by Calculated Risk on 5/24/2009 09:24:00 PM

From Peter Goodman and Jack Healy at the NY Times: Job Losses Push Safer Mortgages to Foreclosure (ht shaun)

In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans ... to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.
...
From November to February, the number of prime mortgages that were delinquent at least 90 days, were in foreclosure or had deteriorated to the point that the lender took possession of the home increased more than 473,000, exceeding 1.5 million, according to a New York Times analysis of data provided by First American CoreLogic, a real estate research group. Those loans totaled more than $224 billion.

During the same period, subprime mortgages in those three categories increased by fewer than 14,000, reaching 1.65 million. The number of similarly troubled Alt-A loans — those given to people with slightly tainted credit — rose 159,000, to 836,000.

Over all, more than four million loans worth $717 billion were in the three distressed categories in February, a jump of more than 60 percent in dollar terms compared with a year earlier.