Subprime, No Problem? FHA Mortgage Delinquencies Hit Record 17.4%, as Fed Triggers Mad Land-Rush in Split Housing Market

by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street

Atlanta metro: 53,000 FHA mortgages are delinquent. Houston metro, 47,000. Just FHA, not including other delinquent mortgages. And when forbearance ends? By metro.

Even as the housing market is being whipped into a mad land rush, with new single-family house sales spiking 46% year-over-year, highest since 2007, with existing home sales jumping to the highest since 2006, and with prices in many metros soaring to new records, the other end of the housing market – high-risk government-insured mortgages – is falling apart, and delinquencies rose to another all-time historic high.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which insures about 8 million high-risk mortgages with lower requirements – “low down payments,” “low closing costs,” and “easy credit qualifying,” it says – reported that an all-time record of 17.4% of its mortgages were delinquent in August, up from what had been the all-time record in July of 17.0%, and having doubled from a year ago.

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