BBC News: Home repossessions rise by 41%

dudleyboy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7548877.stm

The number of properties repossessed by mortgage lenders in the UK rose by 41% in the first half of 2008, to 18,900, the Council of Mortgage Lenders says.
The sharp rise had been widely expected as an economic slowdown makes it harder for some homeowners to repay mortgages.
Repossessions have been rising since the second half of 2004 but have now begun to accelerate.
The number of mortgages in arrears has also risen, up by 20% in the first half of the year, to 155,600.
'Extremely small'
The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) had previously predicted that repossessions this year would rise to 45,000.
Its director general Michael Coogan said the latest figures were no surprise, and would get worse.

Surprise, surprise. :rolleyes:

This is exactly why we decided not to buy during the last 5 years. It would seem that common sense prevails after all.

"The sharp rise had been widely expected as an economic slowdown makes it harder for some homeowners to repay mortgages."

The economic slowdown. Of course! And there was me thinking it was the HPI, unaffordability of houses and people who think that "renting is dead money" foolishly taking on more debt than they can afford to repay.

I'd rather pay dead money than be in negative equity or repossessed. So stick that in your pike and smope it.

neverdespairgirl

Ha! Beat you to it by a whole 4 minutes (-:

dudleyboy

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

Ha! Beat you to it by a whole 4 minutes (-:

FIRST!!!

Ah you're a keen one today, NDG! That's what I get for passing comment rather than just posting a link.

But I'll get you next time, Gadget. Next time...

DB

sympatex

Dudleyboy, if i had a time machine and could go back 5 years, i'd buy a house as an investment and sell it sometime in 2006/7 and i'd probably have made(realised) 25% in HPI, say appx 40k. If i bought it as a home, i wouldn't care. And probably last point, by the time house prices are on 'average' at 2003 prices i would have been paying my mortgage for over 6 years so would/should hopefully keep me out of negative equity. It's no surprise repo is accelerating cheap money is over (for now) and 2/3/5 year fixes are ending.
I'm a FTB now and wish i was born 5-10 years earlier! (and been clever enough to get out when the time was right! hindsight is wonderful).
If I had an opportunity to buy 5years ago and didn't because you thought it was too expensive, today i'd look back on that with regret.

dudleyboy

sympatex wrote: »

Dudleyboy, if i had a time machine and could go back 5 years, i'd buy a house as an investment and sell it sometime in 2006/7 and i'd probably have made(realised) 25% in HPI, say appx 40k. If i bought it as a home, i wouldn't care. And probably last point, by the time house prices are on 'average' at 2003 prices i would have been paying my mortgage for over 6 years so would/should hopefully keep me out of negative equity. It's no surprise repo is accelerating cheap money is over (for now) and 2/3/5 year fixes are ending.
I'm a FTB now and wish i was born 5-10 years earlier! (and been clever enough to get out when the time was right! hindsight is wonderful).
If I had an opportunity to buy 5years ago and didn't because you thought it was too expensive, today i'd look back on that with regret.

With hindsight I, too, would have bought somewhere in 2002/3 with a 100% mortgage and then sold it in 2006/7 and cashed in on the equity.

But, as we know, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately I could not predict that the US and UK governments would willfully turn a blind eye to the fraudulent activity of mortgage brokers, estate agents and financial institutions for so long. The only thing I could predict was that the bubble was going to burst and unpleasantly so. And it has.

The money I've paid in rent these past 5 years is far less than the amount house prices have fallen in the past 12 months(!) I could not have afforded to buy back then, I cannot afford to buy now, but in a few years... we'll see.

All I know is that had I followed the sheep into thinking that "renting is dead money", "house prices only ever go up" and "if I don't buy now I'll never be able to afford it" then I'd be in the exact same !!!!!! they're in.

Fortunately for me I'm not because I have common sense.

Generali

FWIW, I reckon that the number of repos is still tiny even if they are up 41% it's from a very low number to quite a low number.

The more worrying thing is the number of people that are in arrears of 3 months or more and so could be reposessed at any time:

On arrears, the total number of households with arrears of three months or more was 155,600 at the end of the first half of the year, up from 129,600 at the end of 2007 and 120,800 at the end of the first half of last year. The arrears rate stood at 1.33% of all mortgages, up from 1.10% at the end of 2007 and 1.02% at the end of the first half of last year.

Link

stonethrower

Generali wrote: »

FWIW, I reckon that the number of repos is still tiny even if they are up 41% it's from a very low number to quite a low number.

The more worrying thing is the number of people that are in arrears of 3 months or more and so could be reposessed at any time:



Link

That is scary.

Generali

The thing is, if house prices are rising and you can't make the mortgage then you can sell. You stick the mortgage payments on the credit card or perhaps take out one of those loans that Carol Vorderman* seems so keen on and nobody ever need know about it.

If you're in negative equity and so can't sell for enough to clear your debts (and there'll be a lot of people who are despite their home being 'worth more' than the mortgage at 11% off peak prices) then you end up being reposessed if you get into bother.





*Apparently when Carol Vorderman was told about what was going to happen to her salary on Countdown she told her boss to consonant vowel consonant consonant off.

Woby_Tide

41% nice headline grabbing figure to really capture how dire it really is

then find the underlying figures

The CML pointed out that 0.16% of all mortgages had been taken back by lenders in the first half of the year, up from 0.11% throughout the while of 2007.
It said this rate was similar to that of the late 1990s, and was less than half the rate seen in the early 1990s.

and you find it started from a fairly low base in the first place, rose less than they had predicted and was still historically low anyway


for all the decrying of press releases and massaging of figures to present a rosy picture of what was happening the last few years, and now the other side of the coin is doing exactly the same, both as bad as each other

ginvzt

They now say 48%!!!!!

UK home repossessions rise by 48%

Generali

ginvzt wrote: »

They now say 48%!!!!!

UK home repossessions rise by 48%

Good Lord. That's up 7% in 5 hours! If reposessions keep rising at a rate of 7% every 5 hours, every house with a mortgage in the UK will be reposessed before the end of August!