Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Countrywide Foreclosures: April 2008

In February Countrywide Financial (NYSE:CFC) announced that they planed to discontinued publishing their monthly operational status report limiting insight into their internal status to what they termed a more “industry standard” quarterly frequency.

Clearly, this was a move intended to thwart transparency and prevent concerned onlookers from completely understanding the enormity of their troubles.

In order to continue monitoring the Countrywide Financial foreclosure and delinquency status with at least some level of monthly insight I have built a simple model (simple linear extrapolation from actual data reported from 2005 – February 2008) to estimate the monthly numbers.

I will update the model with actual data when and if it ever becomes available in their quarterly reports.

Today, the estimated results for Countrywide Financial show that delinquencies and foreclosures are continuing their climb to troubling levels with delinquencies jumping over 61% on a year-over-year basis to 6.94% of total number of loans or over 83% on a year-over-year basis to 7.49% of total unpaid principle balance while foreclosures jumping over 73% on a year-over-year basis to 1.19% of total number of loans and soaring 105% to 1.70% of total unpaid principle balance.

Prior to January 2007, Countrywide reported foreclosure data as a percentage of the total number of loans serviced which obviously lacked complete clarity.
Below, are charts of both measures; delinquencies and foreclosures by total number of loans serviced and by percentage of unpaid loan principle (Click for larger versions).

Be sure to check out the Countrywide Financial Foreclosures (REO) Blog’s Inventory Tracker for some more startling evidence that foreclosures are skyrocketing over at Countrywide Financial as well as some excellent REO tracking features.