Foreclosures and the Home ATM

From Matt Padilla at the O.C. Register: Do these homeowners deserve help?

Homeowners who treated their houses like cash machines, tapping the equity as home values rose, are among the most likely to end in foreclosure, even more than those who bought at housing’s peak, a new study finds.

Often homeowners have had second, third and even fourth mortgages at time of foreclosure — a trend not adequately addressed by any of the federal or state foreclosure avoidance progams, said Michael LaCour-Little, a finance professor at Cal State Fullerton who authored the study.
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I plan a bigger story on his findings, but wanted to share a few results now.
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For example, for the early November 2008 data sample, he tracked 2,358 properties. Here’s what he found:

•They were purchased at an average price of $354,000 and average year of 2002 (long before the housing peak of 2005).
•Total debt on the properties averaged $551,000 at time of foreclosure. That’s 56% more than the properties were worth when purchased, meaning at least that much was cashed out!
•An automatic valuation model estimated average value at time of foreclosure was $317,000, which suggests a combined loan-to-value at foreclosure of more than 170% ($551,000/$317,000). And that is a conservative estimate. Properties that banks later sold had an average resale price of $271,000!

During the housing bubble, many bought homes they could not afford using "affordability products" like Option ARMs. But there was another group of speculators that lived beyond their means, using their homes like ATM cash machines. I think this an important issues and I'm looking forward to Padilla's article.