First the job disappears, then the house. While a national report Thursday cautioned that one in 10 American households with a mortgage was at risk of losing its home, metro Atlanta remained at the forefront of the economic angst. The 13 counties in and around the city reported a 59-percent spike in foreclosure notices from July to August, increasing from 8,264 to 13,130.

Beginning April 5 new guidelines will make buying distressed properties much easier. Simply put, if this was poker you’d now be able to see the other guy's hand. The goal of the new rules is to reduce the foreclosure inventory by making it easier to have a short sale.

Within the world of mortgage debt there's a concept called forbearance. It pretty much means financial mercy at the option of the lender and now the idea is at the heart of a new proposal by the Mortgage Bankers Association to reduce foreclosures among the unemployed.

Foreclosure buyers got a Christmas Eve goodie from Fannie Mae, a new strategy that's likely to make foreclosure purchasing very much quicker. The catch? A bunch of lenders are about to be very unhappy. Until the recent real estate meltdown, foreclosures were a problem but not too much of a problem.

There's little doubt that 2009 was a brutal year for many in real estate while for others it was a buying opportunity. Foreclosure filings reported by RealtyTrac topped 300,000 per month for much of the year while the National Association of Realtors says that a typical existing home sold for $173,100 in October, down 7.

Whenever I need to finance or refinance a property I call up my friendly mortgage broker and about three weeks later the deal is done. My mortgage broker is a good example of the best you can find in his profession, a profession which is now on the verge of extinction.

December has ushered in a record low mortgage rate? But is this the time to invest in real estate? One expert weighs in on this hot topic.

PLANO, Texas (AP) — Shontaye Edwards spends her day in a gray cubicle at a Bank of America call center in this Dallas suburb. On the other end of the phone line are homeowners — tense, exasperated and looking for help. They often call with questions about the Obama administration's plan to help borrowers modify their mortgages, but many simply don't qualify.

If you believe the hype, it appears that the next phase of the housing market recovery is going to rely heavily on short sales to help remove distressed properties from the home sales pipeline. A “short sale” is a sale where the bank accepts as full value a price that’s less than what’s owed on the property.