I remember playing games out on the playground with all the neighborhood kids back when I was small.  It always seemed that there would be some annoying kid who couldn’t stand it when things didn’t go his way and it looked like he was likely to lose.  If he struck out or a ball went out of bounds he would demand that most annoying and juvenile of solutions– the “do-over”. Lenders, who have been playing for high stakes since the robo-signing scandal, aren’t good losers either.  They can’t afford to be.  Consequently, in states that have judicial foreclosures, they have…
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Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys and frequent “talking head” says that housing will start to make a comeback next year.  Why? [Thanks L!] First he likes the prices: “House prices are now low enough relative to incomes that single family housing is about as affordable as its ever been in the data we have going back to World War II,” Zandi says. And then there’s the “fear factor”: Demand to buy homes will also increase when potential buyers get a whiff of rising interest rates. I don’t share Zandi’s optimism.  However “affordable” homes may be, financing remains difficult to…
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Every since Robert Toll gave his famous “dancing on the bottom” comment about housing back in 2006, we’ve seen hundreds of articles with sunny predictions of green shoots and market bottoms.  You’d think the media would cease to print them, but bottom articles remain a staple of real estate reports.  Yesterday Reuters proclaimed Home prices close to bottoming, to rise in 2013.  They at least decided to sound somewhat dubious about it: [Thanks L!] (Reuters) – The relentless decline in home prices is nearing an end and prices should rise for the first time in seven years in 2013, but…
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One of the options for homeowners facing foreclosure is to do a “deed in lieu”.   A deed in lieu is where a borrower hands the deed back to the lender rather than be foreclosed on.  Bank of America is launching what sounds like a “rent in lieu” program. [Fannie Mae, by the way, has a similar program.]  Borrowers give back the deed and stay on as renters: [Thanks L!] The pilot program works like this: homeowners would give the title of their homes to Bank of America in exchange for mortgage debt forgiveness. Homeowners would then have the opportunity…
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Remember the New York foreclosure mill that had the Halloween party  last year mocking the foreclosed and homeless? [Here's the video if you don't.]   The “robo-signers”, the Steven J. Baum law firm, have settled.  The tab for their “humor”?  Four million dollars. [Thanks L!] BUFFALO, N.Y. – A New York law firm that was harshly criticized after pictures surfaced from a company Halloween party where people dressed as homeless has agreed to pay $4 million in a settlement with the state over some of the tens of thousands of foreclosures it filed, attorneys said Thursday. The agreement settles allegations…
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Back in 2008,  I wondered how sustainable the rise in Canadian home prices was, but the market has continued to rise.  Concerns are rising though, as evidenced by two pieces from the Globe and Mail yesterday.  One was this opinion from Bank of Montreal’s CEO Bill Downe: “We took a long, hard look at the Canadian housing market and concluded … there was a legitimate concern that house prices – particularly in the largest cities – had been rising at a rate that was simply unsustainable,” Mr. Downe said. “With growing concerns over household debt, a soft landing in housing…
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If you Google “Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act“, you’ll see all kinds of warnings like this one: [Thanks L!] PHOENIX (CBS5) -If you are underwater in your home and you might be having to short sale soon, like lot of people in the Valley, you’re going to want to hear this. If a federal law doesn’t get extended, you could end up owing thousands of dollars in taxes if you don’t time it just right. Up until now, if you lost your house because of foreclosure or if you had to short sale, you won’t pay taxes on any loan…
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For nearly six years, we’ve been following the Maricopa County [Phoenix area] Home Sales Report done by Dr. Jay Butler, ASU professor emeritus of Realty Studies.  Back in 2008 there was a bit of a scandal when it was shown that Butler’s inclusion of trustee’s sales was skewing the sales numbers.  After that, Butler’s broke sales out into “traditional sales” and “foreclosures”.  It has also not uncommon for listings to indicate whether or not they are a “traditional” sale.  Here’s one example from L’s spam mail: You might think, based on the listing, that this home is sold by an…
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This former Countrywide loan officer may not be the worst mortgage fraudster to operate in the Phoenix area, but she’s got to be up there.  Using straw buyers, she had them purchase a total of 60 properties at inflated prices.  This was achieved using bogus appraisals, allowing her to pocket the profits.  And that’s just the beginning.  Check this out: [Thanks L!]   How likely is it that the victims will ever see any of that $22 million dollars in restitution she is to pay?  I suspect that if this woman has to do an honest day’s work to earn…
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What caused the housing bubble?  In general, the short answer you’ll get to that question is “Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long”.  I’m not going to argue with that, but I wouldn’t argue with another point made by Matthew O’Brien of the Atlantic, either: Alan Greenspan is still to blame. Just not for the reason most people think. Where the Fed really failed was as a regulator. It could have gone after the predatory lending in the subprime world, if it had wanted to. At least one Fed governor suggested doing so. Greenspan rebuffed him. Counter-factuals…
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Catherine Reagor, real estate reporter for the Arizona Republic, must have taken the easy way out a few days ago and just published a press release as “news”.  She “reported” on a “penny auction” for a home in Phoenix: [Thanks L!] Penny auctions are popular for selling everything from gift cards to cars at discount prices. Now in metro Phoenix, a former foreclosure home is scheduled be auctioned off cent by cent. Real-estate agent Todd Talbot plans to hold an online penny auction for a Glendale home next week. The house at 6214 W. Acoma Drive, Glendale, was purchased for…
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Long time readers know that I have reservations about down payment assistance programs.  Buyers that use DPA have been shown to have a higher rate of default.  One of the big barriers to home buying is the lack of a downpayment though, and if we don’t buy homes, banks don’t make money. Wells Fargo has recently announced that they are setting aside billions of dollars for down payment assistance programs in the cities of Phoenix, Los Angeles and Atlanta.  Borrowers in Los Angeles can receive up to $30,000.  In Phoenix and Atlanta, borrowers can receive up to $15,000.  Here’s what…
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Hat tip to ZeroHedge for the Op-Ed in the New York Times by the Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. It’s annoying to read him patting himself and the administation on the back for all their whizbang government “stimulus” [Which can be read "massive, unprecedented borrowing] that “saved” the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.  As ZeroHedge points out, Geithner conveniently forgets who triggered the crisis– he needs to look in a mirror. It’s bad enough to read him going on at length on all the great things this “stimulus” money is doing, but then he has the nerve to say: American…
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Yesterday the FHFA released a report entitled, The State of the U.S. Housing Market: Removing Barriers to Economic Recovery. The title is somewhat misleading.  This prepared congressional testimony is more about how the FHFA proposes to manage the next phase of its conservatorship, and doesn’t really address removing barriers to economic recovery.  By the way, the report had to be among the most redundant I’ve ever read.  If you eliminated all the repetitive bits, the nine page statement with 25 pages of supporting documentation probably could have been reduced by nearly half.  But in spite of that there was a lot…
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As I was surfing the internet last night, I ran across one more article (Out of who knows how many) that asked “Has the U.S. housing market finally bottomed?”  Invariably these articles go on to indicate that somehow “bottom” = “recovery”.  For instance, last night’s article said: With building activity and builder confidence increasing, and mortgage rates close to record lows, the overall trajectory is clearly upwards. In fact, there really is no “trajectory” at the moment.  Even Warren Buffett, who’s been bullish on the housing market for years, admitted this week he was wrong about an early recovery and…
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