current shutdown, I would say it would not be a surprise to anyone to see
continued softening in this area.”
In Maryland, where required court approvals for home seizures lengthen the
foreclosure process, first-time notices in September more than doubled from
a year earlier in Montgomery County, and tripled in Frederick County, Irvine
, California-based RealtyTrac said. Maryland’s 230 percent gain statewide
ranked second in the U.S., behind a 263 percent surge in Maine.
‘Faster Repossession’
“The timing for this surge in foreclosure activity makes sense and
correlates almost exactly to when the sequester began earlier this year,”
RealtyTrac Vice President Daren Blomquist said in a phone interview. “The
faster repossession timeline in Virginia also allows lenders to liquidate
assets more quickly, and in an improving market they would be motivated to
do so.”
Washington property values rose 1.4 percent in July, the fifth straight
increase on an annual basis, amid low unemployment and historically cheap
mortgages, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Values in the D.C.
metropolitan area are down 19 percent from their May 2006 peak, compared
with a 21 percent decline from the July 2006 high for the 20-city composite
measure.
Real Losses
Washington-area households and businesses are nevertheless feeling the sting
of reduced government payrolls, according to an assessment by Bipartisan
Policy Center authors led by Steve Bell, who worked on the staff of former
Republican Senator Pete Domenici and was a managing director at Salomon
Brothers.
“While we only have anecdotal evidence thus far of the impact of
sequestration on private-sector businesses and workers, we still hold to our
belief that real job losses (not just furloughs) in small- and medium-sized
businesses have already begun,” Bell wrote in the Aug. 2 report. The
center was founded in 2007 by former Senators Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, Howard
Baker and George Mitchell.
While foreclosures increased in the Washington area last month, total U.S.
filings -- default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions --
plunged 27 percent from a year earlier to 131,232, the 36th straight decline
on an annual basis, according to RealtyTrac. Filings fell in 33 states.
The national numbers “show a housing market that is haltingly returning to
health,” Blomquist said in today’s report. “Foreclosures are clearly
becoming fewer and farther between in most markets.”
Federal Contracts
The government shutdown that began this month may hurt vendors after
disputes over spending are resolved, according to Michael Lewis, managing
director at McLean, Virginia-based Silverline Group LLC. About $500 billion
in federal contracts are made each year to tens of thousands of businesses,
with some payments already late or canceled. About 800,000 people, including
Defense Department workers, were furloughed on Oct. 1.
Professional and business-service employment in Fairfax County, where the
Central Intelligence Agency has its Langley headquarters, dropped by 1,500
jobs, or 0.4 percent, in the 12 months through July, the second consecutive
decline on an annual basis, according to the county website. Federal
agencies pared 400 jobs, and the construction industry lost 3,800.
Virginia’s 52 percent monthly increase in foreclosure starts was the second
-highest in the U.S., after New Jersey’s 55 percent, according to
RealtyTrac. Lenders in the state seize distressed homes and sell them in 189
days on average, the fourth-fastest pace of any state, the company said.
“Fairfax County is at risk of continued softening because 35 percent of
jobs in the county are directly tied to government employment or indirectly
through contractors,” said O’Reilly of Collingwood Group. “We can
anticipate federal spending levels likely decreasing further, certainly not
increasing.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Dan Levy in San Francisco at dlevy13
@bloomberg.net; Elizabeth Dexheimer in New York at e********[email protected] |
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