According to industry experts, it was the first time in Massachusetts and also in the United States that an auction had been held for multiple condominiums located in one building. The event was handled by real estate guru Louise M. Sunshine who worked at the marketing department of Donald Trump before she established her company, Sunshine Group and focused on developing strategies to market high-end condominiums in Manhattan.

The 10 homes placed on Boston foreclosures for sale were part of the 50 units at Bryant Back Bay building and were sold in about 25 minutes. Also in the same event, Campion and Co. sold four additional luxury homes at nearly $1.4 million. Another six offers were made, with the highest bid reaching $2 million.

Sunshine said that she expected the Back Bay event to lead to as many as six auctions of luxury homes in New York City. Industry experts said that the speed at which luxury homes were sold at the Back Bay auction was a market-changing development. They added that it is not impossible to see more of this kind of auction as developers struggle to clean their inventory of unsold, distressed luxury properties.

Real estate company Vornado Realty Trust was the owner of the Bryant Back Bay property. Vornado has various property holdings across the country, including a 22 million-square-foot in New York City.

Six months before the auction, only 53 condominiums had been sold in the Bryant Back Bay for more than $1 million. The auction was closely monitored by national banks and lenders that foreclosed properties from developers who failed to continue paying their mortgage loans because of the sharp decline in sales.

According to industry experts, the condominium market has been severely affected by the economic slump and the increasing number of cheap foreclosure properties. They said that in the current market, many buyers prefer to buy low-priced foreclosure properties in good condition instead of spending large amount of money to purchase luxury homes.

Landlords and tenants have been trying to figure out what would be the impact of the ruling issued by the state high court on Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town on apartment owners who have been struggling for some time now. Industry experts are worried that the ruling would cripple the real estate industry while tenants are concerned about their rent.

Many apartments in the area are going into Brooklyn foreclosures for sale because of lack of tenants and adjustments in mortgage rates. The ruling is another setback for financially struggling landlords like Stellar Management of Riverton Houses and Tishman Speyer Properties of Stuyvesant Town which paid exorbitant prices for their residential properties during the peak of the housing market.

They turned rent-regulated apartments into market-rate units on the assumption that rents would further rise. Instead, rents dropped drastically since 2008 and property values declined as landlords tried to pay their mortgage loans.

Industry experts said that many lenders are reluctant to restructure troubled loans by landlords, such as the case of Tishman Speyer that acquired Stuyvesant Town. Experts said that lenders would want a fresh cash infusion before they would agree to restructure any troubled loans. This problem is being experienced by other apartment buildings in Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn.

Industry experts also pointed out that the ruling would affect landlords who are planning to buy distressed apartments across New York City. With the ruling, they would think twice before pursuing their plans to buy distressed apartments.

Some groups have estimated that as many as 70,000 apartments are affected by the ruling. According to recent market data, there are nearly one million apartments that are rent-stabilized in the city.

Meanwhile, the Department of Housing and Community Renewal is expecting a flood of petitions from thousands of renters who will claim that they have been overcharged by their landlords who are receiving tax breaks.

Driving around Detroit, Michigan, one could see abandoned and vacant houses, with boarded-up windows. On blocks dotted with blighted houses, one could see overflowing garbage, knee high grass and broken doors and windows.

On the east side of the city, about 80 percent of houses are vacant and foreclosed. But what has alarmed many industry experts are the growing number of Detroit foreclosures for sale in historically vibrant neighborhoods of North Rosedale Park, Boston Edison, Palmer Woods and East English Village.

Recent market data showed that one out of five houses in Detroit is vacant. Along with the rising unemployment rate, foreclosure has been a major challenge to city officials. Their most immediate problem is how to prevent foreclosure properties in healthy neighborhoods from becoming blights.

Industry experts suggest that the city should work closely with nonprofit organizations, neighborhood groups and block clubs that have been on the forefront in the fight to prevent blights from destroying communities.

They also suggested that city leaders must start to plan for a smaller city, streamlining the population to just about 750,000 by 2010 census. According to data released by the Office of Foreclosure Prevention, 17 percent of city residents lost their properties to foreclosure in 2008 or one in every five households.

Data provided by the U.S. Postal Service showed that about 17 percent of addresses in Detroit are vacant. The figures do not include the thousands of abandoned and empty lots.

Meanwhile, the demolition efforts of the city fell further behind. In the past five years, Detroit was able to demolish only not more than 5,000 structures. So far, Detroit has about 32,000 structures listed as dangerous buildings. However, only about 2,700 have demolition orders. The annual demolition budget of the city could hardly cover the expenses of demolishing several large downtown buildings.

And the problem of vacant, foreclosed properties is expected to grow more with the rising unemployment rate in Detroit. Currently, the city’s unemployment rate is nearly 30 percent while vacant properties are estimated to be around 78,000.

Nationally, home prices declined by 10.1 percent on a year-to-year basis. HPI covers condominiums, townhouses and single-family homes. Similarly, Denver foreclosures for sale also pulled down July home prices by 2.64 percent compared with the same month last year. June home prices also dropped by 3.21 percent from the same month the previous year.

Excluding distressed property sales, home prices in July dropped by 1.26 percent and 1.68 percent in June. Industry experts predicted that home prices in Denver area will drop further by 2.63 percentage point from August this year through the same month in 2010.

Statewide, the August HPI showed that the average home price declined by 3.44 percent compared with the same month last year. The home prices exclude sales of distressed properties which dropped by 2.83 percent.
Industry experts predicted that Colorado home prices will drop by 1.87 from this year’s August to the same month next year. Excluding distressed properties, prices dropped by 3.07 percent.

Experts said that Colorado is better off compared with other housing markets. In Nevada, home prices dropped by 24.4 percent and 19.5 percent in Arizona. They said that states leading the drop in home prices are also topping the list for highest foreclosure rates.

Nevada continued to post the highest foreclosure rate in the country for the third quarter of this year. One in every 23 homeowners in the state has received at least one foreclosure filing, six times higher than the national average. For the quarter, foreclosure filings were made on 47,925 houses from July to September, representing a 10 percent increase compared with figures the previous quarter and a 59 percent rise from the same period last year.

On the other hand, Arizona has the second highest foreclosure rate for the third quarter, representing one in every 53 houses receiving a foreclosure filing. Other states included in the top 10 states with high foreclosure rates are Idaho, Utah, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan and Illinois.

But despite deep discounts on the costs of properties, home sales remained lackluster. Industry experts said that the growing number of job losses in North Texas, which totaled 65,000 so far, is severely affecting the housing market. They explained that when people do not have jobs, they do not buy houses. Furthermore, the lack of employment opportunities in one area means fewer people coming in which would not result to a housing demand.

But what is causing great concerns to industry experts is the growing number of Dallas foreclosures for sale. They predicted that over 60,000 households will receive foreclosure filings in 2009. The numbers are significantly higher than the total home sales for this year and five times higher than new-home starts.

Statewide, foreclosure filings rose by 11 percent in the third quarter compared with the previous quarter and 9 percent higher from July to September of 2008. In September alone, foreclosures jumped by 17 percent to 13,216 from August and 44 percent higher compared with September last year.

And relative to the foreclosure problem of the state is its escalating unemployment rate which hit 8.2 percent in September.

However, industry analysts are optimistic that home prices in the Dallas-Fort Worth region are about to make a turnaround in the summer of 2010. They predicted that home prices not just in the region but in the whole country, would start to bottom out by next spring.

Analysts predict that in the region, prices would be higher by 0.21 percent August of 2010. This is an achievement considering that home prices dropped by 0.12 percent for a year-to-year basis ending August of this year.

Analysts said that the turnaround in North Texas’s residential values, which is expected to happen next year, coincides with other forecasts by economists. Many of them are expecting that home prices will bounce first on the market before it would really take off for a sustained recovery.

They said that even if the area were able to stabilize and strengthen home prices, some institutional and economic factors will work against the housing market’s aim to achieve sustain recovery.

Industry experts said that the North Carolina city was among the three cities across the United States that showed monthly price loss. The other two cities are Las Vegas in Nevada and Los Angeles in California.

The city’s annual price decline garnered it the sixth spot in the list of cities with smaller price declines. But industry experts pointed out that Charlotte’s 8.6 percent price drop in August was better compared with the same month last year’s figures.

Charlotte’s monthly price readings showed a slight gain in March, a drop in April, a three-month gain and a drop in August. According to industry analysts, the drop in August home price was an indication of the vulnerability of the housing market to Charlotte foreclosures for sale.

The abundance of cheap foreclosure houses on the market pulled down prices of other properties to a record low. Home sales took off with help from first-time homebuyers who took advantage of the federal tax credit.

Statewide, about 46,363 homeowners received at least one foreclosure filing in September. According to market data, North Carolina is on pace to surpass the total foreclosure filings in 2008.

A total of 873 foreclosure filings were posted in the counties of Durham, Wake, Johnston and Orange. An increase in foreclosure filings were reported in the counties of Durham and Wake in August.
Durham posted 187 foreclosure filings in September from 176 in August. Similarly, Wake County posted a total of 527 filings in September compared with 464 in August.

Meanwhile, industry experts are anticipating foreclosures to continue to dampen home prices in North Carolina. But on a good note, below market prices are attracting hordes of buyers to the area. Experts said that low-priced properties in Charlotte are mostly located in the east, west and north areas. They added that there is no significant improvement in the housing market in the coming months as unemployment rate continue to increase and the economy continues to remain sluggish.

Raquel Rolnik, the designated UN rapporteur on adequate housing right, will tour New York for about three days, together with some city officials and housing advocates, to hear the views of people who are suffering due to lack of affordable housing.

UN has been appointing independent experts to investigate and report on human rights conditions in various areas in the world. Rolnik, a University of Sao Paulo urban planning professor, is tasked to tour the city and six more places across the country and to report her findings on the progress and violations made on housing rights before the United Nations General Assembly.

If the report showed that there has been a violation of housing rights, the concerned cities will receive a letter from the UN asking them to intervene on the problem.

Included in Rolnik’s itinerary is a visit to Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards site to see the progress of the effort to use eminent domain to repossess property, Grant Houses of the New York City Housing Authority in Harlem to examine the living situation of public housing residents and to meet with renters whose properties are facing Bronx foreclosures for sale.

During a town hall meeting, some city residents complained about the deficient housing subsidies for people with AIDS, deteriorating public housing and landlord harassment among others.

Rolnik pointed out that affordable housing in the city is a misnomer because there is nothing affordable in the current housing market. She said that New York City is unusual in the sense that it took the responsibility to make sure that thousands of homeless people have roofs above their heads.

She said that it is about time that the city put affordable housing on the top of its agenda. After her New York City tour, Rolnik is scheduled to visit and examine the housing and living situations in New Orleans, Louisiana, Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, California, Washington, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and an Indian reservation in South Dakota.

One renter whose landlord is at risk of Bronx foreclosures for sale said that people with authority should be made aware of the fact that many residents have no one to turn to for help.

In the July to September quarter, Atlanta-based SunTrust and Columbus-based Synovus posted substantial losses – $377 million for SunTrust and $423.7 million for Synovus. SunTrust lost 76 cents per share while Synovus lost $1.27 cents per share.

SunTrust’s losses increased sharply because it wrote off bad real estate loans and set higher loan reserves for expected losses in the next quarter. Reserves for real estate loan losses climbed up by $171.7 million, pushing total reserves for bad loans above $1.1 billion.

Synovus in the meantime posted big loan losses when it aggressively marked down its non-performing loans and sold off $339 million of its troubled assets at liquidation-sale prices to clean its balance sheet.

Richard Antony, chief executive of Synovus, explained that the bank needed to cut its exposure in the real estate sector to be able to survive and grow after the recession.

SunTrust is historically a conservative bank, but it lent heavily during the boom to the residential housing construction sector and made a lot of home loans. The July to September quarter was the fourth quarter that SunTrust posted losses, accumulating a total loss of $1.8 billion during the four quarters and adding a lot of residential properties to lists of Atlanta foreclosures for sale.

Georgia had more than 33,300 foreclosure postings in the third quarter, with more than 11,200 of these already in banks’ REO listings.

James Wells, chief executive of SunTrust, said the bank continues to face difficult challenges, but he added that SunTrust has raised over $2 billion to protect its assets and to maintain its capital at regulatory levels.

FIG Partners analyst Chris Marinac remarked that SunTrust has been successful in writing down its non-performing real estate loans, but the bank may not be able to be profitable until next year.

According to Sterne Agee analyst Adam Barkstrom, he was not surprised that SunTrust was still struggling with its loan problems, but the third quarter figures were worse than he had expected.

Agee added that SunTrust may continue to struggle because of its troubled loans to commercial property developers who built office buildings and retail centers in Atlanta. A lot of these developers have been facing difficulties in meeting their financial obligations because of high vacancies and business failures.

In the Bay Area, a total of 18,812 default notices were sent to distressed homeowners in the July to September quarter, an increase of more than 25 percent from the third quarter last year but marked a drop of nearly 6 percent from the previous quarter.

Across California, the number of default notices increased to 111,689 in the third quarter, an increase of nearly 19 percent from last year’s third quarter, but marked a drop of more than 10 percent from the previous quarter.

The quarter-over-quarter declines indicated that loan modification efforts have been working for some homeowners as the Obama administration and other groups continue to push lenders to step up their foreclosure prevention efforts.

Analysts in the area also contend that many banks are deliberately slowing down on their foreclosure actions because they do not want to add more low-priced properties to the already overloaded lists of San Francisco bank foreclosures and they do not want to douse the fragile signs of recovery.

Based on the report, the highest rate of increase in defaults occurred in the wealthiest counties. San Francisco had 607 default notices, San Mateo had 1,263 and Marin had 428. The increase rate in San Francisco was a staggering 72 percent while the increase rates in San Mateo and Marin were 58.5 percent and 65.9 percent, respectively.

Trustee deeds meanwhile in the Bay Area dropped by more than 38 percent from last year’s third quarter to 7,462, but this marked nearly 8 percent of increase from the previous quarter. Statewide, the number of trustee deeds dropped by more than 37 percent from last year’s third quarter to 50,013, but marked an increase of nearly 10 percent from the previous quarter.

Out of all foreclosure homes in the Bay Area, 7,700 houses or 16 percent have not been resold in the third quarter.

According to Fiserv, the current median home price of $675,000 in San Francisco metropolitan area marked nearly 26 percent of total loss in value since 2006. Fiserv expects prices to fall further by another 8.3 percent in 2010 and then starts to gain by a soaring 14.3 percent between the middle of next year and June 2011.

Based on a report from a California based real estate research firm, a total of 1,101 foreclosures were posted for trustee deed sales in September, marking a drop of 7.6 percent from the previous month and a decrease of over 39 percent from September last year.

The number of default notices, meanwhile, increased by nearly 3 percent from August to 2,726 in September. The number was more than twofold than the 1,206 default notices filed in September last year.

Foreclosure postings in San Diego hit their peak of 2,004 in July last year and default notices reached their highest level of 3,832 in March this year.

In contrast to the San Diego trend, foreclosures statewide increased in the July to September quarter. A total of 50,013 foreclosures were posted for trustee sales, marking an increase of 9.5 percent from the previous quarter but a drop of more than 37 percent from last year’s third quarter.

Default notices decreased to 111,689, marking a drop of over 10 percent from 124,562 in the previous quarter but posting an increase of 18.5 percent from more than 94,200 notices sent in last year’s third quarter.

San Diego bank foreclosures that are still in market listings dropped in number to 3,800 units, comprising almost 18 percent of total foreclosures. The percentage marked a drop from the 34.7 percent share one year ago.

Statewide, the number of foreclosure homes that have not been resold dropped to over 57,000 units or 18 percent of all foreclosures, marking more than 50 percent of decrease over the past year.

The researchers observed that foreclosure properties no longer dominate total home sales, but they expect the percentage to climb up again when lenders complete their delayed foreclosure actions.

In the July to September quarter, the number of default notices sent to borrowers in San Diego County climbed up to 8,702, an increase from 7,062 in last year’s third quarter.

The drop in foreclosures was attributed by the researchers to efforts of lenders to regulate the flow of low-priced foreclosures into the market. They know that overloading the market with foreclosed properties will put out the small indications of recovery shown by the market.