Foreclosure Filings in U.S. to Hit Record for Second Year With 3.9 Million

[Purveyor]

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Foreclosure filings in the U.S. will reach a record for the second consecutive year with 3.9 million notices sent to homeowners in default, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

This year’s filings will surpass 2008’s total of 3.2 million as record unemployment and price erosion batter the housing market, the Irvine, California-based company said.

“We are a long way from a recovery,” John Quigley, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview. “You can’t start to see improvement in the housing market until after unemployment peaks.”

Foreclosure filings exceeded 300,000 for the ninth straight month in November, RealtyTrac said today. A weak labor market and tight credit are “formidable headwinds” for the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a Dec. 7 speech in Washington. The 7.2 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007 are the most of any postwar economic slump, Labor Department data show. Unemployment, at 10 percent last month, won’t peak until the first quarter, Quigley said.

Through November, U.S. lenders had permanently modified about 31,000 of the 4 million mortgages targeted for relief by the Obama administration’s foreclosure prevention plan. That’s less than 5 percent of eligible loans, the Treasury Department said today.

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BLOOMBERG: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20603037&sid=a6aLuu9zxbcM