A government watchdog says participation in a federal program to help struggling homeowners is “anemic”.

The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said the program has failed “to put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings.”

That assessment isn’t surprising to local foreclosure prevention counselors and attorneys who work with homeowners who are at risk of foreclosure.

In Massachusetts, foreclosure activity hasn’t really improved. Just yesterday, The Warren Group reported that foreclosures more than doubled in June from the same month last year and year-to-date foreclosures have jumped 57 percent.

Petitions to foreclose, which mark the first step in the foreclosure process, looked like they were on the decline over the last few months. But for the first half of the year, they’re only down 3.4 percent from the same months in 2009.

When does a house size go from big to too big? That’s a question I’m sure planners have been asking themselves for several years as they’ve watched McMansions spring up and home sizes balloon.

It looks like Wellesley planners were facing that question recently. The Boston Globe reports that the Wellesley Planning Board has approved plans for a 15,000-square-foot mansion. The board has asked the owner to add 30-foot evergreen trees to maintain the privacy of abutting homes and a special rainwater collection system.

Apparently, the home size was scaled back from 16,838 square feet to address the board’s concerns. I know that property owners have rights and they should be able to do what town rules and boards allow. But really, 15,000 square feet? That sounds like more like an inn, not a home.

Wellesley has been grappling with the issue of super-sized homes for years. Hundreds of homes have been torn down in Wellesley during the last decade and a significant number of them have been replaced with multimillion dollar homes that are often thousands of square feet larger.

The town has tried to restrict home size, and this 15,000-square-foot residence that’s being planned is in a neighborhood where homes larger than 5,900 square feet are subject to a “large house review”.

But “large house” seems like a huge understatement for this proposed residence.

It looks like Newton just got a bit more desirable. The city snagged the No. 3 spot in Money magazine’s annual search for the top 100 best places to live in America. The magazine noted the city’s close proximity to Boston, top-rated schools, low crime, strong economy, pedestrian-friendly shopping districts, parks and playgrounds.

But one of the minuses was its pricey homes. A modest three-bedroom home can easily cost you $600,000 to $650,000.

In fact, the median price for single-family homes sold in Newton in the first five months of the year was $710,700, substantially higher than the statewide median of about $285,000, according to the most recent statistics from The Warren Group.

Median home prices have ballooned 32 percent in the last decade or so from $539,000 in 2000 to $710,000.

It’s a great place to live if you can afford it.

Those of you who’ve been following housing trends know that foreclosures have been spreading to some of the wealthier suburban parts of the state.

Well it looks like a multimillion-dollar home in one of Brookline’s most desirable neighborhoods was recently foreclosed on.

A 6,000-square-foot mansion at 375 Lee St., which is near Brookline’s Country Club, was foreclosed on by RBS Citizens earlier this month. The bank took back the home for $2.7 million, according to records from The Warren Group.

The home was built by David Geffen, who’s well known for developing upscale properties in Brookline and Newton. His firm built Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino’s home in Brookline about seven years ago. Geffen had been trying to sell the home for several years. I wrote about the Brookline’s luxury housing market back in 2004 when that particular home was on sale for just under $5 million. Last May, it was back on the market for $4.6 million even though foreclosure proceedings had been started on the property in November 2008.

Despite gains that the local housing market has seen recently, it looks like Geffen couldn’t sell his the home fast enough. It will be interesting to see how much the bank gets for the home …

Housing industry followers might be suffering from information overload this week.

Just this week:  A monthly housing scorecard was released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development with all sorts of details, including how many borrowers have received loan modifications under a federal program, and how many temporary loan modifications have been canceled.

Then there was a national report on May home sales, which declined from the previous month, while a local report from The Warren Group showed that home sales continued to rise in May.

That was followed by report that sales of newly built homes fell to the lowest level on record.

Then, Fannie Mae said it was going to prevent distressed homeowners who walked away from their mortgages, the so-called strategic defaulters, from getting new home loans for seven years.  Just for the record, I don’t really see why homeowners think it’s ok to stop paying their mortgages because the value of their homes has fallen. I’m sure the mortgage documents they signed didn’t say I’ll pay this monthly amount only if the home value doesn’t fall below X amount.

But perhaps my favorite report was the one from a treasury official which showed that prison inmates were filing and receiving homebuyer tax credits.  Apparently, thousands of tax filers have fraudulently claimed the tax credit.

The story is even more infuriating after hearing that some buyers who are legitimately trying to claim the credit are running into roadblocks. A Boston Herald story highlights the case of a couple in Western Massachusetts that is having trouble getting the credit. The Herald reports that local attorneys and accounts are seeing delays in tax credit payments because the IRS is trying to weed out fraudulent claims.

More bad news for homeowners who’ve been struggling with mortgage payments: Fitch Ratings released a report yesterday predicting that most homeowners who’ve received a loan modification under the federal Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, will default within a year.

The redefault rate within a year is likely to be 65 percent to 75 percent under HAMP for loans that aren’t back by the federal government, Fitch said.

That’s disappointing to hear, especially since a lot of borrowers spend months, sometimes more than year, trying to secure a loan modification. Experts say that homeowners are saddled with too much other debt – including credit card debt – and can’t keep up with mortgage payment even when they’re reduced.

The news comes as The Warren Group reports that foreclosures in Massachusetts more than doubled in May compared to a year earlier. In the first five months of 2010, 6,107 foreclosure deeds have been filed. That’s a 48 percent jump from a year earlier.

The only bright spot, if you can call it that, is that the number of foreclosures that banks have started so far this year hasn’t spiked. A total of 11,118 petitions to foreclose have been filed by lenders from January through May, which is up about 1.3 percent from 10,978 last year.

Summer is quickly sneaking up, and people with dreams of vacationing with the rich and famous and all sorts of VIPS are snatching up properties on swanky Nantucket.

 Sales of single-family homes have more than doubled on the island in the first four months of the year, compared to a year earlier. There were 39 single-family home sales transactions recorded from January through April, up from 17 a year ago.

But sales have declined significantly since the market peak in 2005, when 62 single-family homes sold in the first four months of the year, according to data from The Warren Group.

Prices have also eased a bit, according to local real estate brokers, although you wouldn’t know it from some recent transactions. Just last month, a compound on Hinckley Lane in the Cliff area traded for $5.75 million. Another home, a five-bedroom Colonial with three-bedroom guest cottage at Medouie Creek Road, actually was foreclosed on by JP Morgan Chase. The bank took it back at auction for more than $5.7 million. The property had been purchased in 2002 for $3.2 million, and was listed for sale four years ago for almost $7.5 million.

Brokers like to say that the island’s residential real estate market is driven by discretionary sales and second-home purchases – meaning that owners of vacation homes don’t have to sell because they don’t need to move off the island for a job or lifestyle change and buyers generally don’t have to buy. The market is somewhat insulated from the housing market on the mainland.

But the recent economic downturn affected even the affluent, seeming untouchable, homeowners. It made selling a necessity for some homeowners who lost well-paying jobs, and buying became a luxury that many could no longer afford.

Real estate agents in Dover, Melrose, Palmer, Hanover, Brookline and Wellesley have been much busier in the first four months of this year than they were a year earlier.

Those communities have had some of the biggest increases in home sales volume so far this year, according to The Warren Group. Home sales in Massachusetts surged 46 percent in April compared to the same month in 2009 and year-to-date sales are up 26 percent.

But home sales transactions more than doubled in places like Brookline and Hanover.

In Dover and Melrose, single-family home sales almost tripled in the first four months of the year, compared to the same period in 2009.

In the western part of the state, Palmer’s home sales rose a whopping 153 percent to 43 from 17 last year.

And in the highly desirable towns of Brookline and Wellesley sales more than doubled. In Brookline, home sales transactions rose from 13 last year to 31, while Wellesley recorded 82 home sales compared to just 35 a year earlier.

More homeowners in Massachusetts may have lost their homes to foreclosure so far this year than they did a year ago, but fewer homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments.

That’s according to the most recent delinquency survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The association reported today that the Bay State delinquency rate fell 90 basis point to 8.83 percent in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter of last year.

The group pointed out that mortgage delinquency rates typically fall between the fourth and first quarter of the year due to seasonal factors, like heating bills and Christmas holiday spending that cause many homeowners to fall behind in December. Those homeowners eventually catch up with missed payments by the end of March.

In Massachusetts, about 3 percent of loans were 30 days past due, while 3.7 percent of loans were 90 days or more delinquent. The smallest group,1.2 percent of loans, were 60 days late.

Yesterday, The Warren Group reported that there have been 4,821 foreclosures statewide in the first four months of the year, up 37 percent from 3,530 during the same period in 2009.

Foreclosure activity in Massachusetts isn’t easing. A new report from The Warren Group shows that lenders started and finished more foreclosures statewide in April than they did a year earlier.

And Banker & Tradesman reports this week that properties that have entered the foreclosure process are moving faster to the auction stage. As Colleen M. Sullivan reports in this week’s issue of Banker & Tradesman, lenders are getting more efficient at handling foreclosures. The fact that banks lifted foreclosure moratoriums, most of them instituted in early 2009, has also sped the process up.

The pick-up in home sales activity has probably also encouraged lenders to move ahead with auctions in hopes of selling the properties and avoiding holding them in their own REO portfolios.

The news comes as federal officials announced that more trial home loan modifications are getting canceled. The U.S. Treasury said 277,640 trial loan modifications were cancelled in April compared to 155,173 in March. Why?

Mortgage servicers are disqualifying borrowers who have not met the income documentation guidelines or who can’t keep up with the reduced monthly payments under the modified loans.

Apparently, the federal program known as the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, will require homeowners to prove that they have the income to qualify for a mortgage modification starting in June. In the past, mortgage servicers and lenders were taking the word of borrowers that they had a certain income level in order to reduce their mortgage payments.

All of this points to one thing – the foreclosure problem is far from over.