KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Thursday December 16 Housing and Economic stories

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No Mortgage Payment In 32 Months And Hasn't Been Kicked Out Yet - (www.dailybail.com) PBS Video... In anticipation of Tuesday's rerun of our report on strategic mortgage defaults, producer Lee Koromvokis checked back in with the characters we interviewed back in April for the story. Fort Myers restaurant manager Josh Bartlett is still "squatting" in the condo he bought in 2005 for $210,000. "The interview could have been done yesterday," he told us. He hasn't made any payments on the property, now worth $45,000, since our interview. Bartlett has begun to believe there may be a reason his lender hasn't been after him. "I have come to think that there was something seriously wrong with my original Countrywide loan, maybe fraudulent," he said. "Nobody wants this to come to light ... so I'm continuing to ride it out and whatever happens, happens." Of course there's no evidence that Bartlett's loan is fraudulent, but his frustrations reflect other stories of mortgage mishaps. Fellow defaulter, golf pro Jason Welsh, said his situation is also the same. "After our interview, we received an offer for $115,000 (we had listed it for $119,000) but we are still bickering with Bank of America, which refuses to accept the short sale. Meanwhile, we are still living in the house, not making any payments, ready to move out as soon as the short sale is resolved."

Hard to collect on mobile home unpaid property taxes - (www.press-citizen.com) Each year, Johnson County misses out on tens of thousands of tax dollars that go unpaid by mobile home owners, but the county has few tools to address the problem right now, one official says. Of the approximately 3,000 mobile homes in Johnson County, more than 600 have unpaid taxes amounting to more than $91,000 from the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years, according to county tax information. Johnson County Treasurer Tom Kriz said the county usually collects about half of the property taxes owed on mobile homes in a given year. By contrast, nearly all of the taxes owed on property such as houses and land parcels are paid by property owners or investors. A lack of viable enforcement options for the county make it easy for mobile home owners to skip out on their taxes without facing consequences, Kriz said. The county holds a tax sale each June where it auctions off the tax deeds for properties with unpaid taxes from the previous year. Investors can buy those tax deeds and make a profit by collecting interest from the property owners. If the owners do not repay the back taxes, the investors could take possession of the property.

New negative trend in Phoenix housing market - (www.physorg.com) It’s official: The Phoenix housing market appears to be experiencing a new downward trend. A new report from the W. P. Carey School of Business at ASU confirms a year-over-year decrease in home prices for the third month in a row. The new dip follows a year of relative stability and may get worse. “Since the housing market is entering what historically has been the slowest time of the year for sales, it is likely that declines on a year-to-year basis will continue for at least the next several months,” said Karl Guntermann, the Fred E. Taylor Professor of Real Estate, who wrote the report with research associate Adam Nowak. The Arizona State University-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI) measures annual changes in average Phoenix-area home prices. The new report estimates a 6 percent drop in average house prices from October 2009 to October 2010. This follows a 4 percent decline from September 2009 to September 2010 and a 2 percent decline from August to August. Before that, the market had not been in negative territory since March.

Portland's Housing Bubble Continues To Deflate - (news.opb.org) Home prices in Portland continue to drop, according to new figures released by Standard & Poor's Tuesday. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index finds that the cost of a typical single-family home in Portland has dropped more than 3.5 percent over the last year. In the country as a whole, it's dropped 1.5 percent. Earlier in the year, prices had been rising as a result of government tax incentives. But Standard and Poors spokeswoman, Maureen Maitland says some analysts think the market could now be in for a so called "double-dip." Maureen Maitland: "Right now, what we're looking at is a fall back in home prices after some relative strength that happened in the spring. And the big concern is that: Was that relative strength just due to the tax incentives that were put in place, and now we're falling back into reality?"

WikiLeaks' Next Target: Bank of America? - (www.dealbook.nytimes.com) Wall Street was atwitter late on Monday when WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, disclosed in a Forbes interview that the organization’s next target was a major American bank, with a major data reveal to come early next year. Of course, he didn’t specify which bank; Mr. Assange is, among other things, skilled at building up suspense for his organization’s data dumps. But in this case, he may have let the cat out of the bag a year ago. In an October 2009 interview with Computerworld, Mr. Assange said that he had obtained copious amounts of data from a Bank of America executive’s hard drive. From the Computerworld piece: “At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he said. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.”