A flood of foreclosures is about to hit the housing market. Thegolden age for foreclosure squatters is over. That’s now that a $26billion dollar mortgage settlement has been approved.The settlement, agreed to by the nation’s five largest mortgagelenders, is expected to speed up the foreclosure process. It willprovide stricter guidelines for banks to follow, when repossessinghomes, which will kick a lot of foreclosures out of limbo- since fall2010 – following the so-called robo-signing scandal – that whenbanks signed off on thousands of foreclosure documents a month withminimal verification. In some states, delinquent borrowers have been squatting in theirhomes for years. In Florida, the average time was 861 days, and in NewYork it was 1,056 days — close to three years. But that’s all aboutto change. We’re going to see an increase in the speed offoreclosures and a higher number of foreclosure starts.