KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Monday November 15 Housing and Economic stories

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'How To Forge A Client's Signature' And Other Lessons From Ameriquest - (www.dailybail.com) A few weeks after he started working at Ameriquest Mortgage, Mark Glover looked up from his cubicle and saw a coworker do something odd. The guy stood at his desk on the twenty-third floor of downtown Los Angeles's Union Bank Building. He placed two sheets of paper against the window. Then he used the light streaming through the window to trace something from one piece of paper to another. Somebody's signature. Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn't held a steady job in years. But he wasn't stupid. He knew about financial sleight of hand—at that time, he had a check-fraud charge hanging over his head in the L.A. courthouse a few blocks away. Watching his coworker, Glover's first thought was: How can I get away with that? As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street's most respected investment houses.

Portrait emerges of woman whose mummified body was found in realtor's car - (www.latimes.com) Though she had two master's degrees, she had filed for bankruptcy and was homeless when she was befriended by a real estate agent who let her sleep in a car. But after she died in the front seat, it was not reported to authorities. The two women met last year at Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley and were unlikely acquaintances. One was a Costa Mesa real estate agent, the other a homeless woman who frequented the park. The real estate agent allowed the woman to sleep in her father's old sedan. But sometime in the last 10 months, the homeless woman died in the car. And for reasons that Costa Mesa police are still trying to determine, the real estate agent decided not to report the woman's death to authorities. Detectives said she drove the car with the mummifying corpse covered with clothing in the passenger's seat. She used baking powder to reduce the smell. Police discovered the body of Signe Margit, 59, last week when officers responded to a report of a car parked illegally on a Costa Mesa street. When they approached the vehicle, they were overpowered by a strong odor. When they looked inside, they spotted a leg underneath clothing in the front passenger seat.

In Spain, Houses Are Taken but Debt Remains - (www.nytimes.com) Manolo Marbán, 59, is still living in his house in Toledo and going to work in the small pink-and-aqua pet grooming shop he bought here in 2006, when he got swept up in Spain’s giddy real estate boom. But Mr. Marbán does not own either anymore. The bank foreclosed on both properties last April, and he is waiting for the courts to issue the eviction notices. For many Americans facing foreclosure, that would be the end of it. But for Mr. Marbán and thousands of others here, it is just the beginning of their troubles. When the gavel falls on his case, he will still owe the bank more than $140,000. “I will be working for the bank for the rest of my life,” Mr. Marbán said recently, tears welling in his eyes. “I will never own anything — not even a car.” The real estate and banking excesses in Spain were a lot like those in the United States. Construction boomed, prices rose at an astonishing pace and banks gave out loans just as fast, often to customers like Mr. Marbán, who used the equity in his house to finance a mortgage for his shop. But those days are over. Spain now has the highest unemployment rate in the euro zone — 20 percent — and real estate prices are dropping. For many Spaniards, no longer able to pay their mortgages, the fine print in the deals they agreed to years ago is catching up with them.

Foreclosure Crisis Is Spreading, New Data Show - (www.npr.org) The foreclosure crisis took an ominous turn Thursday as a new report indicated that foreclosure activity is spreading from states that have been at the heart of the problem into places like Chicago and Seattle. And a backlog of foreclosed properties may chill the housing market for years to come. Rick Sharga of RealtyTrac, which released the data, said he expects home prices to remain fairly stagnant until 2014. Everyone is being touched by this now. - Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody's Analytics. Eleven out of the nation's 20 largest metropolitan areas saw increased foreclosure activity in the third quarter compared with the same period last year, according to the foreclosure listing firm. The top eight metro areas for foreclosures were in Nevada, California and Arizona, said Sharga, a senior vice president. "[Those] … areas were overbuilt, the homes became significantly undervalued [and] underqualified borrowers were put into those homes with toxic loans that ended up being ticking time bombs," he said. "When market prices finally stopped going up, the whole house of cards crumbled in all of those areas."

TARP Watchdog Makes Chilling Comment About Foreclosure-Gate - (www.businessinsider.com) What's the endgame in foreclosure-gate? According to Damon Silvers, a member of the Congressional Oversight Panel, it comes down to this: Resolve the foreclosure situation in a fair way, or preserve the existing bank capital structure. You can't do both. (video via Josh Rosner)