In June 2007, San Antonio administrators recognized the housing crisis in the city. Michael Goeken, director of the city’s Department of Community Initiatives (DCI), took part in the Preserving Homeownership conference held by the Dallas Fed along with the Dallas Field Office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). After exploring foreclosure alternatives, Goeken returned and presented a grant proposal to the Annie E. Casey Foundation for funding. The grant was awarded, and the San Antonio now heads 24 organizations such as HUD and United Way, in the San Antonio Foreclosure Prevention Task Force whose main aim to to sustain home ownership in the San Antonio area.

DCI selected certain ZIP codes, with a high degree of foreclosures and sent out 14,500 postcards which contained the following message printed in both English and Spanish – “Don’t lose your home. You are not alone. We can help!”. The card contained the phone number to DCI\’s Housing Counseling program which was set up to help and create awareness among homeowners. This resulted in about 250 calls from homeowners concerned with the condition of their home mortgage.

In March, an all state group kicked off the local organization\’s plans. The Texas Foreclosure Prevention Task Force (TFPTF) held a press conference to announce the founding of a statewide task force and to create awareness of the Homeownership Preservation Foundation\’s toll-free help hotline, 888-995-HOPE. The event, which received wide coverage on both radio and television, was attended by almost 50 different state and national organizations and welfare groups. The press conference was a clear statement from the city that the TFPTF was there to help. TFPTF encouraged homeowners to call the HOPE hotline, their lenders or a housing counselor when there was any signs of mortgage payment trouble.

In addition to the press conference, a community workshop was also conducted on the weekend following the event. The workshop, which was held in Northwest Vista College, was targeted at the residents and lenders of the two zipcodes in the city with the highest foreclosure rates. Active lenders and delinquents of more than 60 days were sent invites to participate in the workshop. Several dozen homeowners attended the workshop and interacted with a number of loan services. They were able to discuss their mortgage situation with HUD-approved housing counselors and representatives from several mortgage houses in the area. The counselors were trained to assist and advice homeowners in identifying alternatives to foreclosure and helped address many of the concerns and doubts that the homeowners raised. It is estimated that at least eight workouts could potentially result from the workshop.

According to the TFPTF, more workshops like this will be conducted all over the city and the suburbs, particularly targeting areas with a high foreclosure rate. The workshops are expected to bring down the foreclosure rates significantly in the San Antonio area.

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At a time when the national rate of foreclosures is at an all time high and a month where they average 0.240 percent across the nation, the state of South Carolina managed to come in at roughly one third of that at 0.092 percent. Not great compared to the 0.027 percent from the same month in 2007 but when you compare it to the 0.259 percent in Georgia, the folks here are pretty happy and proud of it.

The rate of new foreclosures here has actually dropped every month from September through the month of December. That is phenomenal compared to the rest of the country and the experts agree that they should continue to drop slowly each month or, at the very worst, stay level with the numbers from the month before.

How is it possible you ask? I mean the state of South Carolina has well over ten percent unemployment and yet they are continuing to drop in the amount of new foreclosures each month. Exactly what are they doing well that is allowing that to happen?

A lot of factors combine to make this phenomenon occur. First of all, the unemployment level is due to jobs where the people were not in danger of losing the house. They owned the property and the home on it free and clear so the only thing they would need to worry about would be keeping the utilities paid and food on the table. So the loss of a job had little to no effect on the ability to pay a mortgage since they were non-existent.

It is expected that the rate of unemployment will rise well into the double-digit range and as mentioned above, the foreclosure rate will fall. For the folks of South Carolina, that is the silver lining in the cloud.

Yes folks the paradise that is Hawaii is not immune to the ever-increasing problems facing our country and property there is being foreclosed the same as in every other state in the union. The main difference here is that it is being foreclosed at a lesser rate than it is in most of the other states.

In December 2008 the foreclosure rate was only 0.100 percent, which is a far cry from that in many other states. There is also a fairly low unemployment rate, which is hard to imagine since it is a state fueled by tourism and with tourism declining you would think that both the unemployment and the foreclosures would be up and running away. That does not seem to be the case here.

This is in part due to the fact that Hawaii has been a destination location of the rich and famous for as far back as we can remember and the rich and famous have been less effected than the rest of the population with the problems affecting the nation today. That means that they can still afford to travel and to pump money into the economy there.

Analysts agree that Hawaii will progress down the same path as the rest of the country but at a slower rate than everyone else and that the foreclosure crisis, while still an issue, will not be as bad here as originally projected.

So while the state has had its share of issues on foreclosure, it is still a good solid place to own a property since the property appears to be holding value there well.

There are a lot of wide-open spaces in the state of Montana. You can see forever, as the saying goes. In fact, if you are looking at examining the foreclosure market here, you are going to have to look almost as hard as you can and a lot harder than most other states. In

December Montana Foreclosures rate was a 0.009 percent . Yes folks, you read that right 0.009 percent. That means that during the month of December, which was a hard month for the rest of the country a total of – hang on to your hat here – 38 new properties fell into the foreclosure system in the state of Montana.

That is unheard of at a time when neighboring Idaho was getting almost 1,600 new foreclosures over the same period. We can’t say that it was due to unemployment there because the jobless rate for the same period was almost a full five and one half percent,

So what is the state of Montana doing right that the rest of the country is doing wrong?

That’s pretty simple actually. A quick check of the public records reveal that a good portion of the land in Montana is not under mortgage but rather is owned free and clear and have been paid off and privately owned for years. Couple that with the fact that Montana land owners tend to own large amounts of land as ranches and that would explain the secret.

The foreclosure crisis is almost nonexistent in the state of Montana and it is not expected to change much as the crisis continues, even if it is a long and prolonged issue, which is not expected to happen, the numbers in Montana should remain level or even drop a little due to the reasons outlined above.