The Real Estate Bloggers

Countrywide and Bank of America Settlement Affects 200,000
Residential Real Estate Depressed Till 2013 – Yikes
Congress Wants Your ATM Records – Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Countrywide and Bank of America Settlement Affects 200,000

Posted: 07 Jun 2010 12:45 PM PDT

The settlement between Countrywide, now Bank of America, and the FTC will affect 200,000 homeowners and cost the company 108 million dollars.

Homeowners will have certain fees that were charged inappropriately refunded. The investigation has been ongoing since 2008.

The agreement has to be approved by the court before the terms will be released. Then the FTC will contact the those that Countrywide stole from and refunds will handled.

We will update you as terms of the agreement are announced.

But as the housing market collapsed, Countrywide created subsidiaries to do the work, then marked up the price of those services by 100% or more, charging homeowners the fees to increase profits from default-related services in bad economic times, the FTC said.

“Life is hard enough for homeowners who are having trouble paying their mortgage. To have a major loan servicer like Countrywide piling on illegal and excessive fees is indefensible,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said.

Countrywide also failed to tell borrowers when it added new charges to their mortgages and made “false or unsupported claims” to borrowers about the how much they owed on their loans, the agency said. The marked-up fees were collected as part of repayment plans, foreclosures or bankruptcies. via the LA Times

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Countrywide and Bank of America Settlement Affects 200,000

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Residential Real Estate Depressed Till 2013 – Yikes

Posted: 07 Jun 2010 06:01 AM PDT

Scared-fear According to the projections Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow gave to Inman News this week, we may not see a recovery in residential real estate until 2013. That is a 7 year dip from the highs in 2006 my friends.

When the bubble burst, we all figured that we would be out of the woods in 2008, worst case spring 2009. The real pessimists though that by at least 2010 it would be over. Historically, 2010 would be an outlier, right?

Now experts are pushing the recovery out till 2013 due to the foreclosure overhang and economic forces.

Normally I do not tell agents and brokers how to handle their business but today I will. Live tightly. Keep driving efficiencies. Don’t spend like a fool to get ahead of your competition yet. The wave of pain could be 3 or more years ahead.

Brokers and agents should keep investing in relationships and the tools that will drive those relationships in the future while maintaining a share of business today.

There are a lot of brokerages that are hanging on with white knuckles waiting for the housing recession to end. My thoughts are with these firms, it is a rough ride for all involved.

While home sales likely reached the bottom of the current cycle last year, home values in many markets are still in decline, said Stan Humphries, chief economist for online real estate search and information company Zillow.

“The housing recession is not over: Housing prices continue to fall,” Humphries said. And housing demand may not see a normal balance with new household formation and housing starts until 2013, said Doug Duncan, chief economist for secondary mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

The “overhang or shadow supply” of housing inventory has a lot to do with the drawn-out recovery for the housing market, he noted.

Home and rental unit vacancy rates are running about 2 million units above normal levels, Duncan said. His forecast calls for home prices to continue to fall this year, perhaps 1 percent to 3 percent more, and hit bottom in the third quarter. via Inman News

Thanks for reading this post. If you would like to see more articles like this, please come visit The Real Estate Bloggers. where it was originally published.

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Congress Wants Your ATM Records – Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Posted: 07 Jun 2010 05:09 AM PDT

Big-brother-poster Trust me, I am from the government.

The sucker line of all sucker lines is being bought by the American public. The newest incarnation is a bill that would create the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

One aside, don’t you love Washington, it names the bills the exact opposite of what they do.

This “bureau” will have access to all your financial records, ATM transactions, addresses, and the like just to protect you.

My question is from whom? The evil capitalists?

I am more afraid of the bureaucrats myself. Access to this information will allow them to monitor my behavior and track my every move.

I can not wait for the call, “Mr. Royce, can you explain why you took out $500 from your ATM last week?” Please go to the BCFP website, bcfb.gov and fill out the form for large cash transactions.

So the government will know the present I get for my wife before she does for our anniversary. That I paid cash so it would not show up on the credit card ledger and give away the surprise is the governments business?

Be afraid folks, be very afraid. The government of today wants to know every detail in our lives. Knowledge like that is powerful, and can be used to control our behavior.

The bill, if it becomes law, would create the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and empower it to “gather information and activities of persons operating in consumer financial markets,” including the names and addresses of account holders, ATM and other transaction records, and the amount of money kept in each customer’s account.

The new bureaucracy is then allowed to “use the data on branches and [individual and personal] deposit accounts … for any purpose” and may keep all records on file for at least three years and these can be made publicly available upon request.

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said that Democrats who claim this new bureaucracy will protect consumers are misleading the public.

“[T]he American people are being misled,” Shelby said on the Senate floor on Thursday night. “The authors of this bill are telling them that this legislation has been drafted to address the recent financial crisis and that it will ‘tame’ Wall Street. I am afraid that they are going to be disappointed.”

Shelby slammed the new consumer bureaucracy, saying that it was meant not to protect consumers but to “manage” them by monitoring their behavior.

“Mr. President, make no mistake, behind the veil of anti-Wall Street rhetoric is an unrelenting desire to manage every facet of commerce under the guise of consumer protection.

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Congress Wants Your ATM Records – Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid