Are no money down loans still available? I don't know! But I do know that if you're a first time buyer, you can still get 99.5% financing! All you have to have is a 640 credit score! The .5% could could be a gift from a family member and the seller could cover all the closing cost.

That means if someone was buying a house for $200,000, they'd only have to put down $1000!

Isn't that amazing?

I can't think of a better time to buy! Great loans, great interest rates, homes priced at an all time low!!!

IT'S DEFINITELY A BUYER'S MARKET!

Under 5%, Mortgages May Be Near The Bottom

By JAMES R. HAGERTY, Wall Street Journal

The Federal Reserve is going to extraordinary lengths to push down long-term interest rates, including home-mortgage rates. But those hoping mortgage rates will fall sharply from current levels, already historically low, may be disappointed.

Mortgage firms Thursday were quoting rates averaging 4.75% on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, according to Zillow.com, a real-estate information service. That is down from more than 5% two days ago and about 6% in mid-November. But further big declines will be hard to achieve, partly because the mortgage-lending market has grown less competitive in the past year as hundreds of small banks and independent mortgage lenders have collapsed. The big banks that dominate the market are eager to boost their profits margins, not give deeper bargains to consumers.

Rates for borrowers with the strongest credit are likely to be in a range of roughly 4.5% to 4.75% for the rest of this year, says Mahesh Swaminathan, a mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse in New York.

Others say that is too optimistic. Assuming no big change in government policy, Walter Schmidt, an analyst at FTN Financial Capital Markets, sees a range of 4.75% to 5.5% for most of this year.

The Fed began driving mortgage rates down in late November when it announced plans to buy as much as $500 billion of mortgage securities this year. On Wednesday, the Fed expanded that program, saying it will spend as much as $1.25 trillion on such securities in 2009. That is enough to provide funding for more than half of all home-mortgage loans likely to be made in the U.S. this year.

The Fed also is buying long-term Treasury bonds to drive down rates on those securities, whose pricing affects mortgage rates.

By historical standards, rates look incredibly low. Until recently, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages hadn't been below 5% since the 1950s. For the past couple of months, rates have been bobbing between about 5% and 5.25%. The 30-year rate averaged 4.98% in the week ended March 19, down from 5.03% the prior week, according to Freddie Mac's survey. Fifteen-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 4.61%, down from 4.64%.

One reason mortgage rates often tick back up after a decline is that a rush of people seeking to refinance quickly causes backlogs at lenders, which frequently don't have enough employees to process all of the applications.

"If lenders are working people overtime to close loans, they don't have an incentive to compete too hard on price," says Arthur Frank, who heads research on mortgage securities at Deutsche Bank in New York.

The situation highlights a conundrum for the government. It wants low rates to spur the housing market, but also wants the banks to make profits on loans so they can return to financial health.

Many of the small mortgage banks that remain are struggling. Mortgage banks, often small, family-owned companies, aren't licensed to take deposits and so lack that source of money for their loans. Instead, they typically borrow money for short periods from so-called warehouse lenders. They use this short-term credit to make loans to their customers and then pay back the warehouse lenders after selling the loans to bigger banks or to government-backed mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
But this warehouse credit is much harder to obtain than it was a year or two ago because many of the big banks and Wall Street firms that used to provide it have exited that business.

Despite these constraints, the Fed's action is "going to be a plus" for the housing market, says Thomas Lawler, an economist in Leesburg, Va. Lower rates make it more likely that home prices will hit bottom in many parts of the country later this year, Mr. Lawler says. The recovery, though, is likely to be gradual, partly because rising unemployment reduces housing demand.

Here's a good article I found on people getting scammed who are going into foreclosure. How terrible is that people are going through a hard enough time as it is and people are trying to make money off of their suffering!

Foreclosure prevention: Don't get scammed

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- When mortgage borrowers fall behind on payments and run the risk of losing their homes, they sometimes grab the first lifeline tossed their direction. Often that lifeline is a TV or Internet advertisement making grand promises - and has more than one string attached.>

"The challenge used to be to encourage people to reach out for help," said Marietta Rodriguez, director of National Home Ownership Programs for the community organizer NeighborWorks America. "That's not the message anymore. Now it's borrower beware."

She's worried because many of the companies advertising their services charge or take up-front fees and then do little or nothing for their clients.

"There are many rescue scams that are after your business," Rodriguez said. "They're guaranteeing something they can't and charging a lot. Even the legitimate for-profit services demand a high pay-out up front."

So, if you are in trouble and need help to fight off foreclosures, you should ask several questions before hiring anyone.

5 questions to ask

1. How much does the service cost? "You should never pay a nickel for foreclosure-prevention counseling," said Austin King, a spokesman for the community organizer Acorn. "The companies that charge for this service are profit driven, not mission driven, and they can charge up to a couple of thousand dollars for doing an hour's work."

Organizations like Acorn, which has offered foreclosure counseling for 20 years, provide expert, HUD-certified caseworkers at no charge to homeowners. They're paid with funds from the government, private foundations and lenders.

2. How long has the organization performed foreclosure-prevention counseling? Longer, of course, is better. Counselors should be fully up to speed on how to handle the particular problems of their clients. Each case may be unique, but experienced counselors can apply what they've learned to other particular cases.

Not every organization has been handling foreclosure problems as long as Acorn, but if they just got into the field a few months ago, they may not yet be fully up to speed.

3. Does the counselor have a direct pipeline your servicer's mortgage-modification department? Many foreclosure counselors have established working relationships with the mortgage-mitigation specialists at the lenders. These are the people authorized to offer workouts to defaulting mortgage borrowers.

If counselors are already talking to a servicer several times a week, they know what the servicer requires and what workouts are likely to be offered. Counselors also may have established personal relationships that they can leverage to negotiate on your behalf.

Of course, almost any firm trying to win your business will say they have a direct contact. So get specific. Ask if they have a written agreement with your servicer; many have put pledges to work with foreclosure counselors down on paper. You can also ask if they work with a specific person at the servicer, someone who would have the authority to make decisions on your account.

4. Do they have an "in" with a decision maker who can override the mortgage mitigation department? Some foreclosure counselors have a servicer's VP for mortgage mitigation on speed dial. If they can't get a desired outcome from the people they usually deal with, they can call the higher-ups and sometimes get them to override decisions.

5. Does the counselor stay with you every step of the way? Often once a client is assigned a caseworker, that person sticks with the borrower throughout the foreclosure prevention process.

That's important. One of the problems that defaulting borrowers have in dealing directly with lenders is they tend to get bounced around from one mortgage mitigation specialist to the next. Filtering everything through a single counselor can save time, which is often in short supply for at-risk borrowers.

It still might not work Of course, even with all those factors in place, there's no guarantee of success. Interventions can fail simply because there's nothing anyone can do. If you've lost your job and have no income, even counselors with the best credentials and intentions will be hard-pressed to help

"Not everyone should stay in the house," Rodriguez said.

Counselors, according to her, must ask themselves whether it is in the best financial interest of the borrower to hang on to a home. In some cases, people have to choose "the least amount of collateral damage," she said. That can mean borrowers stop trying to keep homes they simply can't afford under any viable plan and leaving homeownership behind.

First Published: March 26, 2009: 1:19 PM ET