Archive for 'Opinion' Category
Short Sales are “Liar Listings” on the Twin Cities MLS
26 August 2008If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Short Sale
Definition: a home sale where the seller owes more than what the home is worth and is asking the lender(s) to accept an amount that is less than the amount owed to them as payment in full.
The same [...]
Appraiser in $100M Scam Gets 15 Months in Jail
18 August 2008This latest Star Tribune article has me irked… which seems to be happening a lot lately.
Donald T. Yeager, you’ve just found guilty of participating in a $100 million mortgage fraud scheme, what are you going to do now? “I’m going to jail for a little over a year.”
-hypothetical interview with the most recent guy to [...]
Crazy Homeowner - Keep Kids in Private School & Mom at Home, Lose the House
11 August 2008CNBC has a new show called “On the Money with Carmen Wong Ulrich” and I recently saw a segment that drove me nuts. Click here to see the video.
Here’s a summary:
They send one kid to private school ($14,000/yr currently), the 2nd will be in kindergarten next year
Mom stays at home
Mom can start working 2 days [...]
Jim Cramer Says Buy a House - Soon!
23 July 2008Excerpted from: http://www.cnbc.com/id/25818021
Jim: I thought you were of the opinion that banks could not bottom before housing bottomed. What changed? –Dana in Florida
Cramer says: “We saw quarters from Wells Fargo from US Bancorp. We saw a quarter from JPMorgan. We saw a quarter from Bank of America. And those guys had already put charges in [...]
Twin Cities Sales Strong, Listings Soft
21 July 2008While I’m probably the most techie REALTOR in my office, I still like something that is decidedly low-tech, our office’s Listings & Sales Boards. These white boards, which “back in the day” were chalk boards, give a one-line description of each of our new listings and sales for the month, including the name of the agent [...]
Loose Lending Broke Housing, Tight Lending Keeps it Broken
20 June 2008The several years of “loose lending” by mortgage lenders helped bring a surge of bad loan programs with borrowers that were either overextended from Day One or should have been unqualified to begin with. This surge has now become a tsunami of foreclosures and short sales, which Jeff Allen and I have lumped together as [...]
May 2008 Twin Cities Market Stats
12 June 2008MAAR has released their new market stats for the month of May and I’m trying a new idea: I’ve added commentary to the report expressing what I believe are the important “take aways” from the data. I would love to get feedback both on the concept and your thoughts of my opinion.
Minneapolis/St. Paul Real Estate [...]
Minneapolis/St. Paul MLS Addresses Foreclosures & Short Sales… Kinda
10 June 2008The RMLS of Minnesota, which is the governing body of the MLS in the Twin Cities and is owned by the 4 local REALTOR associations, has made some policy changes in regards to the reporting of foreclosures on the MLS, effective on Thursday:
The “In Foreclosure/Lender Owned?” field:
Initially will be an agent-only field (not available on [...]
Twin Cities Housing Inventory Down vs. Last Year
19 May 2008Since early this year, the Twin Cities housing market has been making strong gains towards a level of what I call “peak inventory.” What I’m describing as peak inventory is the point where we see the number of houses for sale today at a level lower than last year. Well, we officially hit [...]
Short Sales & Foreclosures in Plymouth and Maple Grove
19 May 2008I took a few hours Sunday to review short sale and foreclosure sales in Plymouth and Maple Grove during the last 10 months and found some interesting information. Before I explain what I found, I want to explain what I looked at:
Homes that were clearly a short sale OR a foreclosed, bank owned home. This [...]