The New York Times reports that the only new federally regulated bank to open in the United States this year “operates out of a secondhand double-wide trailer, on a bare lot in front of the cavernous Trinity Baptist Church. A blue awning covers the makeshift drive-through window.” Tiny Lakeside Bank opened in July among the oil refineries and casinos of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Former Louisiana State football tackle Hartie Spence is Lakeside’s manager. The article describes

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Forget loan mods, low interest rates and scrapping Fannie and Freddie. As sales of previously occupied homes plunged last month to their lowest level in 15 years, economist Gerald Celente says the only thing that will save US housing is a boom in American job creation. Celente's predictions have proved correct many times. He is credited with predicting the 1987 stock market crash, the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and the subprime mortgage bubble and bust.

"There's no double

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The Congressman who cosponsored the sweeping financial reform act told Fox News that he believes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be scrapped. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was asked by Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto what role Fannie and Freddie should play in housing markets.

"I think they should be abolished," Frank replied. "The only question is what do you put in their place. This is a situation where given the importance they had come to

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This past Tuesday, mortgage executives, financial leaders, and economists met with U.S. Treasury officials to share ideas about the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which are in conservatorship. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said there would be “fundamental change” to the structure of the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Geithner also said, “We will not support a return to the system where private gains are subsidized by taxpayer losses.”

The U.S.

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Fannie Mae and the National Council of State Housing Agencies have a fabulous offer for anyone with an income and good credit--buy a house for just $1,000 down. (Normally, Federal Housing Authority mortgages require a 3.5% down payment.)

It is a pilot program called Affordable Advantage. The Washington Independent reports that the program has been adopted in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Idaho and Pennsylvania, California and Colorado have programs almost identical to Affordable

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The entire nation continues to watch Louisiana,The Pelican State, as it deals with the disaster off the gulf coast.

While many discuss the impact to the gulf coast, no one will be able to effectively predict the true impact on Louisiana housing prices or the housing market for quite some time.

Part of evaluating impact would be to evaluate the housing market prior to the gulf oil crisis. If we take a step back and review the activity from November 2009 through May 2010,

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Every silver lining in the mortgage industry is linked to a big, fat, dark cloud. Fannie Mae just reported that its rate of serious delinquencies for single-family homes dropped to 5.15% in June. Fannie Mae's total business was more than $3.21 trillion at the end of June. Now for that leaden cloud; 75% of the nation’s biggest metropolitan posted year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity, according to Mortgage Orb. Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona racked up the highest

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Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf tells Bloomberg that he likes a lot of President Barack Obama's 2,300 page financial reform bill which is now law. His bank has $1.2 trillion in assets.

“Too-big-to-fail has been dealt with,” Stumpf said. He explained that the creation of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a system-wide risk regulator will prevent crises caused by the collapse of a mammoth banks or lender.

Stumpf also said new consumer protection

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An Massachusetts Institute of Technology studey calculates that every foreclosure decreases the value by 1% of all homes within 250 feet. The study examined the sales of 1.8 million Massachusetts homes for the past 22 years. Banks got no bargains when they try to sell a foreclosed home. The MIT study said the average sale price for a foreclosed home was 27% less than the appraised value.

MIT economist Parag Pathak worked with two Harvard researchers, John Y. Campbell and Stefano

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Ward, June, Wally and Beaver Cleaver had little reason to venture into the dangerous big city because everything they needed was in their heavenly suburb. Even in the skanky world of Desperate Housewives, the suburbs seem shiny, bright, secure and prosperous. For decades, suburbs were the place city dwellers fled to once they were rich enough to leave the crowded, crime-prone city. But according to a Brookings Institution research report, almost one third of all of America’s poor now live in

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The original March 2008 agreements between the Attorney General of New York, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (now the Federal Housing Finance Agency) and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that established the Home Valuation Code of Conduct will expire in November 2010 (originally July 2010). After that, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are no longer obligated to maintain the HVCC.

In addition, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which has already

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In an effort to continue to improve the quality of the appraisals Fannie Mae receives, the GSE has instituted some new appraisal requirements and made some clarifications. The good news for our customers is that FNC's Collateral Management System® (CMS®) and Collateral Headquarters™ (CHQ) platforms as well as the AI Ready data standard make compliance with these changes essentially automatic. Your appraisers will be able to get you the data you need and your system will be able to track and

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It’s called negative 50% equity. According to the Government Accountability Office, homeowners who negotiated lower monthly mortgage payments through the Home Affordable Modification Program are still drowning. The study reviewed stats through the second week of April.

It may be of little consolation to the underwater homeowners or their lenders, but Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman has vowed that banks and investment firms will accurately evaluate the risk involved

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Builder Magazine's Top 10 U.S. Builders is an eagerly anticipated annual list in the housing industry. This year, a nonprofit charity, Habitat for Humanity, landed among the bigfoot builders at #8. Founded 34 years ago in Georgia, Habitat volunteers raise funds and gather donated materials to construct homes for low income families. Habitat closed on 5,294 homes last year.

Builders are ranked by the number of homes sold and closed (including new homes and rehabs). Habitat

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Click on Los Angeles and the map looks like a red planet exploding. The red lines indicate residents who are leaving LA, mostly for Texas and North Carolina. Black lines indicate residents moving into a county. Here the black lines show you that New Englanders are moving to LA in modest numbers.

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Humans aren't the only ones who lose their homes during a foreclosure. The American Humane Society says animal shelters have been overwhelmed by abandoned pets whose owners who lost their houses. Some delinquent home owners simply move out and leave the pets locked inside the abandoned home. Weeks later, the lender’s agent finds the terrified pets in an empty, filthy.

The problem is

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The Justice Department today announced nearly 500 arrests for mortgage fraud since March as part of an undercover sting called Operation Stolen Dreams. A total of 1,215 defendants have been targeted in cases that amounted to more than $2.3 billion in losses.

FBI agents have been working in 23 mortgage fraud task forces across the country. Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department will also file in civil suits to recover more than $147 million. At a press conference

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The Financial Times reports two sources in the FBI say the law enforcement agency will launch a major, nationwide raid against hundreds suspected of mortgage fraud. Charges include encouraging borrowers to falsify income on mortgage applications, misleading home owners about foreclosure rescue programs and inflating home appraisals. The FBI opened 23 local mortgage fraud task forces back in October 2008.

"Mortgage fraud-related losses totaled $1.4billion in 2008, an 83.4% rise

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Recently, several banks conducted research linking unemployment to foreclosure. The response most Americans may have is, “Well, duh.” But the point the banks were making is, subprime loans are no longer the reason most Americans cannot afford their mortgages; losing a job is.

At the REO Expo in Dallas yesterday, RealtyTrac explained the math. For every one to six Americans who lose their jobs, there will be one foreclosure. Being unemployed, not being underwater, is what puts a home

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When the guys at Wall Street Cheat Sheet put together a list of states where foreclosures are increasing most, it was no surprise to see Illinois (a Rust Belt state aching from recession) and Nevada (shredded by exploding real estate bubble shrapnel).

But Hawaii? The unemployment rate is 6.8%, quite manageable compared to the national rate of 9.7%. Yet foreclosures have rocketed 116% since April 2009. Maui is the hardest hit island with one in 187 homes in

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Owning a home of one’s own is no longer the American Dream for almost half of this nation. The National Foundation for Credit Counseling said 49% of Americans responding to a survey believe they will never be able to scrape together the 20% down payment to buy a home. Homeowners once had faith that if they had to sell their house, the value would raise enough to cover their down payment on a new home. Now, no one knows when home values will go up.

Only 12% of respondents said they

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Army Reserve Capt. Michael Clauer was current in his mortgage payments but a Texas homeowners’ association foreclosed on his $300,000 home and sold it for $3,500 while he was serving in Iraq---because he owed $800 in homeowners’ association fees. Clauer’s wife did not realize they had lost their home until the new owner sent her letters demanding rent money then, finally, an eviction notice.

The Service Members Civil Relief Act protects military personnel from foreclosure while

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Housing Wire reports that 80% of total workouts were classified as cures, meaning the

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The National Collateral Database™ combines appraisal, public record and other real estate sales and descriptive information into the most powerful real estate information database available to lenders and appraisers for the valuation and analysis of residential property across the United States. It is the National Collateral Database that fuels FNC’s data and analytics products and services.

What lies behind all this? Where does all this data come from, how does it fit together and

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Summer is just around the corner and many people begin to make their summer vacation plans. A large majority will head down to the Sunshine state, Florida. Florida was one of the hardest hit states during the housing crisis. Many analysts are watching closely FL, TX, NV and CA for signs up the housing market stabilizing.

So what’s been happening in Florida? We are going to take a look at the last 6 months to see if the sun will come out for the sunshine state. Over the last 6

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We found the following New York Times editorials interesting and informative, so we wanted to share them with you:

• Take a look at Mom, Apple Pie, and Mortgages by Robert Shiller, Yale professor of economics and finance. Shiller says new types of housing finance institutions could lead the United States to develop new types of housing.

• And in

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  posted in: Mortgage

It has been an active year for appraisal management company (AMC) legislation. Because of the activity, we presented an update on AMC legislation in June, 2009. Since then we have updated the presentation itself to keep up with the various changes this year (although we did not catch everything).

For those of you who are keeping

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Recently one of our clients asked us to look at the relationship between sales price and appraised value across the country. We looked at about 200,000 sales transactions over the first nine months of the year and found that most of the appraised values were above the actual sales price.

The chart below shows the percent of purchase transactions where the sales price was above the appraised value.

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posted in: Appraising, FNC, Lending, Mortgage, Valuation

Blog. Such a strange and funny word. Say it repeatedly and it’s reminiscent of blah. "Blah, blah, blah." Isn’t that what a blah-g is all about? Just an electronic medium for saying what’s on one’s mind -- a venue for stream of consciousness, for random thoughts, opinions, commentary, criticisms – sometimes educational and informative, sometimes satirical or funny (e-musing, if you

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