Wholesale Foreclosure Sales Planned

The U.S. federal government is making plans to sell more than 250,000 foreclosure homes at wholesale prices in bulk to a series of investor-backed firms in an effort to speed up the recovery of the housing market and artificially push home prices higher.
The plan comes on the heals of a pilot program that sold homes to investor led groups in a half a dozen states, most seriously damaged by the real estate collapse. The government has made a series of efforts to aid the housing market, including efforts to refinance underwater homeowners without regard to loan to value levels, but few of the programs has actually shown much success to aid the market, which has seen home prices decline for seven years in most areas of the country until recently.
The Fannie Mae program will be implemented to sell off assets in the form of either pool sales or joint ventures. Realtors are criticizing the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in its quiet effort to sell foreclosed homes in package deals. The REO properties, like those that have already been sold to investor groups, will have to be rented and not resold for a period of time and may not be immediately “flipped” for a profit.
A large scale sell-off of foreclosures held by Fannie Mae would reduce the number of vacant and foreclosed homes waiting to be sold throughout the country, and could also act to artificially push home values higher as a result of fewer homes listed for consumers in the general marketplace. However, it would come at an expensive price as the Federal Reserve buys home mortgages that have defaulted.