KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Saturday July 2 Housing and Economic stories

Friday, July 1, 2011

Saturday July 2 Housing and Economic stories

KeNosHousingPortal.blogspot.com

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Realtor lied to clients, stole their money, and admitted to $4.3 million Ponzi scheme - (www.irvinehousingblog.com) Twenty-four year member of the Orange County Association of realtors, David R. Sparks, has admitted to lying to clients to cover up his fraud and theft in a $4,300,000 Ponzi scheme. As I have stated on many occasions, chasing appreciation is a fool's errand. Unlike realtors who will tell anyone who will listen that prices only go up, I have been telling people to pay attention to the cashflow. That's where the real value is. Chasing appreciation is part of today's story. The twenty-four year member of the Orange County Association of realtors made a massive bet on appreciation in rural Utah at the peak of the housing bubble in 2005. Given that he is a realtor, his poor judgment on the housing market is understandable, but the deception and fraud that followed is truly remarkable. Do you think OCAr will bring him up on ethics charges? He is still a member, apparently in good standing. Also, His MLS access is still working.

How to Tell When the Moving Man Is a Con Man - (www.dailyfinance.com) You may like the idea of a new house, but most people feel about moving the way they feel about a trip to the dentist -- it's one of life's necessary evils. Still, an estimated 37 million Americans do it each year, and about a third will do so between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But moving can be more than a logistical hassle: It you're not careful, you could get bamboozled in a big way. The Better Business Bureau received more than 8,900 complaints against movers in 2010, a 5% increase over 2009, primarily about damaged or lost goods and final prices in excess of original estimates. In a too-frequent worst-case scenario, reports the BBB, a moving company holds the customer's belongings "hostage" and requires potentially thousands of dollars to unload the van. Portrait of a Moving Scam Victim: Leslie Davis (not her real name) hired a company to handle her move from New York City to St. Louis last summer. Much to her surprise, the company she chose were just brokers who outsourced the job. She went through everything in her one-bedroom apartment with the company's representative and got an estimate of $2,733. Shortly before moving, another representative called to "go over the estimate again." "They wanted to be sure they would have enough space on the truck and they also asked if I would need a shuttle service, which was explained to me as having a second, smaller moving vehicle available if the full-size truck couldn't fit or park on my residential street in Queens," explains Davis.

Engineered Economic Collapse Explained - (Paranoid, but could be right) - (www.youtube.com)

Squatter Nation: 5 years with no mortgage payment - (money.cnn.com) Charles and Jill Segal have not made a mortgage payment in nearly five years -- but they continue to live in their five-bedroom West Palm Beach, Fla. home. Lynn, from St. Petersburg, Fla., has been living without paying for three years. In Thousand Oaks, Calif., an actor has missed 30 payments, and still, he has not lost his home. They're not alone. Some 4.2 million mortgage borrowers are either seriously delinquent or have had their cases referred to lawyers to pursue foreclosure auctions, according to LPS Applied Analytics. Of those, two-thirds have made no payments at all for at least a year, and nearly one-third have gone more than two years. These cases can go on and on. Nationwide, it takes an average of 565 days to foreclose on borrowers in default from their first missed payments to the final auction. In New York, the average is 800 days and in Florida, where the "robo-signing" issue is particularly combative, it's 807. If they want to fight evictions hard, borrowers can remain in their homes even longer while their cases are being worked through. The Segals have been doing that -- in court. They bought their home in 2003 with an adjustable rate mortgage. After a few years, their monthly payments tripled to $3,000, just as their home-inspection business was cratering.

Americans' equity in their houses near a record low - (www.hosted2.ap.org) Falling home prices have shrunk equity so much that the proportion of their homes that Americans actually own is near its lowest point since World War II. The Federal Reserve says average home equity plunged from more than 61 percent at the start of 2001 to 38 percent in the January-March quarter this year. That drop comes as home prices in big metro areas have reached their lowest level since 2002. The Fed's quarterly report shows how much wealth, or net worth, Americans have gained or lost. Net worth is the value of assets such as homes and stocks, minus debts like mortgages and credit cards. Americans' overall net worth grew 1.65 percent in the January-March period, to $58.06 trillion, because of stock market gains. Household debt declined at an annual rate of 2 percent from the previous quarter, a sign that many Americans are focused on paying off credit. When Americans pare their debt, they have less money to spend, and that tends to slow growth. Consumers spending accounts for 70 percent of the nation's economy.