“This has always been the wild card out there that we have been unsure of because we never had so many of these exotic mortgages. There is a lot of uncertainty out there,” said Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate. “As interest rates have moved up, (homeowners) are having difficulty making payments and they are having difficulty refinancing because the qualification criteria have tightened since last year.”
