Ladera, an unincorporated community of about 25,000, is conspicuously affluent -- it's home to Tamra of The Real Housewives of Orange County. The schools are strong, the surrounding chaparral foothills pretty. Good jobs are to be had in nearby Irvine. In short, this is a place a lot of folks would consider a slice of heaven, which is why MONEY began following what was going on here two years ago, as the dream of the house that made you rich began crumbling.
Now heaven has turned into limbo, where defaulters may live for a year or more with a giant mortgage they can't fully pay. Not counting homes already in the foreclosure process, about one in 10 Ladera mortgages is at least 30 days late, according to LPS Applied Analytics. And houses in the foreclosure process have been delinquent an average of 16 months, up from seven in 2008.
The national figures are almost as ugly. And what they show is that our collective real estate hangover is far from over. And limbo will start to last even longer as the "robo-signing" scandal raises questions about the integrity of the foreclosure process.
Read it allTo judge from recent stories about poorly (if not fraudulently) documented seizures, you would think servicers are snatching up houses quickly. In fact, rushed doc signings and long delinquencies are two sides of the same problem: During the boom, lenders tripped over themselves to create millions more ultimately unsustainable mortgages than they can now unwind.
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