Foreclosure Strategy

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Foreclosure Strategy To solve the foreclosure crisis we must take a multi-pronged approach that tackles the issues making the situation worse and that caused the problems in the first place. Our goal is to do this in an efficient and time conscious manner. Any solution is going to have its positive and negative aspects but we must try to maximize the former and minimize the latter. The biggest problem is that we had and have an overinvestment in real estate that led to an overproduction in housing. In other words we have too much supply. This massive oversupply has led to home prices decreasing. To remedy this we must either increase demand or decrease supply. While I will discuss ideas to achieve both a reduction in supply and an increase in demand, I believe that stimulating the demand side will be more productive. However, if we expand home buyers at the expense of rental owners we will still cause significant damage. Also, keep in mind that the U.S. population is growing at about 1% a year and if left to natural mechanisms will take years to soak up the oversupply. First, let's try to solve the issues that are making the situation worse. We will quickly touch on the oversupply problems and then move onto the demand solutions. One of the reasons for the oversupply of housing is that many individuals that can afford their homes are walking away because of the negative equity in the house. Negative equity in the home means that the mortgage debt remaining is greater than the current price of the home. Statistically, most people who walk away from their mortgage payment have negative equity. They made a financial decision to buy a house at a certain price, but since the current price is lower now they don'... ... middle of paper ... ...ollowing 3 years 20% of your original stock allocation is allowed to be sold, and then in year five 30% can be sold. At any time during this period if it is deemed that the bonus's were misallocated due to poor performance the remainder can be clawed back. This gives an incentive to do what is best in the long run and should eliminate many of the poor short-term decisions. This paper was written to give a general outline of some steps that can be taken to decrease the supply of housing , increase the demand of housing, and fix some of the issues that created the housing bubble. It is not comprehensive as there are more things that can be done, but I have tried to include some of the most relevant. This multi-strategy approach does not only help with the housing crisis, but also is instrumental in economic growth, and providing positive long-term incentives.

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