In a recent Housingwire story, it was reported that Beazer Homes has settled a costly lawsuit for $53 million. From the article:
The settlement resolves allegations that when Beazer Mortgage originated Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgage loans for buyers of Beazer-built homes, the companies fraudulently charged “interest discount points” at closing but failed to reduce the borrowers’ interest rates and instead kept the cash.
Wow, talk about ballsy. Furthermore, it appears that Beazer got caught using “charities” to gift the 3% down payment requirement.
The allegations also state Beazer funded improper cash “gifts” through charities to be used as the required down payment and as a result inflated home purchase prices. Beazer Mortgage allegedly obscured default information to avoid FHA scrutiny and ignored “stated income” requirements and made loans to unqualified purchasers.
I’m guessing that the Nehemia grant was one of those charities that were abused. Seller funded down payment assistance problems are no longer allowed. Beazer was not alone in their use of “charity” programs to skirt the down payment requirements.
Many real estate bargain hunters are searching for the “secret to short sales” so that they can cash in on the deal of the century. I’m often asked how to buy a short sale for way below fair market value. I’m going to lay it out for everyone in this blog post. Be prepared to be underwhelmed.
Top 3 Tips to Successful Real Estate Short Sales
Short Sale Tip Number 1 : Don’t Get Emotionally Attached
As a matter of fact, this goes for any negotiation in life. Negotiating to get what you want is pretty easy if you are neutral to the outcome. When it comes to short sales, you need to be completely honest with yourself, and your significant other (if applicable). If you begin to view short sales you better be open to walking away. If you aren’t you stand a 90% (my anecdotal estimation) chance of being disappointed, wasting months of your life, and comparing every other property to “the one that got away”.
WASHINGTON, July 1 (Reuters) – Fannie Mae (FNM.N) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N) will expand their foreclosure-prevention efforts and refinance homeowners whose loan-to-value ratio is 125 percent, an administration souce said on Wednesday.
I really wonder about the GSE’s true intent. What are they really trying to accomplish? I can’t believe anyone really believes a 125% LTV refinance is a large scale acceptable solution. It’s a tiny band-aid that will not fix anything.
The housing market is extremely sick, and our Government is trying to patch it up with worthless band-aids. We don’t need band-aids, we need medicine.
Peter Schiff told us that the medicine would taste really really bad, but we must take it. The Government is denying us our medicine.
Many people are surprised to learn that Century 21 and Coldwell Banker are in the same franchise group as each other. As a matter of fact, Realogy is the parent company of Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby’s International Realty, ERA, and Better Homes and Gardens.
The mortgage operations behind Century 21 and Coldwell Banker operate in a similar manner (as far as I can tell). I am working several a short sale for a customer who thinks that he has a “Coldwell Banker” loan, which is not entirely accurate. When the customer got the loan it was certainly under the Coldwell Banker Mortgage Loan marketing title, but they were really getting a PHH loan.
PHH is a private label mortgage company that services the Realogy brand. [click to continue…]
I posted about the prime mortgage melt-down earlier. The ensuing prime mortgage melt-down is going to make the sub-prime mess look like a walk in the park. However, I anticipate that the prime melt-down will be taken more seriously than the sub-prime melt-down.
Housingwire has a great post summarizing a recent OCC and OCS report. From the post:
Serious delinquencies among prime loans jumped 20% from the previous quarter to a total 2.9% of all prime mortgages. Subprime serious delinquencies, on the other hand, rose by 1.5% to a whopping 16.7% of all subprime mortgages in the porfolio.
As we noted in a previous post, the raw number of prime defaults is now greater than the raw number of sub-prime defaults. [click to continue…]
Many real estate bloggers and journalist have the opinion that homes in the upper price ranges are “holding their value” while those in the lower price ranges are starting to “sell like hot cakes”. This is an over-simplification to be sure, but I feel that is a reasonable fair assessment of how many “experts” view [...]
It’s hard to find objectivity. The internet has made it a little easier, but you still must always be on your toes that you are being “sold”. That’s why I like to find purpose driven blogs. I think Patrick.net is one of them. Despite being a self-proclaimed liberal that wants socialism, I agree with much [...]
In a recent Housingwire story, it was reported that Beazer Homes has settled a costly lawsuit for $53 million. From the article: