How will the Coronavirus Impact the National Mortgage Market and Housing
For the past couple weeks we have been hearing from the National Association of Realtors and other media outlets about how the coronavirus will have a limited to moderate impact on housing as homeowners and their lenders are in a much better financial position than during the last economic downturn.
During that time our firm was a very active participant in the distressed real estate market representing lenders and servicers including Freddie Mac, JP Morgan Chase, Nationstar Mortgage, Bank of America and CitiMortgage so we saw first hand how these institutions were dealing with the vast number of mortgage defaults. While a significant number of properties were foreclosed and resold, there was still a large number of mortgages that were modified or sold to a non-bank investor like private equity or a hedge fund.
Since there is virtually no regulation of these non-bank entities, there is a gap in the overall data about the number of possible loans that could be at risk for default.
