Nearly half of lenders participating in a recent FICO survey expect more homeowners to elect to default on their mortgages this year than last.

A plurality of respondents (46 percent) participating in a recent FICO survey of bank risk professionals expect the volume of strategic defaults in 2012 to surpass 2011 levels.

“After five years of a brutal housing market, many people now view their homes more objectively and with less sentimentality,” said Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs. “Regardless of legal or ethical issues around strategic defaults, lenders must account for this risk when they evaluate mortgage applications in declining markets. Many homeowners who find themselves upside down on mortgages in the future are likely to consider strategic default as an acceptable exit strategy.”

Only 29 percent of lenders said the current generation of homeowners considers their mortgage to be their most important credit obligation and 49 percent said is not.

Otherwise, the survey had some good news for the housing economy. More respondents (26 percent) expect delinquencies on mortgages to decline in the coming months than at any previous time in the two years FICO has been conducting this survey. Furthermore, 53 percent of respondents said the housing market would improve by the end of 2012, compared to 24 percent who said the market would deteriorate.

“Lenders seem to believe the housing market is starting to stabilize,” said Jennings. “Defaults, whether strategic or not, continue to be problematic. However, a gradually improving job market could begin changing the dynamics in housing. If job creation continues, banks will be more likely to embrace mortgage lending once again. A healthy job market is essential for improving the quality of mortgage applications and reducing default risk.”

A majority of survey respondents (56 percent) expected the supply of credit for residential mortgages to fall short of demand over the next six months. A similar majority (53 percent) expected the supply of credit for mortgage refinancing to fall short of demand, indicating that lenders remain cautious about the risks in the real estate market.

Large investor firms are taking advantage of the deep discounts found in some housing markets, and they’re finding that buying one or two homes is just not enough — they want thousands. The investors are then renting the homes out to tenants, banking on returns from the rental income, which they say is better than other investments at the moment.  

Landlords usually are individuals or small investment firms that own a few homes. “Nobody has ever tried this on such a large scale, and critics worry these new investors could face big challenges managing large portfolios of dispersed rental houses,” notes a recent article at The New York Times.

For example, large private equity investors like Waypoint, which signed a deal with GI Partners, says it plan to buy 10,000 to 15,000 additional homes by the end of next year. 

“We realized that there is a tremendous amount of brain damage around acquiring single-family homes, renovating them, and renting them out,” says Colin Wiel, a co-founder of Waypoint. “We think this is a huge opportunity, and we are going to treat it like a factory and create a production line to do this.”

Investors are seeing big opportunities in the real estate market, with nearly 650,000 foreclosed homes owned by lenders and 710,000 in the foreclosure process, according to housing data from RealtyTrac.

Meanwhile, rental demand is rising and so are rents. 

Economists say that investors buying the homes by bulk could help to stabilize the housing market. 

“If you have a lot of foreclosures in one community you will improve everybody’s home values if you take them off the market,” Diane Swonk, the chief economist at Mesirow Financial, told The New York Times. “If those homes are renovated and even rented, it is a lot better than having them stand empty.”