N.Y. Financial Services Staff Visit Neighborhoods Hit by Foreclosures

Mortgage foreclosure prevention specialists from New York State Department of Financial Services will visit a New York City neighborhood that has been hard-hit by a spate of home foreclosures.

The prevention specialists and the department’s Mobile Command Center, a 36-foot long vehicle, will visit Crown Heights, Brooklyn, this coming Friday.

“Our objective is to provide direct help to homeowners and get the word out to others that it’s important to ask for help as quickly as possible. The longer a homeowner waits, the harder it may be to save a home,” Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of Department of Financial Services, said. Crown Heights has one of the highest rates of foreclosure in the entire New York State.

Foreclosure prevention specialists are planning to meet with homeowners and assess where they are in the pre-foreclosure or foreclosure process. The staff will provide:

• Information to homeowners about specific loan modification programs which may be available to them;

• Intervention on behalf of homeowners with their lenders or mortgage servicers;

• Guidance to homeowners on how they can file complaints with the department so that cases of lender or mortgage servicer abuses — such as predatory lending practices — can be investigated.

CoreLogic Report: Jan. Home Prices Down 3.1%

The U.S. housing market is still recovering from the 2008 mortgage crisis. CoreLogic, a California-based business analytics provider, said this week that national home prices, including distressed sales, fell 3.1 percent in January on a year-over-year basis, and down by 1.0 percent from December 2011.

CoreLogic says year-over-year declines have continued for the last 18 months. On a positive side, home price declines are slowly improving and not far from the bottom, it says.

Topics New York Homeowners