KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Wednesday September 29 Housing and Economic stories

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Man charged with renting out houses he doesn't own - (www.sun-sentinel.com) Claiming he is backed by an obscure Florida law pertaining to abandoned and vacant property, a West Palm Beach man has attempted to take homes via adverse possession and rent them to unwitting tenants, according to Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office investigators. Carl Heflin, 52, was arrested on similar charges in 2009. Following a July release from the Palm Beach County Jail, Heflin filed adverse possession papers on four homes, renting one on Tallahassee Drive and accepting $2,500 from a tenant to begin a three-year lease, police said. Heflin was arrested again on Tuesday on multiple charges of burglary, organized scheme to defraud and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. On Wednesday, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Krista Marx ordered Heflin held in lieu of $100,000 bail. Heflin's 17-year-old daughter, Carli, also was charged with burglary because she allegedly broke windows to get into empty homes so her father could change the locks, the Sheriff's Office report says.

When Mortgage Mediation Is a Gamble - (www.nytimes.com) NEVADA — one of the states where home prices went stratospheric during the housing mania — is now reporting some of the nation’s most horrifying foreclosure figures. Last week, RealtyTrac said that 1 in every 84 households in the state had received a foreclosure notice in August, 4.5 times the national average. To mitigate this continuing disaster, the Nevada Assembly created aforeclosure mediation program last year. Intended to help keep families in their homes, the program brings together troubled borrowers and their lenders to negotiate resolutions. The program began on July 1, 2009, and in its first year, 8,738 requests for mediation were received and 4,212 completed, according to the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts. Some 668 borrowers gave up their homes and 445 were foreclosed upon in the period. “We are the only state that requires the bank to do something — they must come to the table if the homeowner elects mediation,” said Verise V. Campbell, who administers the program. “We are now touted as the No. 1 foreclosure mediation program around the country. The program is working.” During its first year, 2,590 cases — more than 60 percent of completed mediations — resulted in agreements between borrower and lender, Ms. Campbell said. But when asked how many actually wound up assisting homeowners through permanent loan modifications, she said her office did not track that figure.

Tell truth about banks, get sued (Freedom of speech?) - (www.nytimes.com) RICHARD X. BOVE is a bank analyst who likes to take what he calls “extreme positions.” He occasionally moves the stock market, which has earned him a certain amount of prestige and notoriety — but has also gotten him fired several times. One recent Tuesday morning, for instance, Mr. Bove opined from his bright-orange home office, in this town just north of Tampa, that new government rules would curb mortgage profits and, therefore, bank profits, too. It wasn’t a particularly extreme pronouncement, by Bove standards. Yet shares of Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, started to drop, and his phone lighted up. “That’s what makes the game fun, right?” he says. But for the last two years, Mr. Bove has been engaged in a lonely legal battle to retain his ability to say whatever he likes, an ordeal that he says has been anything but fun. BankAtlantic, a Florida bank, sued him, accusing him of defamation after he wrote a report about the banking industry in July 2008, just as the financial crisis was starting to boil over. The bank contended that the report falsely suggested that the institution was in trouble. The case was settled three months ago , and Mr. Bove didn’t pay a dime to BankAtlantic. Still, it was hardly a resounding victory for Mr. Bove or, for that matter, freedom of speech on Wall Street, where some say the need for independent, probing voices has never been more apparent.

Here's Why Facebook Is Secretly Building A Phone: It Needs To Be A Platform, Not Just A Service - (www.businessinsider.com) Facebook already has over 150 million mobile users and is likely the most popular iPhone app of all time. But if Facebook is going to have as much impact on the mobile world as it has on the web, it needs to become a platform, and not just a service. And that's precisely why Facebook is working on its own mobile phone software. During my recent trip to Silicon Valley, the idea of a Facebook phone is one of the juicier, wackier rumors I heard about. But before I could dig up any details, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has the scoop: He reports that Facebook is working on mobile phone software, with star employees Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos supposedly working on the secret project. One detail I'll add: Facebook is working off of Google's Android software, based on clues from employees and a plugged-in Silicon Valley source.

Europe Struggling With Banks Addicted To Easy Credit - (www.businessinsider.com) Europe is struggling with a select group of banks that are addicted to easy credit funding from the ECB, according to the Financial Times. And now, it seems, the ECB's leadership is going to take aim at these troubled institutions and try to make them kick the habit. But it isn't exactly an easy drug to quit. These banks are, according to the FT, located in Ireland, Portugal, and Greece. Which means they are struggling with balance sheet issues that are, potentially, getting worse. The continued slow-down in these economies may prevent their weakest banks from moving off the ECB's lending facilities and back to pre-crisis facilities. What is known is that the closing of these facilities is not likely to happen until sometime in 2011. The cost may be more honesty for the troubled banks still in need, as they are outed and forced to come clean on their continuing struggles. The banks may even need further bailouts to clean up their balance sheets. This tedious bank cleanup process in Europe, with anemic growth in the immediacy, is likely to continue at a slow pace.