For the daredevil sellers who recognize that this is an ideal time to sell, yet want to wait and see if the market will goose itself higher, what are the indicators to watch? 1. We've been tracking the NSDCC active inventory this year, and it hasn't been growing much...
Thanks to Albert Pujols for sending this in: A former Fannie Mae sales associate who allegedly promised to provide listings to a real estate broker from the mortgage giant's REO inventory in exchange for kickbacks has been indicted on three counts of wire fraud....
Wouldn't it make sense for banks to be unloading REOs when all we see are bidding wars everywhere? Initially we thought that the drop-off in foreclosures was because banks were pushing people to short sale instead. With this being the last year of debt-tax exemptions,...
We received a cease-and-desist letter from the California Association of Realtors for having a blank copy of the purchase contract on the blog. I speculated that they must have a lot of time on their hands, and asked if could they use some of it to pursue the rampant...
The Manti Te'o hoax exposes how journalists rush to publish a story. The public has come to accept the shallow, TMZ-type sensationalism, and rarely do you see any in-depth examinations of topics that deserve such. Here are real estate topics that should get more...
Most big-time flippers are mis-reporting their trustee-sale purchase price these days, but the majority of buyers are committed to paying the right price, regardless.
Even after paying a $67 million settlement to the SEC and being banned from the mortgage industry Angelo Mozilo, founder and former president of Countrywide Financial Corp still says his company never made a loan "that we knew the borrower could not pay." Mozilo...
Those paying attention are seeing realtors continuing to commit short-sale fraud, and about the only hope for it to end is for short sales themselves to run out of steam. If the debt-tax relief doesn't get extended (unlikely but possible) and those underwater sense...
Why would anyone spread possum urine around a house, turn up the heat and close all the windows for a few days? Because they're flopping, of course. Flopping is the latest in mortgage fraud, in which sellers actually want as low a price as possible. The scheme works...
