... Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast for the University of Southern California, said that the federal government could end up owning property through the bailout plan...
... There may be instances of "clustering" of property financing within specific geographic areas, as a single mortgage broker or lender may have arranged financing for most of the homes in a single development area, Conway said, and it may be easier for the federal government to obtain direct access to those properties in such cases.
"It wasn't just random. There was some order to it, some organization -- often geographic," she said, citing Cleveland as an example of a city in which individual banks have taken ownership of thousands of properties.
It may be easiest for the federal government to focus on buying up the mortgage-related paper for loans that are geographically clustered, she said, as those would perhaps be the "easiest to buy and the easiest to restructure," or pursue modifications to keep homeowners in their homes and prevent foreclosure...
October 8, 2008