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The decimated housing market may get considerably worse before it gets better, according to housing-industry professionals, who expect foreclosures and home-price declines to continue pressuring the sector through at least the first half of 2010.

The biggest problem will likely be a flood of inventory hitting the market from rising foreclosures, says Bob Curran, a managing director at Fitch Ratings. With a mountain of specialized adjustable-rate mortgages, known as option ARMs and Alt-A mortgages, slated to reset over the next 12 to 18 months and unemployment projected to hit 10.5% this year, the number of homeowners defaulting on their mortgages is expected to surge. At least $64 billion in option ARMs will reset in 2010 and another $68 billion in 2011, according to First American CoreLogic, a real estate and mortgage-data company. 

At the same time, the government’s loan-modification program has been disappointing: the default rate on loans modified after the third quarter of 2008 was 61%, according to a report issued in December by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision. All of this is expected to trigger another wave of potential home foreclosures in 2010 and could cause home prices to fall another 5% to 10% before the market stabilizes, according to analysts and economists.

A record 3 million homes received foreclosure notices in 2009, according to Lawrence Yun, chief economist with the National Association of Realtors (NAR). He expects a similar number this year.

John Burns, president of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, is a bit more bearish, predicting foreclosure notices will rise to 3.1 million this year. Foreclosure notices include default notices, auction-sale letters and bank-repossession notices. But those notices may produce a far more damaging result than last year’s. “I think 50% more people will lose their homes to a bank this year than they did last year,” predicts Burns. 

One reason for the expected jump, he says, is that in 2009 many lenders were under pressure from the Obama Administration to postpone repossessions until loan modifications could be made. However, many banks didn’t have the staff to assess all their defaulted loans at the time, and he believes many of those will ultimately go into foreclosure in 2010.

Adding to the sector’s woes — the Federal Reserve has indicated it plans to end a program that’s helped keep mortgage rates at attractive levels for home buyers. The Fed program, which involved purchasing up to $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities backed by Fannie and Freddie, will expire on March 31. Rates have already started to inch up in anticipation of the change, with the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage surpassing the 5% mark in December.

Since the housing market’s peak in July 2006, home prices have plunged 30% on average, with prices in some markets, such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and parts of Florida, falling more than 60%. NAR’s Yun estimates home-equity losses from the housing meltdown totaled $7 trillion at the end of 2009.

Many housing-industry experts believe pricing will bottom soon, but the bears warn that it will probably be 2013 before the market noticeably rebounds. “The improvement that we’re going to see off the bottom will be anemic” for quite some time, says Curran.

“Some markets still have further [down] to go, but we’re definitely in the latter innings of the downturn,” says David Goldberg, an analyst at UBS. “Even if there’s another leg down, we definitely think by [late] 2010 we will have seen the bottom of housing.”

The government’s decision to extend the $8,000 first-time home-buyer tax credit to mid-2010 and expand the program to include a $6,500 credit for non-first-time home buyers will likely help lure home shoppers into the market. Also, the slide in prices is making homes more affordable. Notes Burns: “If you go to Phoenix, it’s $800 a month to buy a brand-new house,” making it more affordable than renting.

There have already been mixed signs of stabilization in price and demand. Home prices rose month over month for six consecutive months through October, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Composite 10 Index, although prices are still down year over year. However, the most recent figures from NAR indicate that pending sales of existing homes fell 16% in November. Such mixed signals, analysts say, will be the housing market’s message for some months to come.

Time

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

“The choice we appear to be making is trying to modify our way out of this, which has the effect of lengthening the crisis,” said Kevin Katari, managing member of Watershed Asset Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund. “We have simply slowed the foreclosure pipeline, with people staying in houses they are ultimately not going to be able to afford anyway.”

Mr. Katari contends that banks have been using temporary loan modifications under the Obama plan as justification to avoid an honest accounting of the mortgage losses still on their books. Only after banks are forced to acknowledge losses and the real estate market absorbs a now pent-up surge of foreclosed properties will housing prices drop to levels at which enough Americans can afford to buy, he argues.

“Then the carpenters can go back to work,” Mr. Katari said. “The roofers can go back to work, and we start building housing again. If this drips out over the next few years, that whole sector of the economy isn’t going to recover.”

The Treasury Department publicly maintains that its program is on track. “The program is meeting its intended goal of providing immediate relief to homeowners across the country,” a department spokeswoman, Meg Reilly, wrote in an e-mail message.

But behind the scenes, Treasury officials appear to have concluded that growing numbers of delinquent borrowers simply lack enough income to afford their homes and must be eased out.

In late November, with scant public disclosure, the Treasury Department started the Foreclosure Alternatives Program, through which it will encourage arrangements that result in distressed borrowers surrendering their homes. The program will pay incentives to mortgage companies that allow homeowners to sell properties for less than they owe on their mortgages — short sales, in real estate parlance. The government will also pay incentives to mortgage companies that allow delinquent borrowers to hand over their deeds in lieu of foreclosing.

Ms. Reilly, the Treasury spokeswoman, said the foreclosure alternatives program did not represent a new policy. “We have said from the start that modifications will not be the solution for all homeowners and will not solve the housing crisis alone,” Ms. Reilly said by e-mail. “This has always been a multi-pronged effort.”

Whatever the merits of its plans, the administration has clearly failed to reverse the foreclosure crisis.

In 2008, more than 1.7 million homes were “lost” through foreclosures, short sales or deeds in lieu of foreclosure, according to Moody’s Economy.com. Last year, more than two million homes were lost, and Economy.com expects that this year’s number will swell to 2.4 million.

“I don’t think there’s any way for Treasury to tweak their plan, or to cajole, pressure or entice servicers to do more to address the crisis,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “For some folks, it is doing more harm than good, because ultimately, at the end of the day, they are going back into the foreclosure morass.”

Mr. Zandi argues that the administration needs a new initiative that attacks a primary source of foreclosures: the roughly 15 million American homeowners who are underwater, meaning they owe the bank more than their home is worth.

Increasingly, such borrowers are inclined to walk away and accept foreclosure, rather than continuing to make payments on properties in which they own no equity. A paper by researchers at the Amherst Securities Group suggests that being underwater “is a far more important predictor of defaults than unemployment.”

From its inception, the Obama plan has drawn criticism for failing to compel banks to write down the size of outstanding mortgage balances, which would restore equity for underwater borrowers, giving them greater incentive to make payments. A vast majority of modifications merely decrease monthly payments by lowering the interest rate.

Mr. Zandi proposes that the Treasury Department push banks to write down some loan balances by reimbursing the companies for their losses. He pointedly rejects the notion that government ought to get out of the way and let foreclosures work their way through the market, saying that course risks a surge of foreclosures and declining house prices that could pull the economy back into recession.

“We want to overwhelm this problem,” he said. “If we do go back into recession, it will be very difficult to get out.”

Under the current program, the government provides cash incentives to mortgage companies that lower monthly payments for borrowers facing hardships. The Treasury Department set a goal of three to four million permanent loan modifications by 2012.

“That’s overly optimistic at this stage,” said Richard H. Neiman, the superintendent of banks for New York State and an appointee to the Congressional Oversight Panel, a body created to keep tabs on taxpayer bailout funds. “There’s a great deal of frustration and disappointment.”

As of mid-December, some 759,000 homeowners had received loan modifications on a trial basis typically lasting three to five months. But only about 31,000 had received permanent modifications — a step that requires borrowers to make timely trial payments and submit paperwork verifying their financial situation.

The government has pressured mortgage companies to move faster. Still, it argues that trial modifications are themselves a considerable help.

“Almost three-quarters of a million Americans now are benefiting from modification programs that reduce their monthly payments dramatically, on average $550 a month,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said last month at a hearing before the Congressional Oversight Panel. “That is a meaningful amount of support.”

But mortgage experts and lawyers who represent borrowers facing foreclosure argue that recipients of trial loan modifications often wind up worse off.

In Lakeland, Fla., Jaimie S. Smith, 29, called her mortgage company, then Washington Mutual, in October 2008, when she realized she would get a smaller bonus from her employer, a furniture company, threatening her ability to continue the $1,250 monthly mortgage payments on her three-bedroom house.

In April, Chase, which had taken over Washington Mutual, lowered her payment to $1,033.62 in a trial that was supposed to last three months.

Ms. Smith made all three payments on time and submitted required documents, Chase confirms. She called the bank almost weekly to inquire about a permanent loan modification. Each time, she says, Chase told her to continue making trial payments and await word on a permanent modification.

Then, in October, a startling legal notice arrived in the mail: Chase had foreclosed on her house and sold it at auction for $100. (The purchaser? Chase.)

“I cried,” she said. “I was hysterical. I bawled my eyes out.”

Later that week came another letter from Chase: “Congratulations on qualifying for a Making Home Affordable loan modification!”

When Ms. Smith frantically called the bank to try to overturn the sale, she was told that the house was no longer hers. Chase would not tell her how long she could remain there, she says. She feared the sheriff would show up at her door with eviction papers, or that she would return home to find her belongings piled on the curb. So Ms. Smith anxiously set about looking for a new place to live.

She had been planning to continue an online graduate school program in supply chain management, and she had about $4,000 in borrowed funds to pay tuition. She scrapped her studies and used the money to pay the security deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment.

Later, she hired a lawyer, who is seeking compensation from Chase. A judge later vacated the sale. Chase is still offering to make her loan modification permanent, but Ms. Smith has already moved out and is conflicted about what to do.

“I could have just walked away,” said Ms. Smith. “If they had said, ‘We can’t work with you,’ I’d have said: ‘What are my options? Short sale?’ None of this would have happened. God knows, I never would have wanted to go through this. I’d still be in grad school. I would not have paid all that money to them. I could have saved that money.”

A Chase spokeswoman, Christine Holevas, confirmed that the bank mistakenly foreclosed on Ms. Smith’s house and sold it at the same time it was extending the loan modification offer.

“There was a systems glitch,” Ms. Holevas said. “We are sorry that an error happened. We’re trying very hard to do what we can to keep folks in their homes. We are dealing with many, many individuals.”

Many borrowers complain they were told by mortgage companies their credit would not be damaged by accepting a loan modification, only to discover otherwise.

In a telephone conference with reporters, Jack Schakett, Bank of America’s credit loss mitigation executive, confirmed that even borrowers who were current before agreeing to loan modifications and who then made timely payments were reported to credit rating agencies as making only partial payments.

The biggest source of concern remains the growing numbers of underwater borrowers — now about one-third of all American homeowners with mortgages, according to Economy.com. The Obama administration clearly grasped the threat as it created its program, yet opted not to focus on writing down loan balances.

“This is a conscious choice we made, not to start with principal reduction,” Mr. Geithner told the Congressional Oversight Panel. “We thought it would be dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, create much greater risk of unfairness.”

Mr. Geithner’s explanation did not satisfy the panel’s chairwoman, Elizabeth Warren.

“Are we creating a program in which we’re talking about potentially spending $75 billion to try to modify people into mortgages that will reduce the number of foreclosures in the short term, but just kick the can down the road?” she asked, raising the prospect “that we’ll be looking at an economy with elevated mortgage foreclosures not just for a year or two, but for many years. How do you deal with that problem, Mr. Secretary?”

A good question, Mr. Geithner conceded.

“What to do about it,” he said. “That’s a hard thing.”

The New York Times

Hocking the house for quick cash is a lot harder than it used to be, and it’s causing headaches for homeowners, banks and the economy.

During the housing boom, millions of people borrowed against the value of their homes to remodel kitchens, finish basements, pay off credit cards, buy TVs or cars, and finance educations. Banks encouraged the borrowing, touting in ads how easy it is to unlock the cash in their homes to “live richly” and “seize your someday.”

Now, the days of tapping your house for easy money have gone the way of soaring home prices. A quarter of all homeowners are ineligible for home equity loans because they owe more on their mortgage than what the house is worth. Those who have equity in their homes are finding banks far more stingy. Many with home-equity loans are seeing their credit limits reduced dramatically.

The sharp pullback is dragging on the economy, household budgets and banks’ books. And it’s another sign that the consumer spending binge that powered the economy through most of the decade is unlikely to return anytime soon.

At the peak of the housing boom in 2006, banks made $430 billion in home equity loans and lines of credit, according to the trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance. From 2002 to 2006, such lending was equal to 2.8 percent of the nation’s economic activity, according to a study by finance professors Atif Mian and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago.

For the first nine months of 2009, only $40 billion in new home equity loans were made. The impact on the economy: close to zero.

“The home as ATM is yesterday,” says Keith Gumbinger, vice president of HSH Associates Financial Publishers, which publishes consumer loan information.

Millions of homeowners borrowed from the house to improve their standard of living. Now, unable to count on rising home values to absorb more borrowing, indebted homeowners are feeling anything but wealthy.

Holly Scribner, 34, and her husband took out a $20,000 home equity loan in mid-2007 — just as the housing market began its swoon. They used the money to replace sinks and faucets, paint, buy a snow blower and make other improvements to their home in Nashua, N.H.

The $200 monthly payment was easy until property taxes jumped $200 a month, the basement flooded (causing $20,000 in damage) and the family ran into other financial difficulties as the recession took hold. Their home’s value fell from $279,000 to $180,000. They could no longer afford to make payments on either their first $200,000 mortgage or the home equity loan.

Scribner, who is a stay-at-home mom with three children, avoided foreclosure by striking a deal with the first mortgage lender, HSBC, which agreed to modify their loan and reduce payments from $1,900 a month to $1,100 a month. The home equity lender, Ditech, refused to negotiate. Scribner’s husband, Scott, works at an auto loan financing company but is looking for a second job to supplement the family’s income.

The family is still having trouble making regular payments on the home-equity loan. The latest was for $100 in November.

“It was a huge mess. I ruined my credit,” Holly Scribner says. “We did everything right, we thought, and we ended up in a bad situation.”

It’s a mess for the banking industry, too.

Home equity lending gained popularity after 1986, the year Congress eliminated the tax deduction for interest on credit card debt but preserved deductions on interest for home equity loans and lines of credit. Homeowners realized it was easier or cheaper to tap their home equity for cash than to use money taken from savings accounts, mutual funds or personal loans to fund home improvements.

Banks made plenty of money issuing these loans. Home equity borrowers pay many of the costs associated with buying a home. They also may have to pay annual membership fees, account maintenance fees and transaction fees each time a credit line is tapped.

In 1990, the overall outstanding balance on home equity loans was $215 billion. In 2007, it peaked at $1.13 trillion. For the first nine months of 2009, it’s at $1.05 trillion, the Federal Reserve said. Today, there are more than 20 million outstanding home equity loans and lines of credit, according to First American CoreLogic.

But delinquencies are rising, hitting record highs in the second quarter. About 4 percent of home equity loans were delinquent, and nearly 2 percent of credit lines were 30 days or more overdue, according to the most recent data available from the American Bankers Association.

A rise in home-equity defaults can be particularly painful for a bank. That’s because the primary mortgage lender is first in line to get repaid after the home is sold through foreclosure. Often, the home-equity lender is left with little or nothing.

Banks are applying the brakes.

Bank of America, for example made about $10.4 billion in home equity loans in the first nine months of the year — down 70 percent from the same period last year, spokesman Rick Simon says. The also started sending letters freezing or cutting lines of credit last year, and will disqualify borrowers in areas where home prices are declining.

“This was just solid risk management,” he says.

Jeffrey Yellin is in the middle of remodeling his kitchen, dining room, living room and garage at his home in Oak Park, Calif. He planned to pay for the project with his $200,000 home equity line of credit, which he took out in January 2007 when his house was valued at $750,000.

In October, his lender, Wells Fargo, sent a letter informing him that his credit line was being cut to $110,000 because his home’s value had fallen by $168,000, according to the bank.

He is suing the bank, alleging it used unfair standards to justify its reduction, incorrectly assessed the property value, failed to inform customers promptly and used an appeals process that is “oppressive.” Jay Edelson, a lawyer in Chicago who is representing Yellin, says homeowners are increasingly challenging such letters in court. He says he’s received 500 calls from upset borrowers.

Wells Fargo declined to comment on Yellin’s lawsuit but said it reviews of customers’ home equity lines of credit to make sure that account limits are in line with the borrowers’ ability to repay and the value of their homes.

“We do sometimes change our decisions when the customer provides sufficient additional information,” Wells Fargo spokeswoman Mary Berg said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.

Work has stopped at the Yellin’s home. The backyard, used as a staging area for the remodeling job, is packed with materials and equipment.

“Now, I’ve got a backyard that looks like ‘Sanford and Son’ almost,” he says.

ADRIAN SAINZ

AP Real Estate Writer

Chicago Tribune

The Wofford family of Encinitas, Calif., is the latest recipient of a free home built by the crew from ABC TV’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to possibly lose their dream home to foreclosure.

Dr. Brian Wofford, a widower with eight children, was the subject of the show’s generosity five years ago, coming away with a 4,337 square-foot home with seven bedrooms and four baths. Unlike some of the show’s other home makeover recipients, however, paying off the Wofford family’s mortgage was not part of the deal.

According to records found on RealtyTrac, the home at 1785 Caliban Drive, Encinitas, was originally set for auction on November 13 with an estimated loan balance of $835,081, the amount owed on the first loan. A check with the trustee shows the auction was rescheduled for Dec. 14.

Original lender on the loan, Indymac Bank FSB, was taken over by the FDIC and has since been sold to OneWest Bank which has since filed for foreclosure. 10News in San Diego reported that the family has been facing financial problems over the past two years since the home’s mortgage adjusted upwards. Dr. Wofford, a chiropractor, has had trouble keeping up with his bills, the 10News story notes.

The family has hired legal representation in an effort to get the loan on the home modified, so far unsuccessfully. OneWest is reportedly working with the family now to iron out a loan modification agreement.

The Woffords are the latest of a handful of the show’s home makeover subjects who have fallen victim to foreclosure, including the Harper family of Lake City, Ga., who reportedly took a $450,000 loan against the home’s equity to finance an unsuccessful construction business.

DETROIT–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Ralph R. Roberts, consumer advocate and spokesperson for Federal Loan Modification Law Center, today released a list dispelling the top five myths about loan modification. Intended to better educate homeowners facing the prospect of losing their home in foreclosure, the following list demystifies the most common misconceptions surrounding the loan modification process.

MYTH #1: My bank wants me out of my house. My bank wants my home. Banks and other lending institutions do not want to foreclose. They earn more money if you can make your payments. When they foreclose, they not only lose your monthly payments, but they also have the expense of foreclosing (attorney fees), rehabbing the home, and then selling it (agent commissions). In today’s market, there’s a good chance they’ll have to sell the home at a loss. This is all good news for you – it means the bank is highly motivated to make a deal with you.

MYTH #2: My credit score is bad so I won’t qualify. Unlike the option of refinancing out of trouble, which requires you to apply for a new loan, loan modification simply adjusts the terms and perhaps reduces the balance of a loan you already have. Your credit score is much less of a factor in determining whether you qualify for a loan modification. In addition, a successful loan modification can actually improve your credit score over time, especially if it prevents you from ending up in foreclosure or bankruptcy.

MYTH #3 I am not late on my mortgage payments so I won’t qualify. I have to miss a payment to be eligible. Early on, this was true. In fact, some early eligibility requirements stated that you had to be 61 days delinquent in order to qualify. In other words, you would have had to have missed two full payments. The truth is that the eligibility requirements are constantly changing and differ among lenders. Many lenders are now working out loan modifications with borrowers who are up to date on their payments. It’s difficult to determine whether you qualify until you actually discuss your situation with the lender or with an attorney who is knowledgeable and experienced in loan modifications.

MYTH #4: I would be better off walking away or declaring bankruptcy than modifying my loan. Walking away from the home and filing for bankruptcy are certainly two options, but they are rarely the best options when you are facing foreclosure. If you simply walk away, the lender is unlikely to pursue legal action against you, but in some jurisdictions, the lender can pursue a deficiency judgment against you to collect the difference between what the lender receives for your home at auction and what you currently owe on the balance of the mortgage. Filing for bankruptcy may be better than just walking away, but it can leave a blemish on your credit history that makes it difficult to borrow money in the future. A successful loan modification is almost always a more prudent choice.

MYTH #5: It’s too late. I have already received a foreclosure notice. As long as you still reside in the home – that is, you didn’t voluntarily abandon it, and the home hasn’t been sold at a foreclosure auction – you may still have time to work out a loan modification with your lender. The sooner you take action, the more options you have available and the more time you have to pursue the best option, but you can still negotiate late into the process. By contacting the lender or, better yet, having your attorney contact the lender on your behalf, you demonstrate a good faith effort to work out a solution and can often buy yourself extra time to negotiate a loan modification.

WASHINGTON – Most congressional Democrats say the quickest way to save homeowners like Troy Butler of Saginaw, Mich., is to let them declare bankruptcy and allow judges to dictate new mortgage terms.

Easy, except the lenders that would absorb the pain — and lose control of any deals to ease the terms — do not want to get dragged into bankruptcy court by millions of overextended borrowers.

Butler, 40, is a laid-off General Motors worker who has filed for bankruptcy. But the bankruptcy court has no authority to change the terms of his $90,000-plus mortgage that is more than double the value of his home.
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A bill to give judges authority to alter loan terms for primary residences may be the quickest way to arrest the housing market’s collapse. Most Democrats in the House and Senate support that plan. President Barack Obama told Democratic leaders Friday he also backs it, according to a Senate aide who was not authorized to be quoted by name.

But 10 groups representing the lending industry and other businesses are fighting back fiercely. Several have engaged portions of their lobbying machines to stop the legislation. The groups spent $83 million in lobbying on multiple issues in 2008, a figure that shows the power of the banking and investing industry and their business supporters.

One Democratic backer of the bankruptcy proposal, Rep. Maxine Waters of California, said the banking industry “has owned this Congress far too long.”

Butler, the GM worker, and an industry lobbyist see things much differently.

“I’m living from day to day, hoping to make it through the day. I worry about my family, where we’re going to live, how we’ll survive,” said, Butler, who has a disabled wife and two children, ages 15 and 11.

‘Bad public policy’
The chief lobbyist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, Steve O’Connor, said new homebuyers would end up paying higher interest and bigger down payments if lenders are saddled with the risk that a judge could change mortgage terms.

“We’re going to defend the industry” against “bad public policy,” O’Connor said.

The association’s 23-member government affairs team is trying to persuade lawmakers to kill the bankruptcy legislation. The team includes six lobbyists and nine policy experts who double as lobbyists, said O’Connor, senior vice president of government affairs.

The bankruptcy solution would not cost taxpayers money, as would mortgage modification programs that could become part of the government’s huge economic bailout package. But it certainly would harm the bottom line for lenders and investors holding mortgages.

The lending industry has voluntary programs in place to change mortgage terms. But Butler’s lawyer, Peter Bagley, said it was a nightmare trying to contact his client’s lender.

First, he was told the application for a loan modification would take at least 30 days to process. Bagley then called someone with authority to stop any sale of the home, but only received voice messages that the mailbox was full. The application never arrived.

The key to passage of the bankruptcy bill is the Senate, where Democrats need 60 votes to stop a possible filibuster. Ten Democrats — all still in the Senate — would not back the plan in a vote a year ago.

Removed from stimulus bill
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chief Senate sponsor of the bill, said Obama persuaded him in a White House meeting Friday to remove the bankruptcy proposal from an economic recovery package — to ensure it doesn’t jeopardize the stimulus bill. But Obama pledged his support for the bankruptcy solution, Durbin said.

Obama said he would work with Durbin to attach the proposal to other “must pass” legislation — with the hope that supporters of the overall bill would not vote against it because of the bankruptcy provisions.

Of the 10 organizations that asked the House Judiciary Committee to oppose the bill, the largest is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It spent $57.9 million on lobbying in 2008, according to the Center For Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks lobbying expenditures and political donations.

The Mortgage Bankers Association, which represents 2,400 member companies in the real estate property industry, spent $3.8 million and the American Bankers Association totaled $6.8 million.

A new measure to provide extra help for homeowners struggling to pay mortgages after losing their jobs comes into force today.

The measure, announced last year, was introduced by the Government to stem the rising number of repossessions.

The waiting period to qualify for the means-tested benefit has been reduced from 39 to 13 weeks from today – a move brought forward from April.

Others will qualify for help making interest payments after the terms to qualify for such assistance were changed.

More people will now be eligible to receive Support for Mortgage Interest (SMI) after mortgages of up to £200,000 were included, double the previous limit and £30,000 higher than the previously planned increase.

Work and pensions secretary James Purnell told Sky News:”It comes as part of a raft of measures aimed at helping people stay in their homes.

“If there are two earners in the household and one of them loses their job, being able to renegotiate your payments down for two years, you can get through this difficult period.”

Gordon Brown on Sunday promised to help people who face losing their homes in the recession, and conceded the downturn could last two years.

The SMI scheme provides mortgage relief to those who are already receiving a means tested benefit, such as income support, pension credit or income-based jobseekers allowance.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) estimates that the number of repossessions will soar to 75,000 next year as rising unemployment leaves growing numbers unable to meet interest payments.

A second scheme is being finalised to allow householders to defer a proportion of their mortgage interest payments for up to two years.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Home prices posted another record decline in October, falling 18% compared with a year earlier, according to a closely watched report released Tuesday.

The 20-city S&P Case-Shiller index has posted losses for a staggering 27 months in a row. In October, 14 of the 20 cities set fresh price decline records.

“The bear market continues; home prices are back to their March 2004 levels,” says David Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s.

Sunbelt cities suffered the most, but most of the country is watching home values fall. Home prices in Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Francisco all fell more than 30% on a year-over-year basis. Miami, Los Angeles and San Diego recorded year-over-year declines of 29%, 28% and 27%, respectively.

“As of October 2008, the 20-City Composite is down 23.4%,” said Blitzer. “In October, we also saw three new markets enter the ‘double-digit’ club.”

Atlanta, Seattle and Portland each reported annual rates of decline of about 10%.

“While not yet experiencing as severe a contraction as in the Sunbelt, it seems the Pacific Northwest and Mid-Atlantic South is not immune to the overall demise in the housing market,” Blitzer added.

Many of the factors affecting home prices turned strongly negative this fall, according to Blitzer.

“October was really the first month to feel the full brunt of the credit crunch,” he said. “Up until the Lehman Brothers [bankruptcy filing on September 15], everyone felt relatively optimistic.”

Plus, in many of the free-falling cities the majority of real estate sales consist of distressed properties such as foreclosed homes and short sales. These houses tend to sell at a steep discount to the rest of the market, and when they account for a large proportion of all sales, they can exaggerate the depth of price declines.

Of course, foreclosures continue to be a big problem as well. In October alone, nearly 85,000 people lost their homes to foreclosure, adding vacant inventory to an already overburdened market.

Home sellers should not expect prices to improve any time soon, according to Pat Newport, a real estate analyst for IHS Global Insight.

“I expect it’s going to get quite a bit worse over the next couple of months,” he said. “Existing home sales reports have really been bad.”

Home sales fell 8.6% in November, much more than expected, to an annualized rate of 4.49 million units according to the National Association of Realtors.

And although interest rates are currently extremely low - the 30-year fixed-rate averaged 5.14% during the week of December 24, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) - that’s doing more to help people refinancing existing mortgages than it is to help new home buyers.

“Buyers still have to have a 20% down payment,” said Newport, “and, in this environment, it can be hard to meet that criteria.”

The latest Case-Shiller numbers provide more ammunition to Washington policy makers who want to do more to fix the housing mess, according to Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with the Stanford Group, the policy research firm.

“These data just add to the tremendous pressure on the president-elect and the Democrats to stimulate housing,” he said. “That means more lucrative tax incentives and broad foreclosure prevention. All of this will likely be in the stimulus plan that Congress adopts in January.”

Nicholas Retsinas, Director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, agrees. “Housing problems are at the core of our economic problems,” he said, “yet, of the government interventions made during 2008, few were focused on housing.”

With a new administration and Congress in place next month, he expects to see a renewed interest in stabilizing the housing market.