Mish reports:
Florida remains ground zero of the housing bust with an amazing 19.39% delinquency rate. The Tampa Bay area has a delinquency rate of 17%.
The St. Petersburg Times has the details in Nearly 17 percent of Tampa homeowners three months behind on mortgage.
Nearly 17 percent of Tampa Bay homeowners haven’t paid their mortgages for at least three months.
The February report by First American CoreLogic shows mortgage delinquencies rising steadily for more than a year. From February 2009 to February 2010, delinquencies increased from 10.84 percent to 16.96 percent of all residential mortgages, making mincemeat of such government anti-foreclosure measures as Making Home Affordable.
Florida’s 90-day delinquency rate was even worse at 19.39 percent. The U.S. rate was 8.78 percent.
This might not be strictly related to the economy – it could be a sign that Floridians are just bailing out on their “underwater” home loans. It would make sense: walking away is probably something which starts small, and then builds. As people see their neighbors giving up on underwater mortgages, it becomes more likely that they’ll do it, too, as whatever stigma is attached fades away.
I’m going to be watching things with care out here in Nevada – a lot of ARMs come due in the second half of 2010. These will be on houses which cannot be refinanced and which cannot be sold to cover the principal. The pressure to just walk away will, I believe, become irresistible. It might already be happening – housing prices continue to drop, which indicates more houses are coming on the market and I’ll bet dollars to donuts it is because of “short sale” actions (where a person puts the house on the market and the bank agrees to accept whatever the house brings).
There is really no easy way out of this – even if the economy really is in recovery, housing prices will not recover fast enough to bring home values back in line with mortgage balances. And if the economy really isn’t improving – and I think its all smoke and mirrors – then we just have a bad situation about to get very much worse.
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