SD Voice: Mortgage Distress Spreads Beyond Subprime

[El Pinko]

Mortgage Distress Spreads Beyond Subprime
By KELLY BENNETT Voice Staff Writer


Monday, Feb. 11, 2008 | In the year since national spotlights became trained on problems affiliated with subprime mortgages, some pundits and analysts have made "subprime" synonymous with the entire crisis in the economy, the housing market and a lot of other, sometimes unrelated, issues.

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Confirming a well-known trend, new data show that late payments and delinquencies on subprime loans in San Diego County soared between November 2006 and November 2007, according to FirstAmerican Loan Performance.

But in that same time, signs of distress also increased among the other 87 percent of outstanding loans in the county, those prime loans restricted to borrowers with very good credit.

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But the share of those prime mortgages in both the 60-days-late and the foreclosure scenarios grew between November 2006 and November 2007. While just 0.44 percent of the prime loans outstanding in the county had late payments for at least 60 days in November 2006, the share of prime loans in that situation had tripled to 1.54 percent by November 2007.