The housing market continues to struggle with recent findings from the Census Bureau. They found out that in the previous quarter that there are over 2 million homes that don’t have residents living in them. This continues to saturate the housing market with numbers that have reached the equivalent of the amount of homes in Detroit.

The first quarter of the year was actually an all time low for the country housing market. This shows exactly what has happen since there has been so much overbuilding in many markets and way too many 100% financed loans lent out to people that are not prepared to pay back their loans.

There are so many people that have been forced out of their homes and they can’t find people to buy the homes and are either forced to make monthly payments, find renters which are rare, or potentially foreclosures. In essence people got a little too greedy too fast.

There are many people that believe the market will continue to drop since there is so much supply and that this could continue for years because population and the economy catches up with the vast amount of property. Experts believe that this number could reach 3 million to 4 million homes in the next several years. Countrywide, the nations largest lender already has announced a loss of 1.2 billion dollars. In turn this is going to hurt a lot of builders, real estate agents, and lenders looking to offer loans and property.

Countrywide, a major mortgage lender in the United States, has been under fire lately both on the financial front and from critics in the financial world. The lender experienced huge growth during the mortgage boom by extending large mortgages to credit-suspect borrowers. The loans it issued were very often of the ‘creative’ variety that involved low, interest-only or negative amortization payments that allowed people to buy much more house than they probably should have.

As interest rates have risen more and more Countrywide customers have experienced hardship and even foreclosure. But now the mortgage giant is doing something to help – they’re offering foreclosure prevention programs to keep more of its clients from defaulting on their loans.

A formerly harsh critic of Countrywide, Bruce Marks, has now teamed up with the company in order to protect and assist at-risk homeowners. Marks sounds positively ecstatic about the joint-effort. “Countrywide is going to restructure loans for people with unaffordable loans to rates that people can afford to pay,” Marks said.*

Countrywide is taking a two-pronged approach to helping distressed borrowers:

1. They’re offering low-cost refinancing to to over 50,000 borrowers that provide them with more manageable payments.

2. They’re offering some 20,000 other borrowers extended terms on their temporary low-rate loans.

The consensus from borrowers in trouble and consumer advocacy groups is that Countrywide is doing the right thing and making big steps in slowing and preventing the credit crisis in the US.

*Source: money.cnn.com