Following the remarkably high 60 percent back-end debt-to-income ratio for homeowners whose loans have been made “permanent” via the government’s HAMP program as noted here a couple days ago come more scary statistics on the nation’s housing market.

From Diana Olick’s Loans Going Bad Faster Than the Fixes comes word of how long the foreclosure process is being dragged out:

More than 31 percent of loans that have been delinquent for six months are not yet in foreclosure, while 22.8 percent of loans delinquent for 12 months have not been moved to foreclosure status…

More evidence of banks being hopelessly behind or not wanting to take market prices for REOs comes in California foreclosure starts rise nearly 20% in February from the LA Times:

The number of properties scheduled for foreclosure sale also remained near record levels. However, actual sales of foreclosure properties, whether back to the bank or those sold to third parties, dropped 11.9% in February from the month prior.

Lastly, Paul Jackson at Housing Wire concludes that Housing Recovery is Spelled R-E-O after culling through yesterday’s report from Lender Processing Services:

On average, severely delinquent borrowers have gone more than 9 months without making a mortgage payment—and yet foreclosure has not yet started for them. For those borrowers who are in the foreclosure process, it’s been an average of 13.6 months—more than one full year—since they last made any payment on their mortgage.

With this kind of data piling up, it’s hard to get excited about the prospects for any sort of a near-term recovery. Based on how the banks and the government are handling the problem, we’re probably in for a housing market bottom that will take years to form.

The Commerce Department reported(.pdf) that housing starts fell 5.9 percent in February, from a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 611,000 to 575,000, while permits for new construction dropped 1.6 percent, from 621,000 to 612,000.

Homebuilding activity has been at depressed levels for almost a year-and-a-half now as distressed sales have continued to limit demand for new construction.
January housing starts were revised upward from 591,000 to 611,000 making the decline in February about twice as large as it would have been using originally reported data and the previously reported number of housing permits was also revised upward.

Inclement weather in parts of the country affected the February data, however, housing starts fell more in the South (down 16 percent) than in the Northeast (down 9.6 percent) during a month of record snowfall in the Northeast.

On a year-over-year basis, new home construction was up 0.2 percent while the number of permits issued rose 11.3 percent and, from the peak of homebuilding activity in 2005, housing starts are now down 73 percent with permits issued are a full 75 percent lower.