Diamond Foods Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. have called off their $1.5 billion deal for Diamond to buy the Pringles brand. Cereal maker Kellogg Co. is swooping and made a $2.7 billion deal to purchase the brand.Nobody’s dancing a jig, but for the first time in about three years the number of U.S. homeowners behind on their mortgages is declining.
The hope, of course, is that the housing crisis is stabilizing.
The Mortgage Bankers Association said Friday the percentage of borrowers who missed just one payment on a home loan fell to 3.6 percent in the October-to-December quarter, down from 3.8 percent in the third quarter.
Indiana saw a similar decline during that period as homeowners missing one payment dropped to 4.6 percent, compared with 4.7 percent in the previous quarter.
The decline is even more surprising because delinquencies usually rise at that time of year because of higher heating bills and holiday spending. While the number of borrowers not missing a payment is small, “a decrease is a decrease,” said Rena Black, president of the Fort Wayne Area Multiple Listing Service. The MLS is a subsidiary of the Fort Wayne Area Association of Realtors.
“I was amazed last year at how prevalent (depressed housing) was,” Black said. “It hasn’t backed off all that much, though.”
Even before Friday’s report from the mortgage bankers group, Black noticed less pressure on the local market from foreclosures.
The Realtors association Tuesday said that the median sale price in January this year jumped to $89,900, up from $57,900 in January 2009. Black attributed the lower median price last year to a higher number of “bank-owned properties and foreclosures.” She said the January 2010 median price was “an indication that there are fewer foreclosures.”
RealtyTrac Inc. monitors default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions. It reports Indiana has 4,622 foreclosures through January. The average home sale price was $132,141. The Irvine, Calif., company said Allen County had 294 foreclosures in January, 272 of those in Fort Wayne.
Nationally, the new trend in late payments is significant because it means the number of people going into foreclosure will continue to decline this year. And that is important for all homeowners in areas where cheaply priced foreclosures are bringing down neighboring values.
Jay Brinkmann, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s chief economist, said the report likely marks “the beginning of the end” of the wave of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures that started more than three years ago.
Still, more than 15 percent of homeowners with a mortgage have missed at least one payment or are in foreclosure, a record for the 10th straight quarter.
Although the drop means the number of people losing their homes will start to fall, some pain from the crisis is sure to persist. Because millions of people are already in foreclosure, deeply discounted houses will put pressure on home prices for years.
“The bad news is that we still have a big problem,” Brinkmann said.
“The good news is it looks like it may not get much bigger.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
