I attended a great presentation yesterday by Leroy Houser where he discussed being successful in this Buyer's market that we are in.  Mr. Houser spent a good amount of time talking about distressed properties and their effect on the market.  One statement he made really stuck out to me...last year (2009) there were approximately five million homes sold in the United States.  This year (2010) the predictions are that there will be five million foreclosures added to the market to sell.  As many distressed properties will be added to the market this year as the total number of houses that sold last year...staggering! 

I saw in the headlines this morning where "Bank of America Corp., the second- largest U.S. home lender, added 2,000 employees since April to work with borrowers having trouble paying their mortgages, a senior executive said.

The lender now has more than 18,000 workers in “default management,” a 60 percent increase since January 2009, Barbara Desoer, president of Bank of America’s home-loan and insurance unit, said in testimony prepared for a congressional hearing on U.S. housing policy tomorrow. Those workers handle 100,000 calls a day, she said. Wells Fargo & Co., the largest U.S. home lender, Bank of America and other companies have hired thousands of employees or shifted staff from other departments to work with borrowers who have lost jobs or experienced declining incomes. Banks repossessed a record 257,944 homes in the first quarter, 35 percent more than a year earlier, according to Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc. More than a fifth of U.S. mortgage holders owed more than their homes were worth, Seattle- based real estate data provider Zillow.com reported last month."

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