Lenders were on pace to have initiated roughly 1-1/2 million foreclosure proceedings last year, up from an average of fewer than 1 million foreclosure starts in the preceding two years. 2 More than one-half of the foreclosure starts in 2007 were on subprime mortgages.
The first was based on a plethora of building societies, whose optimistic officials believed that every family in the colony could simultaneously build their own house, keep up the payments through good times and bad, and support an army of investors who were being paid high rates of interest for the use of their money.