Bad — or unaffordable — home loans are no longer affecting unfortunate homeowners and lenders.

As the trend of more homeowners defaulting on their mortgages continues to increase, stock market investors are growing concerned with a possible “crisis in regard to subprime loans, according to U.S. News & World Report.

In fact, the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled more than 100 points yesterday, underscoring the impact the situation could have on the broader economy.

Here’s a snip:

“It’s stomach-turning time on Wall Street again. After plummeting more than 242 points Tuesday–and 416 points on February 27–the market began another downward march Wednesday on growing fears that the troubles in the subprime mortgage sector are turning into a full-blown financial crisis. And if there’s anything that Wall Street hates, it’s an unexpected crisis with unknown consequences.”

According to the article, an across-the-board rise in defaults and foreclosures means two things:

1. Consumers stop spending
2. Home prices could dip

And, according Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg, tightening lending standards might not be the silver-bullet solution.

Here’s a snip:

“Our biggest concern is that any tightening of lending standards in the mortgage market — even if confined to lower-quality borrowers — is going to constrain overall housing demand and make it more difficult for home sales and prices to stage a recovery.

We’ll continue to provide updates on this evolving issue … stay tuned.

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And, if you have an issue outside of regular business hours, don’t hesitate to leave us a message.

Andy, our long-time customer service manager, always ensures that someone from the Foreclosure.com teams responds to your message in a timely manner.

Put simply, we respond to every single inquiry — 100 percent of them! We’re even in the process of ensuring that we have around-the-clock coverage, meaning that you can talk to a human — not some voice operated system or robot — at anytime day or night.

Talk about refreshing.

Of course, you may never need to contact our customer service department. But if you do, we are serious about providing the best possible user experience, and offering top-notch customer support is an important part of the overall goal.

So, feel free to give us a call at (561) 981-5337 or send us an email. Or, don’t forget, ourLive Chat feature allows you to chat online in real-time with one of our customer service superstars, Scott.

Great customer support: It’s just another reason Foreclosure.com is the place to search for the best deals in real estate.

With foreclosures rising and regulators eyeing subprime loans as the primary cause, mortgage brokers are calling for an independent government inquiry to determine all the factors contributing to the problem, according to InmanNews.com (subscription required).

Here’s a snip from Joseph Falk, a longtime south Florida broker:

“Before you rush to the judgment that brokers are placing consumers in bad loans and before we impose ‘suitability’ standards, we have to know the cause of problem. Although the consumer advocates blame industry for inappropriate activity, it’s time to study and see (the real) causal factors.”

According to the article, it is widely predicted that as many as 20 percent of all subprime loans funded over the past two years will wind up in foreclosure.

It’s a huge problem that lawmakers and regulators are looking to solve.

If loan requirements are tightened, it would, eforce lenders to ask more questions and make more disclosures, factoring in such eventualities as tax consequences, income forecasts, the borrower’s resale plans, and whether their debt loads are likely to increase.

Whichever path is taken, this is an issue that needs to be resolved as soon as possible to ensure that more homeowners don’t fall into foreclosure.

We’ll continue to monitor this situation as it happens.

When a homeowner falls behind on mortgage payments, the reality of a looming foreclosure filing and bank repossession can cause fear and desperation.

During these trying times, it’s not uncommon for some homeowners to make poor, uninformed decisions and fall victim to foreclosure rescue scams.

Unfortunately, once homeowners are in default and foreclosure proceedings begin it becomes a matter of public record. Armed with this information, crooks often approach these distressed homeowners with bogus or misleading assistance that eventually make bad situations worse.

The Boston Herald recently highlighted such a scheme, which is, ripping through Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.

Here’s a snip:

… a cottage industry of shady small-time speculators has sprung up to target these struggling homeowners. One popular tactic: persuading a beleaguered homeowner faced with foreclosure to “temporarily sign over his home in exchange for financial assistance. You can guess the rest. Another ploy: offering to make some phone calls – to pull a few strings – on behalf of the homeowner with the lender. Of course, all that is needed is a few thousand dollars up front.

Fortunately, the new scam has caught the attention of the Attorney General, according to the article. And, the office has brought two rescue scammers to court and is exploring additional cases.

The Massachusetts example detailed above represents a small slice of this nationwide problem. With the increase in foreclosures across the board, state governments and local authorities are finding it harder and harder to crackdown on each and every rescue scam.

It’s critical that homeowners don’t fall into this trap. Therefore, anyone who sends fliers via mail or knocks on front doors talking about quick and harmless bailout offers should be considered suspicious.

And, always remember that viable resources and options do exist to avoid foreclosure. For starters, fill out this form to speak with a reliable professional.

Most important, however, is to remain as level-headed and as cool as possible.

Good help is out there, it’s just a matter of finding it before bad help finds you.

Last week, the Colorado Division of Housing uncovered potential flaws with national foreclosure data that was reported by RealtyTrac.com, highlighting a problem that has been flying under the radar for the past few years.

According to reports from the North Colorado Business Report and the Rocky Mountain News, RealtyTrac.com in some cases is triple counting foreclosures in the state. It is the primary reason the company incorrectly labeled Colorado with the dubious distinction of being the top state for foreclosures for nine of the past 13 months.

In fairness, Colorado uses a unique system to track its foreclosures.

Here’s a snip from a report contained within the Rocky Mountain News article:

“The Public Trustee data indicates that foreclosure numbers have been exaggerated by some organizations providing foreclosure data on the state. For example, RealtyTrac has provided widely reported foreclosure data stating that in 2006, Colorado experienced 54,747 foreclosures and had a total foreclosure rate of 1 in 33 households. If this is the case, Colorado has experienced an 85 percent increase in foreclosures since 2005, and a large number of counties would be experiencing foreclosure rates worse than 1 in 33 households.”

It’s important to note that RealtyTrac — one of the more reliable data providers on the Web — is not alone in its miscalculations. In fact, the real estate industry is awash in statistics, making it difficult to discern fact from fiction, right from wrong.

In October 2006, Foreclosure.com made a strategic decision to not release monthly foreclosure statistics. Even though we maintain the most accurate nationwide database — a statement supported by prestigious media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and esteemed organizations such as the Mortgage Bankers Association — we found it unnecessary to compete with the gaggle of so-called online data providers that crop up all the time.

And, it often put our credibility on the line when it was clear to us and anyone who took the time to look that our numbers best reflected the true foreclosure conditions on the ground.

Put simply, we’ve been at this for more than a decade. In fact, we pioneered the practice of releasing monthly foreclosure numbers even before the Internet became such a monster.

Foreclosure.com published numbers as a courtesy to the industry and press at large. Now that the media is saturated with wild and unsubstantiated numbers — doom and gloom, the sky is falling– sells, more than ever before, it validates our decision to take a step back and re-evaluate how to proceed going forward.

Fortunately, the media and local governments have started to scrutinize foreclosure numbers rather than accept them at face value.

We are confident that if more organizations take the time to analyze foreclosure data from online real estate companies, it will soon become clear that Colorado is not and isolated incident — the problem is more widespread.

Proceed with caution.