Archive for July 16th, 2008
Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
I got a call from an Indymac borrower who asked that his name not be used. He and his wife bought a three bedroom townhouse in the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth for $525,000 in March 2006. He says that two weeks after closing on the home he got a letter from Indymac asking him to confirm info on the mortgage application. “Suddenly it had all these numbers we’d never seen before,” he says. They included income inflated by 30%.
He called his independent mortgage broker and was told it was just normal procedure; they do this so they can sell the loans. The broker provided him with a letter from Indymac asking the broker for the changes. By the time the bank had asked the borrower to confirm the new numbers, he says he’d already moved in. He signed the papers. “We unwittingly participated in this fraud out of fear,” he says.
Today the townhouse has dropped some 20% in value. With the economy slow, the independent software engineer is having troubled making the $3,800 a month house payments. He’s looking to renegotiate the loan. Yesterday he called an Indymac customer service hotline and was told the hold time would be seven hours.
“I was very frustrated reading in the papers that it was the borrowers that brought down Indymac,” he says. “There was definitively an effort on Indymac’s part to fraudulently complete my loan. I’d have been a lot happier if they had just denied it.”
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Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
A four-partner public-private partnership has broken ground for the second phase of work on a $400 million mixed-use transit oriented development called Avalon Walnut Creek at Contra Costa Center, which is located next to the transit station in Pleasant Hill in California’s Bay Area. Read more »
July 16th, 2008
Property alternating is the process by which an investor purchases a piece of genuine estate and resells it rapidly at a higher price. The strategy is to feel underpriced properties whose values can be commemorated up somewhat before they’re resold, for example, by cooking some improvements.
Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
The Federal Reserve unanimously approved new mortgage lending rules Monday in a crackdown on shady practices - particularly those involving subprime loans made to borrowers with weak credit.
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Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
The housing finance crisis and spiraling energy costs will remain a drag on the U.S. economy for the rest of the year, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers in a gloomy presentation about the economic outlook.
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Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was hammered by lawmakers on Tuesday over the Bush administration’s plan to prop up mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
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Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
This is already one of the worst national housing downturns in half a century. But what’s really scary is that judging from the still-huge overhang of unsold homes - one of the key indicators of the market’s prospects - things could get worse. In fact, much worse if the economy slips into recession.
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Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
Grubb & Ellis Co. said today that William Hunt, a 29-year veteran of the Southern California real estate market, has been named executive managing director, responsible for the the company’s Los Angeles county offices. Read more »
Continue Reading July 16th, 2008
Grubb & Ellis Co. said today that William Hunt, a 29-year veteran of the Southern California real estate market, has been named executive managing director, responsible for the the company’s Los Angeles county offices. Read more »