Entries from August 2007 ↓

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Instead of a wholesale bailout of subprime borrowers that are getting into trouble with their mortgages as many are calling for, President Bush has outlined his plans to help borrowers that are caught in some of the toxic loans in the marketplace.

An aide to President Bush leaked his plans overnight before the formal announcement today.

- Urge Congress to pass Federal Housing Administration overhaul legislation that would give the FHA more flexibility in assisting mortgage holders with subprime mortgages.
- Pledge to work with Congress to reform the tax code to help troubled borrowers rework their loans.
- Call for rigorously enforcing predatory lending laws and strengthening lending practices. My Way News

One of the biggest problem we see in the RE.net world is content theft. It makes sense as real estate and mortgage Google Ads are one of the most lucrative marketing opportunities out there. Steal the content, SEO it a little bit and you can have a site that will make you a few dollars a day.

Well, Search Engine Round Table has a great post that leads you step by step on how to file a DCMA report on the offending splogs and potentially have them lose their adsense accounts, cutting off part of the motivation to steal your content. 

Maybe we should have a clean up the RE.net day. Everyone scope out the content thieves and we work to file DCMA takedown notices on them. That would clean things up in a hurry.

Every Google Adsense ad — including ads on splogs — can be reported to Google if it is in violation of any particular AdSense guideline.
How is this done? Let’s walk through an example from a splog.
First, you click on “Ads by Google” (in some instances, you will see “Feedback - Ads by Google”). via Search Engine Roundtable.

An interesting trend in the newspaper business is occurring. The papers facing shrinking advertising revenue and readership are starting to sell their real estate holdings. In major cities, many of the newspapers had grand buildings that were a testament to their power and prestige often rivaling city hall.

Now as the newsworld is shifting online and newspapers are fighting for their survival as the high cost of printing information and general apathy by the public in getting news on paper is forcing the newspapers to reduce costs. Here are some examples.

• The Philadelphia Inquirer putting it’s landmark 18 story  Beaux-Arts building on the market for 70 million dollars.
• The Boston Herald selling 6 prime acres in the trendy south end part of town.
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune selling 4 downtown blocks to the Minnesota Vikings for their new stadium.
• Rumors that Sam Zell will sell the Tribune Tower in Chicago when the sale of the Tribune Co. goes through.

With profits and revenue falling, newspaper companies are increasingly looking to real estate to shore up their finances. Though newspapers are still largely profitable, they are seen by many on Wall Street as a dying medium. In some cases, the Inquirer and the Boston Herald among them, financial pressures are forcing newspapers to sell their property as a quick way to come up with cash. In others, especially papers acquired by private-equity firms, the new owners are simply trying to squeeze as much money out of the operation as possible, says newspaper analyst John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc. via  WSJ.com.

Lender IndyMac has been know as the leader in Alt-A loans and built their business on the backs of small business owners and those that were outside of the normal lending channels. Now, as the secondary market for lending has dried up for subprime and Alt-A, the company has had to change directions.

IndyMac Chairman and Chief Executive Michael W. Perry announced yesterday that the company is going to focus on prime loans and home refinancing leaving Alt-A in the dust. The company plans on making 90 percent of it’s business loans which will be approved and bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It will be interesting to see if IndyMac will be able to make the transition to the prime mortgage market. The alternatives of not making the change would almost guarantee the demise of IndyMac as the business they became a leader in for the most part does not exist anymore. But the company will now be in a crowded field where there is a great amount of competition and very little they can differentiate themselves in except on price.

The lender said Tuesday that 90% of the loans it made from now on would be of the type bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy nearly all prime mortgages made for less than their $417,000 maximum.The other 10% of IndyMac’s volume is expected to be prime home equity loans and prime jumbo mortgages.
The company, which funded nearly $90 billion in mortgages last year, said in a news release that the shift would substantially reduce the firm’s mortgage volume but would increase profit margins in the fourth quarter. via Los Angeles Times.

After years of fairly easy lending standards for buyers, homeowners did not have to worry about coming up with large downpayments for their first homes. But since the lending standards for homebuyers has tightened significantly in the past year, new homeowners need to learn the tricks to coming up with a larger downpayment to qualify for a mortgage.

One of these tricks is to use money from your IRA to fund the downpayment. Each spouse is able to withdraw 10,000 dollars for a downpayment on their first home from their IRA tax free. This money can be used for the downpayment or to refurbish the home within the first 120 days of homeownership.

For younger families that were not expecting to have to come up with a 10 or 20 percent downpayment, this could be the difference in getting into a new home or continuing to rent. And if you are an agent, it could help a deal from falling through when the buyers are trying to qualify for their mortgage.

Withdrawing cash from an IRA before you turn 591/2 typically carries hefty penalties, but the IRS makes an exception for first-time home buyers.
You can take up to $10,000 out of your IRA penalty-free as long as you put the money toward building, buying or refurbishing your first home within 120 days of receiving the money.
If your spouse also qualifies as a first-time buyer, you can get up to $20,000 to invest in your dream home.
A first-time home buyer is anyone who hasn’t held an ownership interest in a main home for the last two years, according to IRS Publication 590. via Ohio.com

One thing that the media is guilty of, as am I, is that once a storyline becomes fixed in the mindset of the country we try to feed it. So a credit crunch is all encompassing, lending is moribund, and the there is little that can be done.

Then a report from the mortgage bankers comes out that goes against the grain. Instead of lending dropping we hear that for this week at least, lending is up 10.5 percent from the year ago period. That is with the media screaming lending is dead and disincenting the populace from seeking a loan.  So while Alt-A and Subprime are tools that may not be in the lenders toolkits for a while, the lending to solid borrowers continues to be strong.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, for the week ended Aug. 24 fell 4.0% to 615.2.
Applications, however, were 10.5% above their year-ago level.
Borrowing costs on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, excluding fees, averaged 6.41%, down 0.08 percentage point from the previous week. Interest rates were above year-ago levels, which averaged 6.39%.
The four-week moving average of mortgage applications, which smooths the volatile weekly figures, was up 0.3% to 647.9. via  USATODAY.com

For some the term it is a dogs life is the mark of despair, but for some the of the grandchildren of Leona Helmsley it is pure jealousy. The famed Queen of Mean and billionaire left a will that suited her famous temperament perfectly. Instead of leaving an equal share to all, she was very specific leaving 12 million to her dog Trouble while cutting out some of her grandchildren.

Growing up in New York and living there during the period of her tax problems has implanted Leona Helmsley on my brain as the real estate mogul arch villain and probably why I have written so much about her. Harry Helmsley was always pictured as the sweet doting man and Leona the conniving wench that was always sticking daggers into her enemies at night. To read her will and her actions in the afterlife cements this image for me.

So when the tough-as-nails businesswoman died on August Th, no one knew quite what to expect in her will. But even veteran observers were stunned when its contents were revealed on Tuesday. Helmsley left her white Maltese named “Trouble” $12 million, to assure the animal would live in comfort for the rest of its life.
She also bequeathed millions for her brother, who was named a caregiver for the dog. And two of her grandchildren will get to keep $5 million each - but only if they visit their father’s grave-site once a year. Miss a turn and they lose everything. Two other grandchildren got absolutely nothing from the bizarre woman, for “reasons that are known to them,” she wrote. via CityNews

We have talked a great deal on this site about real estate agent safety. Either from the elements or providing the tools to be safe when showing homes. One real estate agent in Alameda County, California took another extreme when showing homes. She was attacked by a potential buyer, who police found out had just gotten out of prison. Instead of fighting the man, she befriended him thinking of exacting vigilante justice, but instead led him to the police.

It is a fine line between being paranoid and being safe as a real estate agent. You do not want to get into the mindset that your clients could be attackers and treat them warily, but at the same time trying to find the right balance could save your life. Systematizing your contacts with clients and putting safety precautions in place that are regularly followed can lead to your experience as a real estate agent being safer.

The woman, who works as a real estate agent, was showing a home in Alameda County on Aug. 16 when the prospective buyer attacked her, Nelson said. He declined to say where the incident happened, because that could identify the victim.
The assailant choked the woman, raped and robbed her, Nelson said. During the attack, the woman started to befriend him “in an attempt to gain his trust,” Nelson said.
The woman told him she wasn’t going to call the police and would try to help him, Nelson said. She even went as far as to promise to arrange a job interview for a security or bodyguard position the following day. The woman later told investigators that she had set up the interview so “she could exact vigilante justice on him,” Nelson said. “The victim was afraid the suspect would not be sent to prison for the crime.”
She ultimately decided to call the sheriff at the urging of a relative who had worked as a police officer, Nelson said. When Moore showed up for the supposed job interview at a Starbucks in Hayward, he was met by sheriff’s deputies, Nelson said. via the SFGate.com

Realtors.com has come out with a new blogging tools for their membership called Featured Blog and Let’s Talk Real Estate. The new blogging tool will be linked to at the top of their Realtor.com page that gets 6 million visitors a month. If I was a Realtor I probably would create a blog on the site because it would be another avenue to marketing my farm.

I also will be curious to see where the direction of the project will end up. Will it keep it’s focus on the consumer or will it morph into a professional discussion for Realtors like Active Rain has. Something I have watched as an outsider writing about real estate and reading the blogs out there is that real estate agents have a hard time focusing their writing on the consumer. Conversations and posts that start discussing splits, marketing, and other inside real estate sales topics will make this site a one and out for consumers. And this is not to disparage Active Rain, it has become the water cooler for the real estate industry.

Likewise, if the agents keep themselves from selling constantly on the site, there could be some success. But to be honest I have a hard time seeing this. Very few of those who start blogging continue and are successful, mainly because most fail to write what the readers want. Instead, I expect to see a plethora of hard selling, inside the industry discussions, and sabotogue in the comment sections if someone starts doing well. All things that will turn off the consumer. 

I wish much luck to the conversation that can be held on the new sites, but in all reality I expect this site to bring out the worst stereotypes of real estate agents and leave a blemish on the industry before it helps.

“Featured Blog and Let’s Talk Real Estate! give REALTORS another way to have direct dialogue with consumers that have questions about market trends, a neighborhood, or even local community events,” said REALTOR.com President, Errol Samuelson. “Through these no cost real estate blogs, REALTORS can share their knowledge, build relationships, and expand their overall referral network while talking about their favorite subject — real estate.”
REALTORS will find it easy to jump into the blogosphere on REALTOR.com. Click to http://www.featuredblogsignup.com, register for a Featured Blog and post an initial article, comment or message that can be visible as a stand-alone website page or within a personal web site. Elevating the dialogue to a national forum, the REALTOR.com editorial staff will select the freshest and most interesting Featured Blog posts and spotlight them in the “Let’s Talk Real Estate!” section on the site’s home page visited by approximately 6 million consumers each month.
“Another great benefit of Featured Blog is that we’ve engineered search engine optimization (SEO) features into the platform to increase the odds that a post will get picked up by major search engines and receive a higher placement,” says Samuelson. “This means REALTORS that keep their posts fresh, relevant and interesting have a better chance of attracting interest and driving traffic to their sites without the marketing costs associated with key word purchases or pay-per-click.” PR

Last week we showed you the Top 10 Cities to Live in Worldwide, now we will show you the flip side, the 10 worst cities to live in worldwide as compiled by The Economist magazine. The least liveable city Algiers rated a scale of 64.7% livability. That does not sound like much until it is compared to the top 10 cities which range from number 1 Vancouver at 1.3% to number 10 Zurich at 3.9%.

The factors that go into the what makes a city liveable are traffic congestion, crime, education, infrastructure, access to health care, recreation, and cultural activity.

While the list reads like the itinerary of a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movie, my guess is these are not cities that I would like to visit. I was talking to a pilot friend who told me about how the airline he flies with is adding service to Lagos. When arriving the crew is escorted under arms to their van which has 2 armed escorts to get the crew to their hotel. Once at the hotel no one is allowed to leave. Kidnapping is such a threat these are the precautions that need to be taken.

The 10 Worst Cities To Live In Worldwide

1. Algiers 64.7%
2. Dhaka 60.4%
3. Lagos 60.1%
4. Karachi 58.6%
5. Kathmandu 54.7%
6. Abidjan 53.9%
7. Dakar 53.2%
8. Phnom Penh 53.0%
9. Tehran 52.6%
10. Bogota 48.3%