Reposession figures "bogus", claim Tories.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

TWICE as many families have lost their home in the recession than official figures suggest, the Tories claim.


Yesterday they challenged Labour assertions that repossessions are falling. The total is being deliberately underestimated, they said, by excluding “sale and rentbacks”.
This is when owners with mortgage arrears are forced to sell their home to a firm which then allows them to continue living in the house as tenants.
Tory housing spokesman Grant Shapps believes that if these forced sales were included then the number of people made homeless would be almost double. He said the official figures “fail to reflect their misery”.
Officially there were 48,000 repossessions in 2009, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders.
But Mr Shapps said: “Taking sale and rentback properties into account, it is likely that nearer 85,000 families have been compelled to hand their keys back.”
The Office for Fair Trading suggested 50,000 “sale and rentback” schemes took place up to October 2008, with many more last year.

Ummmm, so what?

The fact is that the repo numbers are correct, and the influence with regards to house prices is unchanged.

As a house sold and leased back is no more available for sale than a house not reposessed.

And without an accurate number of sale/leasebacks in 2007, the comparison is bogus anyway.

carolt

Have you got to the stage where you have to post your own bearish articles just to have someone to argue with?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

carolt wrote: »

Have you got to the stage where you have to post your own bearish articles just to have someone to argue with?

It takes a special kind of stupidity to think that a mechanism which keeps half the distressed homeowners in Britain from becoming reposession statistics, and thus keeps half the potential repo's off the market, is "bearish".;)

1984ReturnsForReal_2

Haven't you got anything better to do other than keeping on regurgitating the same old sh*te?

stueyhants

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/151404/Repossession-figure-is-bogus-

TWICE as many families have lost their home in the recession than official figures suggest, the Tories claim.


Yesterday they challenged Labour assertions that repossessions are falling. The total is being deliberately underestimated, they said, by excluding “sale and rentbacks”.
This is when owners with mortgage arrears are forced to sell their home to a firm which then allows them to continue living in the house as tenants.


Tory housing spokesman Grant Shapps believes that if these forced sales were included then the number of people made homeless would be almost double. He said the official figures “fail to reflect their misery”.
Officially there were 48,000 repossessions in 2009, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders.
But Mr Shapps said: “Taking sale and rentback properties into account, it is likely that nearer 85,000 families have been compelled to hand their keys back.”


The Office for Fair Trading suggested 50,000 “sale and rentback” schemes took place up to October 2008, with many more last year.

DaddyBear

1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »

Haven't you got anything better to do other than keeping on regurgitating the same old sh*te?

To be fair, he does spent a lot of time reading HPC and making a daily calculation of how much his house is worth.

dopester

stueyhants wrote: »

TWICE as many families have lost their home in the recession than official figures suggest, the Tories claim.

They'd be a lot more repossessions without mortgage rescue assistance schemes. And if the courts weren't such a soft-touch with repossession actions. Real story after story I've read where those deserving of repossession (not someone having acted prudently in all the circumstances, trying to make it through, but struggling a bit) are let off. Loads here. http://ourdailydebt.wordpress.com/

The anti-repossession faction at this forum are so often getting regular 'good' results in the courts. For example, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the courts congratulated this guy for his plucky ambitions, and allow him to keep his mortgage-free house, despite his eyes being full of greed when he got on the BTL bandwagon.

A couple of years ago I entered buy to let mortgages with 3 partners planning to pay back the mortgages with the rent.

Now all the properties are in negative equity.

Due to no fault of my own, the mortgage company is threatening repossession due to substantial arrears and I am the only one of the four of us that has assets to lose.

How can I protect my assets?
My main concern is that my own property, which I own outright, will be taken from me in order to pay the mortgage company.

Is there any legal way – loop holes etc.. – that I can protect own property?
Can I transfer my assets into my wife’s name or set up a trust for my grandchild?


Last resort:
Changing address and use PO box numbers for correspondence etc…

If he really cared that much about his own house and security, he wouldn't have risked it with BTL further borrowing... but nevermind...taxpayers and FTBs (forced to pay a rigged higher market rate because of people like him) will bail him out of his reckless decisions he took in pursuit of glory. Maybe he won't be able to continue bragging as much about his empire but still keep him cosy with his own house. FTBs deserve their complete kicking in the teeth in forced to pay a lot more than would otherwise be the case if actions had consequences.

There is much evidence that human expectations tend to be linear. Most of the time, most people expect current conditions to continue for the indefinite future. This is why cities are built on floodplains and fault lines. A similar presumption makes the gambler double his bet or the farmer plant additional crops on reclaimed land after a good harvest.

Wherever prosperity exists, it is natural for people to expect prosperity to continue. For this reason, much of the history of human society is a record of astonishment.

Time and again, people have marginalised their affairs, rendering themselves increasingly crisis-prone. They have gone into debt, extending claims on resources to an extreme that could be supported only if current conditions were sustained uninterrupted into the future. Time and again these hopes have been disappointed.

stueyhants

I think the only real message you can get from this is that the figures are worse than has so far been reported. The claim that this recession isn't as bad as the last one because repossessions are lower is looking less credible.

It doesn't matter whether the house is classed as a repo and sold on the open market or if it was bought on sale and rent back, the message is that more people found housing unaffordable even considering the low IR environment

System

Interesting article and despite the frothing not something that's come up before, Hamish if you find something like this in future perhaps PM it to someone like Cleaver to post so the morons won't have a tantrum and we can actually post about it.

Someone on here, possibly julieq, did say that banks aren't going to put themselves in a worse state by repo-ing everyone, and that a scheme like this would happen instead, well, here it is.

michaels

All the incentives point to avoiding repos - bad publicity for the banks and govt and bad for the banks balance sheets - in a stable / rising market banks have every incentive not to repo and crystallise the loss.

For Hamish this is having an unexpectred positive impact on the housing market, negative equity is supporting prices by preventing properties coming on to the market as the owners can't afford to sell and the banks don't want to (can't afford to?) reposess.

For our debate I guess the question is what impact this will have on the market going forward - would rising prices unleash a flood of sales and reposessions especially if accompanie by rising interest rates? Would this be enough to put a brake on any big increases above 2007 peak levels in the short to medium term? I am a strong believer that sentiment is a key driver of the housing market so suspect that even a short period of falling prices again headlines could push the market in to reverse, although locally at the moment the sentiment seems to be all about buy now while you can still afford to - interesting times...

carolt

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

It takes a special kind of stupidity to think that a mechanism which keeps half the distressed homeowners in Britain from becoming reposession statistics, and thus keeps half the potential repo's off the market, is "bearish".;)

It takes a special kind of stupidity to start threads just to disagree with the person starting the thread - yourself.