Greg Snow - Southwest Florida Real Estate Expert provides real estate services to Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel and Captiva Islands

 Glancing at our local newspaper, www.news-press.com, on Father's Day, I read a national article about the possibility of a new wave of mortgage foreclosures that could be headed everyone's way, with our Florida being one of the most probable. Now the term, "new wave" means different things to many people, however I would like to view it, in money terms, as an inexact approach in forecasting the return of massive mortgage foreclosures. The newest worry is the over $230 billion of "option adjustable-rate" mortgages that are due for adjustment in the next three years. These 560,000 plus option ARM's, very popular quasi-exotic loans, had their glory days during the housing boom. Now, the potential default rate worries many experts.

These attractive, risky instruments let you opt to pay less than your monthly balance due and add the difference on to the outstanding loan balance. These loans reset to a time frame trigger or a debt to value established (probably woefully out of line from inception of the loan). Option ARMs grew from less than 3% of bundled loans in 2004 to almost 15% of all bundled loans in 2007. Many of these outstanding loan balances are 30 -50% greater than the property's current value and may help create one of the very last realities we need in our fragile real estate market which is more inventory. Barclay's Capital estimates over 82 % of all option arms issued in 2007 remain outstanding. How many did the banks "hold" on their books and how many were sold as securities to investors? Nobody is certain. Main problems of low rates in adjustable period and strong loss of value, combing with high unemployment, put new waves of strain on us all.

 As our schoolchildren escape from their school year imprisonment (according to many of them), I can recall a song by Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham named "The song remains the same", www.ledzepplin.com. I have lived here in southwest Florida's Lee County since they let Ronald Regan take office for a second term and many things have stayed constant and many have REALLY changed. Let's have a look-see: The unadultered shriek from both parents and their children when school ends covers opposite ends of the joy-horror spectrum and is most likely a national , if not international given. Our weather pattern is hot and humid n the early morning changing to really hot and really humid by noon to the loud roar of thunder and lightning and pounding quick shower around 4:00ish to the heat is back on around 5:00ish. The desire for water, for consumption, bathing, cooling off, boating, swimming, or fishing is at the top of your demand survival list. Everyone's countdown for football seems to go on and we yearn for our country's passion to arrive sooner than later. The service and retail industry tightens their belts, locals vacation in N.C., Key West seems to be calling for a visit, and our real estate market goes into a kinda of somnabulistic trance and crawls through the summer and early fall.