Real Estate Blog

Law enforcement officials are trying hard to snuff out a foreclosure scam in San Diego, CA. According to today’s San Diego Tribune, a scam artist by the name of Maurice Simmons, identifies homes that are abandoned — usually due to foreclosure — then he files official-looking grant deeds with county recorder offices. The deeds are bogus, but county recorder officials say they don’t have time to ascertain their authenticity. Simmons then re-keys the locks, posts these documents in the windows of the homes and turns the house over to people who are looking for a place to live. All along, these people are under the belief that Simmons is the rightful owner of the home. Simmons defends himself by saying,

“Bankers are defrauding people, and all I’m doing with this program is helping people get into homes who deserve to have a home but who got screwed,” Simmons said in interviews before his arrest. “I’m tired of people getting thrown out of their homes and no one seems to care.”

It sounds like a Robin Hood-type story of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but the added twist is that Simmons says he’s operating under common law and not judicial law. Alongside the “quiet title” document claiming ownership, he also posts signs on homes declaring “Spiritual Sanctuary” and “No Tresspass.” When the rightful owner shows up — usually after purchasing the home through a foreclosure sale — they find it occupied.

Real estate scams are on the rise, as witnessed by another recent story about an elderly couple in Ohio who seems to have been swindled with a mortgage they didn’t need. Chalk this up as another weird foreclosure story.

Read more here:
Scam Alert: Bogus Grant Deeds on Abandoned Homes

(Photo by Scott Heckel / GateHouse News Service)

That’s Bette and William Hammen above, of North Canton, OH. They are 85 and 83 years old, respectively, and they were THISCLOSE to losing their home to foreclosure this morning, but a recent check of CantonRep.com shows the sheriff’s sale of the couple’s home was canceled. Whew.

Their story is not easy to hear. According to the Holland Sentinel, the Hammen’s received a foreclosure notice back in February, but it got lost among the other mail and was never opened. Records show they took out a $105,000 mortgage on the house in 2006, but William doesn’t recall needing one until, “Two men showed up one day with papers to sign.” To add insult to injury, Hammen was involved in an Internet scam in which he was sending money to Nigeria, hoping to win a lottery. Also, he lost his car to the repo man.

As you can see, age and deteriorating health has played a big part in the Hammens’ present plight, but, for now, they are safe in their home. What’s the moral of this story? Check on your parents or elderly family members. Make sure their papers are in order and they’re not suckered into any kind of real estate scam. It’s always better to be safe, than sorry.

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Got a map based real estate site? Vancouver-based lat49 lets you monetize that asset with its geo-targeted advertising network.

It’s pretty simple really, as a publisher you simply sign up to join their network, incorporate their API and then begin earning ad revenue passively. Think of it like Google Adsense for maps.

It raises the possibility for brokerages (many of whom have invested heavily in map-based real estate search tools) to develop an alternative source of revenue and offset some of those costs, by being able to bring advertising directly to their maps.

What would make this offering a real winner, would be the option to offer premium map-based ad space to ancillary service providers, vendors and even local merchants. The key aspect would be to be able to control who and what advertisements would appear on your site.

In addition, Lat49 also give real estate companies (even individual brokers or agents) a unique opportunity to create regionally-based branding campaigns across multiple web properties by embedding ads at a local or even hyperlocal level.

Lat49 gives advertiser several IAB approved sizes including a 728×90 Leaderboard, a 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and a 468×60 Full Banner ad.

Sites currently using this technology include Hotpads in the US and HomeZilla (see Neighborhood Search Comes Back) in Canada.

lat49, real estate marketing, online advertising

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Lat49 Lets You Monetize Your Maps

It’s November 5. Happy Birthday, Flux Capacitor.

Read the full post at http://www.themortgagereports.com

Excerpted from:
The Temporal Junction Point For The Entire Space-Time Continuum

The Federal Open Market Committee voted to cut the Fed Funds Rate by one-half percent today. The benchmark interest rate now stands at 1.000 percent. Now, many people assume that because the Fed Funds Rate fells, mortgage rates fell, too. They didn’t. This is a false association; a myth perpetuated…

Read the full post at http://www.themortgagereports.com

More:
Parsing The Fed (October 29, 2008 Edition)

It’s a sign of desperate times for homeowners facing foreclosure. According to San Diego news channel KFMB, a woman in Mira Mesa, CA, has chained herself to her home, determined to fight imminent eviction any way she can (watch this video). After living in this home for 19 years, she says, “We’re not going to allow the bank to just take it away from us. We did suffer some hard times… we did fall… We are not going to just turn our keys over without a fight.” According to the report, she got an adjustable rate mortgage a few years ago and “didn’t know about the subprime crisis,” and has tried to do everything she can to keep the home. No doubt we will hear more about the outcome of this sad and desperate situation.

Facing foreclosure? One consumer network says you should ask the bank to “produce the note.” I’m not sure if this will help this woman at this point, but it looks like she is determined to fight in any way she can.

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Woman Chains Herself to Her Home

<script src=”http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/2.0/video/evp/module.js?loc=dom&vid=/video/us/2008/10/26/diaz.tx.foreclosure.angel.wfaa” type=”text/javascript”></script><noscript>Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a></noscript>

At a foreclosure action in Dallas, TX, a woman was about the lose her Pottsboro, TX home to foreclosure, but in a last-minute act of kindness, a complete stranger — a woman named Marilyn Mock who watched “Tracy” cry over the imminent loss of her home — stepped in and bought it at auction and will return it to Tracy. Mock said, “People need to help each other and that’s all there is to it.”

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Freewheeling American capitalism may be falling out of fashion on Wall Street, but in the western suburbs of Northern Virginia, it is driving one of the greatest home-buying sprees the region has ever seen.

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Foreclosures, Falling Prices Spur Pr. William Home Sales

It’s easy to dismiss the foreclosure crisis as one big, sad mess that you can’t do much about. But instead of pooh-poohing the crisis, one Flint, Michigan woman is turning to Winnie the Pooh. (No, she’s not hitting the honey barrel.) Since August, 20-year-old Kristina Pringle has been painting Winnie the Pooh characters on the boarded-up windows of a vacant foreclosed home on her street. She hopes the characters — first came Eeyore, now she’s working on Tigger — will help brighten her struggling neighborhood.

Pringle was encouraged to start the murals by Art Wenzlaff, community relations director of a nearby school. Wenzlaff has set out to beautify local neighborhoods by cleaning them up and creating murals (with permission by the city), outfitting Pringle and other volunteers with art supplies. In the spring, Pringle has plans to recruit local children to add their own artwork to her murals. She’s also hoping that once the foreclosed home is torn down or sold, the boards will be put to use on another home.

Photo courtesy The Flint Journal

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Michigan Woman Brightens Foreclosure With Her Paintbrush

Mortgage bond markets are signaling a slight return to risk this morning. If you’re watching the wrong market indicators, though, you probably didn’t get the memo. Looking at the chart above, we see that as of 9:02 AM ET: Mortgage-backed securities are improved by 28 basis points 10-year U.S….

Read the full post at http://www.themortgagereports.com

More:
The Media Watches The Wrong Market Signals And Doesn’t Tell You When Mortgage Rates Are Falling

Mortgage bond markets are signaling a slight return to risk this morning. If you’re watching the wrong market indicators, though, you probably didn’t get the memo. Looking at the chart above, we see that as of 9:02 AM ET: Mortgage-backed securities are improved by 28 basis points 10-year U.S….

Read the full post at http://www.themortgagereports.com

Go here to read the rest:
The Media Watches The Wrong Market Signals And Doesn’t Tell You When Mortgage Rates Are Falling

Mortgage bond markets are signaling a slight return to risk this morning. If you’re watching the wrong market indicators, though, you probably didn’t get the memo. Looking at the chart above, we see that as of 9:02 AM ET: Mortgage-backed securities are improved by 28 basis points 10-year U.S….

Read the full post at http://www.themortgagereports.com

See the original post here:
Why Can’t The Media Tell You When Mortgage Rates Are Falling? It Doesn’t Know How Mortgage Rates Work.

Mortgage bond markets are signaling a slight return to risk this morning. If you’re watching the wrong market indicators, though, you probably didn’t get the memo. Looking at the chart above, we see that as of 9:02 AM ET: Mortgage-backed securities are improved by 28 basis points 10-year U.S….

Read the full post at http://www.themortgagereports.com

Credit:
Mortgage Rates And 10-Year Treasury Rates Don’t Move In Lockstep

Watching foreclosure numbers and reading reports each month is like watching a slow-motion train wreck — it’s big, it’s slow, and it’s ugly. In the past year, 14.5% of all U.S. real estate transactions were by people buying foreclosed properties and the highest percentage belonged to those in California, specifically, Stockton, Merced, Salinas, Madera and Modesto, according to the Zillow Q2 Real Estate Market Reports.

No doubt that foreclosure touches all of us in very strange ways. We believe that if you see something weird, it’s probably related to foreclosure. Then we heard that foreclosures are affecting business at legal Web site, Avvo, too (disclosure: Zillow CEO Rich Barton is on the Avvo board). But, their biz is being affected in a good way. Avvo founder and CEO Mark Britton (right) said searches for foreclosure lawyers and info about foreclosure on Avvo spiked by 700% since the first of the year and “…it is clear that a lot of Americans are hurting on the financial front.”

The nice thing about Avvo is that they offer a Q&A section called Avvo Answers in which you can ask any ‘ol embarrassing question you want — anonymously, if desired. Britton said “…most consumers are intimidated by the legal profession and have no idea how to engage.  Too many big words, complex processes and old men in black robes…” so, this anonymous tool is kind of nice to get some rudimentary information up front, for free, without walking into a stodgy lawyer’s office.

Avvo is getting a lot of questions about buying foreclosed property, too. So, it does cut both ways — people are suffering from foreclosure, but there are many people and businesses that are benefiting because of it. Kind of like the “board-up specialists” that have emerged or the uptick in foreclosure bus tours. Or, people who couldn’t previously afford to buy a home are suddenly in the market, buying foreclosed property. Zillow offers foreclosure listings - just type in a location in the search box. Under “Listing Type” on the left-hand side, click the “foreclosure” button to see foreclosed properties for sale.

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Foreclosures and Their Trickle-Down Affect

Watching foreclosure numbers and reading reports each month is like watching a slow-motion train wreck — it’s big, it’s slow, and it’s ugly. In the past year, 14.5% of all U.S. real estate transactions were by people buying foreclosed properties and the highest percentage belonged to those in California, specifically, Stockton, Merced, Salinas, Madera and Modesto, according to the Zillow Q2 Real Estate Market Reports.

No doubt that foreclosure touches all of us in very strange ways. We believe that if you see something weird, it’s probably related to foreclosure. Then we heard that foreclosures are affecting business at legal Web site, Avvo, too (disclosure: Zillow CEO Rich Barton is on the Avvo board). But, their biz is being affected in a good way. Avvo founder and CEO Mark Britton (right) said searches for foreclosure lawyers and info about foreclosure on Avvo spiked by 700% since the first of the year and “…it is clear that a lot of Americans are hurting on the financial front.”

The nice thing about Avvo is that they offer a Q&A section called Avvo Answers in which you can ask any ‘ol embarrassing question you want — anonymously, if desired. Britton said “…most consumers are intimidated by the legal profession and have no idea how to engage.  Too many big words, complex processes and old men in black robes…” so, this anonymous tool is kind of nice to get some rudimentary information up front, for free, without walking into a stodgy lawyer’s office.

Avvo is getting a lot of questions about buying foreclosed property, too. So, it does cut both ways — people are suffering from foreclosure, but there are many people and businesses that are benefiting because of it. Kind of like the “board-up specialists” that have emerged or the uptick in foreclosure bus tours. Or, people who couldn’t previously afford to buy a home are suddenly in the market, buying foreclosed property. Zillow offers foreclosure listings - just type in a location in the search box. Under “Listing Type” on the left-hand side, click the “foreclosure” button to see foreclosed properties for sale.

Foreclosures and Their Trickle-Down Effect