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How to Get the Best Firewood for Clean and Affordable Energy | Bedford NY Realtor
8 Awesome Ways to Use Your Car to Shoot Great Video | Bedford Corners Realtor
A lot of times, amateur filmmakers forget the everyday objects and items they use everyday which can be used to enhance their videos. They are easy to overlook. After all, that rolling chair in your office couldn’t possibly be used as a dolly, could it? That’s for sitting and nothing else. Well, as it turns out, your car can be used for video, too, and it has even more mobility and versatility than even an office chair. With a hat tip to Ricardo at Wooshi, we thought we’d take a look at Derek Beck’s entertaining video called, “Drive-By Shooting: Using Your Car to Make Better Videos,” and break it down.
How to Use Your Car as a Video Production Tool
Derek Ward teams up with amateur filmmakers Neko Neko Productions to create this tutorial, and he writes out the instructions for each step. First, let’s take a look at the video:
What do they tell you first? Well, be careful. You’re driving your car around here. You need a clear road, and you need to drive with safety in mind, and sometimes, you’ll have a guy looking through a camera who might be in a precarious position. So don’t be stupid.
1. Using Your Car As A Dolly
– From the Trunk
The first shot we see is of Derek walking along towards the camera as it moves away from him. We see the camera operator sitting in the open trunk of the car as the car drives slowly. And the effect is simple, almost like they had a professional dolly track. They also show this vantage point being used for a slow-push “dramatic” shot.
– Out the Side Window, From the Backseat
Another vantage point is from one of the side windows of the car, with the camera on a tripod in the backseat. This method can capture side dolly shots of people slowly walking. What’s more, if you don’t have a tripod, they suggest using a bag of rice to keep the camera steady at the bottom part of the window frame.
– From the Front
The camera hangs outside one of the front windows and needs to be mounted safely so that it doesn’t fall out the window and crash to its death. The framing needs to be done so that the front of the car can’t be seen, just your subjects (unless, of course, you want people to know it’s in a car). With this vantage point, the camera can capture people running or another car or anything that might need speed to keep up with.
2. Audio Issues and How to Avoid Them
– Overdub the Dialogue
You may need to do some ADR (automated dialogue replacement), or overdub the dialogue in a more controlled environment, if you don’t want that car engine to be in the soundtrack. But, there’s another way:
– Get Out And Push
Turn the engine off, put it in neutral, and you can guide the car where you’d like. You’ll have to get a boom mike or something similar to hang outside the car to record the dialogue. Notice from here they’ve turned the car’s tires slightly so that when they push, the camera can slowly circle the subject.
3. Helicopter View Effect
If you happen to know a place where driving on an overpass can get you close and personal with the tops of buildings, you can add helicopter blades in post and it makes it look like you’re flying around the building, provided you keep any part of the car out of the frame, of course.
4. The Out-Of-Body Effect
There’s that effect where you see the main character in the center of the frame and no matter where he goes, he remains in the center. The effect is hard to pull off in a car, and in the description of this shot they say it’s probably easier to pull off in a truck.
5. Elevated Platform
If your car’s roof is sturdy enough, it can be used to get that perfect bird’s-eye view. Yeah, don’t try this when the car is in motion.
6. Fake Driving
By simply giving your subject something circular to hold onto and keeping your fake steering wheel out of the shot, you can safely shoot a person “driving” in the backseat of the car. Just keep the frame tight where only the actor’s head, arms, and the window are in view. With someone else actually driving, the car can be in motion and the subject doesn’t have to keep an extra careful eye on the road (although, the effect would be ruined if the subject just sits and talks to the camera the whole time).
7. Ditching Your Car Effect
This requires a couple of shots, then matching them later in editing. First, you’ve got to shoot the car driving past a certain point. Then, your subject, safely out of the car and on the far side of the road, will pretend to “jump” out by rolling and standing. In post, this requires matching similar frames from the first shot and the second shot to complete the effect. Selling the effect may require a separate shot of the actor opening the door from inside the moving car and pretending to jump out.
8. Pretending to Hit Someone with Your Car Effect
This requires some post-production reversing. Create a mark for where your subject is standing. Start with your actor in his “post-crash” state and slowly move the car backwards. When the car reaches the mark, the actor should slide off the hood and stand up. The car moves out of the frame. The way they did this effect here was they shot Derek saying a few words, then they matched a shot from the sequence they wanted to reverse, then sped up the reverse shot, making it look almost seamless.
By the way, if you want more amazing car stuff, Film Riot, unsurprisingly, has also made a few great videos involving cars, including “Driving In A Car Without Driving A Car:”
In that tutorial, they use three different methods to achieve this effect. Green screen, rear projection, and special effects lighting are all covered.
And that’s not all. They also have one where you can “Drive Fast Without Driving Fast,” which we actually broke down in this article.
With Derek and Neko Neko Productions’ tutorials, and the accompanying videos from Film Riot, you can do almost anything you want with cars, except, hopefully not wrecking them.
via reelseo.com
California Leading U.S. Out of Housing Bust: Mortgages | Armonk NY Real Estate
Orange County
Orange County, home base for defunct subprime lender New Century Financial Corp., had the highest median price of the six Southern California counties in August, rising 6 percent from a year earlier to $445,000, according to DataQuick. San Francisco led northern counties, up 13 percent to $700,000.
Bulk-buying of foreclosure properties by firms such as Colony Capital LLC and Carrington Holding Co. LLC has soaked up some of the housing excess in inland counties, said O’Toole, of Discovery Bay, California-based Foreclosure Radar.com.
In Antioch and Vallejo in northern California, and Riverside in the south, homes that sold for $400,000 at the peak have been purchased for about $130,000 each and renovated for the rental market, Gary Beasley, managing director of Oakland, California-based Waypoint Real Estate Group LLC, said in an interview.
The mortgage industry, which lowered underwriting standards to increase loan volume and fuel price gains, used so-called robo-signers to handle the flood of foreclosures that followed.
Judicial Review
The country’s top banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., agreed to a $25 billion settlement in February after attorneys general in 49 of 50 states participated in a probe of fraudulent paperwork used to repossess homes.
Driving the recovery in California has been the relative speed it has worked through foreclosures, in part because home repossessions there don’t require judicial review as they do in about half of U.S. states, said Ivy Zelman, CEO of Zelman & Associates LLC. There are 24 non-judicial states, according to RealtyTrac.
A new California law that goes into effect Jan. 1 may make it harder for lenders to seize property, which could delay the clearing of distressed homes and a swifter statewide recovery, Blomquist, a RealtyTrac vice president, said in an interview.
“We’ve been seeing a downward trend in new defaults, while the market in California is gradually improving,” said Blomquist. “The danger is that the law will delay foreclosures in the short-term, and be followed by a spike down the road.”
Scaled Back
Investors may already be getting out of the market after California’s housing gains. Insight Capital Research Management Inc., which had $360 million under management as of June 30, has scaled back positions in homebuilders, including those with heavy California exposure, said Mike Ashton, portfolio manager with the Walnut Creek, California-based fund.
Even in the Vallejo/Fairfield metropolitan area, which had the highest U.S. foreclosure rate in September at one filing for every 202 households, California’s relative housing value is on display. The average foreclosure property there cost $187,939, compared with the U.S. average of $170,040, RealtyTrac said.
via businessweek.com
How to create a sense of urgency for buyers | Bedford NY Real Estate
Question: When is the last time you sold a home when the buyer had no urgency to buy the ones you showed?
Notice I did not say, “No urgency to buy a home.” I said, “No urgency to buy the ones you showed.”
My guess: Not recently, if ever.
Let us ask this another way. Why would your prospects submit an offer if they saw no benefit or had no fear of losing the homes you showed them to another buyer?
“There is no way I can create urgency if it is not there,” say some real estate agents.
Uh … that is exactly what we do for a living. We help real estate buyers find deals so good that the self-imposed pressure is so great — they have to buy it if they can.
Stay with me on this, because I am about to help some of you make huge commissions by tweaking your showing schedule.
Usually “urgency” has to do with the action the other party needs to take by a certain date or time period. When it comes to buyer urgency, the buyer must have a strong desire to make the purchase, or the urgency factor will not be a factor.
If there is no fear of losing the house if they do not act soon, there is no urgency. So after you have developed trust and determined their needs, including a vision for their lifestyle, your showing schedule must meet or exceed their expectations.
We are talking buying pressure here, but not sales pressure. We are talking about the buyer’s urgency, their desire to make a buying decision before they lose the opportunity.
The best sales I ever made were ones where I put no pressure on the prospects, but showed them properties, prices and terms they could not resist. It makes it a lot more fun this way.
Experienced, successful agents know what I am sharing is the truth. Case in point:
I recently helped a couple purchase a presale home from a production builder. They both liked the home. In this case, the home was not the urgency. The price of the home was not the urgency. How can these be urgent when they are building 300 homes in that location, and my prospect would be buyer No. 3?
The builder offered them a substantial upgrade allowance package. We all knew that all the builders were offering something close to this number, so while the offer was competitive, it was not a reason to buy NOW. So far, we are still ahead of the builder.
But when the on-site agent reminded us one more time, now that we had settled on the house we got into a serious financing discussion with a couple who planned to pay cash for the home.
If the couple used the builder’s mortgage financing, they would get a $5,000 contribution towards closing costs, IF they were one of the first five to purchase in their new community. So far, one person had bought two homes, so my couple would be the third.
So, with just that, they quickly understood that they could lose $5,000 by just being the sixth person to purchase.
The “urgency” phase of this presentation was just getting warmed up.
It was time to see the actual home sites, to get an idea of the view. At this point, the on-site consultant knew that the couple had a dog. The builder had only a few home sites available in this phase, one of which was directly across from the dog walk.
The wife, who was constantly taking the “I don’t know why we are moving” stance, commented on how she could walk her dog and sit on the front porch watching others walk their dog. She got so excited that she turned to her husband and told him to write a $15,000 check “right now. We don’t want to lose this home site.” Fear of losing something she had not a vision for, until she visited the site.
Her husband didn’t move that fast, but within two days, they were signing a contract, which the builder prepared, and now are taking care of every detail of a presale, while I am off doing other things, waiting on a nice commission check in December.
As I have thought about first-time homebuyers or those coming back into the market, I can see why with cash contributions and incentives “new homes” are projected to be a preference over short sales.
It is not hard to see why qualified, cash-strapped homebuyers at any level might buy a new home.
Showing new homes requires a GPS, an automobile and the ability to make an introduction, and giving your prospects time to understand the complete deal, price, financing and incentives.
This not only will help you close more new homes, but it gives your buyer prospect a real price baseline from which to judge the value of resales. This cannot help but help your resales’ closings ratios.
For too long, the real estate industry has wondered why prospects would shop new homes, then buy a new one, many times without using the broker.
The reality is that the only urgency you have going for you is the urgency or perceived urgency residing somewhere in the prospect’s mind. You can affect “urgency” by showing them homes they get excited about living in.
You control no urgency tools nor have you exposed your prospects to any that would give them a solid reason to purchase soon. Thousands of dollars are riding on the buyer’s decision to act or not to act.
You must give the buyers decision-making tools that help them feel good and smart not only about the home they buy, but also about themselves.
Many prospects will end up preferring a resale to a new home, but it does not matter. What matters is that they closed on a home you showed them and are happy with the deal.
Make sure your buyers get the “urgency” story. It is an urgent imperative in your showing schedule. What are your thoughts?
via inman.com
Must-knows before secretly recording your tenants | Bedford Hills NY Real Estate
Q: One of my tenants wants to meet with me to go over some issues we’re having with him. He has complained that we are discriminating against him, and has threatened to file a complaint. I think he’s just trying to get some money out of us, and I want to record the conversation so that I have evidence of his thinly veiled threats in case I need it. Is there anything illegal about recording our meeting? –Dustin J.
A: There’s no legal problem at all in recording your conversation with your tenant as long as you tell the tenant, at the outset, that your recording device will be switched on. If your tenant doesn’t want to be recorded, he can simply leave the meeting. If he agrees, the recording can be shown to your lawyer and any lawyer or fair housing agency contacted by the tenant, and could conceivably be introduced as evidence in court.
But are you asking whether you can secretly record the meeting? The answer to this one is quite different. Many states, including California, Connecticut, Illinois and Georgia, do not allow a party to a conversation to intentionally record it without all participants’ permission.
In California, for example, the violation is a criminal offense (a misdemeanor), and it exposes the perpetrator to civil damages as well. (Calif. Penal Code sections 632 and 637.2.) But importantly, in order for the recording to be illegal, the conversation must have taken place in a place and manner that gave rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy on the part of the person being recorded.
For example, a loud argument at the community pool, which is recorded by someone’s cell phone (not necessarily by one of the speakers), probably would not be a violation of the law, because no one could reasonably expect that the conversation would be confidential. Not so if the meeting takes place behind closed doors, with only the two speakers present.
You’ll need to find out whether your state prohibits secret recordings. If it does, do not proceed. Doing so is a crime, although it’s not too likely that a prosecuting attorney will be interested in prosecuting a single offense.
Many times, however, people record conversations and then later tell their lawyers about the recording. A lawyer might be able to use the recording in court in a very limited circumstance: If the other side testifies under oath in a way that’s inconsistent with statements made on the recording, a judge might allow the recording into evidence to discredit, or impeach, the witness’s testimony. Some states have decided that it’s more important to expose a liar than to uphold their state’s rule against secret recording.
Q: A family applied for a two-bedroom apartment. Because the family included a teenage boy and girl, I thought that the place was too small for them, because the kids would each need a bedroom. The family told us that the kids don’t mind sharing a room, but it seems wrong to me. Can I reject them without risking a fair housing complaint? –Larry L.
A: You may mean well, but your conclusions about what is proper or not will not legally support your position. The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits landlords from discriminating against applicants and tenants on the basis of their “familial status.” Among other things, this means that the landlord cannot make decisions about how families should allocate bedrooms (not only are family sleeping arrangements none of their business, but all too often, landlords make this issue a pretext for turning families away). As long as the space meets minimum size requirements for a sleeping room, as established by your state building codes, it’s none of the landlord’s business who bunks with whom.
A family that thinks you are making decisions based on the age and sex of their children may consider calling the local HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) office. They can file a complaint online. HUD will investigate the matter (or have an equivalent state agency do it for them), and if there’s a basis for their complaint, they’ll attempt to settle the case. If that goes nowhere, it will go before a judge, who has the ability to compensate the tenants, order you to offer the rental, order you to attend fair housing education classes, and more.
via inman.com
One of Five Say it’s a Good Time to Sell | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
Last month the largest percentage of Americans since the housing bust said they believe it’s a good time to sell house, according to the latest Fannie Mae National Housing Survey.
Results from show Americans’ optimism about the recovery of the housing market and with regard to homeownership continued its gradual climb, bolstered by a series of mortgage rate decreases experienced throughout the summer. Consumer attitudes about the economy also improved substantially last month, breaking the progression of waning confidence seen during much of this year.
Survey respondents expect home prices to increase an average of 1.5 percent in the next year. The share who say mortgage rates will increase in the next 12 months dropped 7 percentage points to 33 percent. Nineteen percent of those surveyed say now is a good time to sell, marking the highest level since the survey began in June 2010. Tying the June 2012 level (and the all-time high since the survey’s inception), 69 percent of respondents said they would buy if they were going to move.
With regard to the economy overall, 41 percent of consumers now believe the economy is on the right track, up from 33 percent last month, while 53 percent believe the economy is on the wrong track, compared with 60 percent the prior month. Both the right track and wrong track figures mark the highest and the lowest readings, respectively, since the survey began in June 2010.
Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed expect home prices to go up in the next year, the highest level since the survey’s inception in June 2010. Thirty-three percent of respondents say mortgage rates will go up in the next year, a decrease of 7 percentage points since last month. Those who say now is a good time to buy dipped slightly to 72 percent.
.Consumer optimism climbed in September, with 41 percent saying the economy is on the right track – the highest level recorded since the survey’s inception and an 8 percentage point increase over last month. Forty-four percent of respondents expect their personal financial situation to improve over the next year, up from 42 percent in August.
The share of respondents who say their household income is significantly higher than it was 12 months ago decreased by 3 percentage points to 17 percent. Thirty-four percent of those surveyed say their household expenses are significantly
What not to use online home value estimates for | Bedford Corners Realtor
Q: What is your take on online home value estimates on houses? My real estate person says they shouldn’t be paid attention to, but I think they’re pretty close. What do you think?
A: Monitoring online home value estimates is a fixation of many a Web-savvy real estate consumer. It can be more than a little addictive to watch the value of your own home, the homes in the areas you’d like to live, and even, some say, your friends’ and relatives’ addresses move up and down with the market. I strongly believe that these estimates can be useful, if you understand how they are determined, how they can be skewed, and what they should and should not be used for.
Let’s explore precisely these issues now:
1. Understand how these home value estimates are determined. Ten years ago, if you wanted to get any sort of idea what a home might be worth, you had to consult with a real estate agent (or a few, if you wanted to get to a relatively reliable number), hire an appraiser (at the cost of a few hundred bucks) or, well, sell the house! I say that because the well-accepted definition of a home’s value is entirely dependent upon what a qualified buyer would pay for it at any given moment, in an arm’s-length transaction (“arm’s length” simply indicates that it’s not an insider deal, but rather a deal between strangers).
Article continues belowThis means that a home’s value changes over time, reflecting market dynamics like supply, demand, interest rates and the mortgage lending environment, so ultimately, any projection of a home’s value is truly only an estimate unless and until the home is sold — then, the sale price is the definitive answer of what the property was worth at closing.
This also means that the best way to estimate a home’s value is to look at what similar, nearby homes have actually sold for, as close as possible to the time the home’s value is being estimated. That’s what appraisers do; that’s what real estate agents do; and that’s ultimately what these online home value estimates attempt to do.
These websites build algorithms, just a funny word for calculations, that do their best to replicate the home value estimation process of real estate professionals, by pulling a description of your home from the public records available from your city or county, pulling other publicly available records of the recent sales prices of similar or comparable homes in your area, and making mathematical adjustments to create a rough estimate of your home’s price based on how similar or different it is from the “comparables” (especially on measurable factors like number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square footage) and how your overall local real estate market has moved in the time since those comparables actually sold.
2. Understand the margin for error and the factors that make your own home’s estimate more or less reliable. Keep in mind that the key difference between an automated online estimate of a home’s value and the estimate your appraiser or agent might provide is the fact that the latter are professionals (and humans!), with the ability to detect physical, aesthetic, condition and location nuances that a computer relying on public record data will simply never be able to appreciate. As a result, online estimates have a much larger margin of error than the estimates of human professionals typically do.
Many online sources actually provide the data on how accurate (or inaccurate) their home value estimates are on a monthly, city-by-city basis, if you snoop around in the fine print portions of the website. I’ve seen some say they are as accurate as being within 7 percent of the home’s later sale price, on average, in a given town, and others say they are as inaccurate as 40 percent or more off in a city. That would mean that on average, in a specific town, homes actually sell for 40 percent more or less than the value estimate the site provided for that same property in the month that it sold!
And that’s really inaccurate. The error potential for online estimates is precisely why most real estate agents find them to be wildly unreliable, especially when they can offer you a human, professional estimate (of course, sellers probably think that human professionals have other issues, like bias, which is sometimes true, but the subject of a different article!).
One way you can begin to assess how accurate your home’s estimate is likely to be is to understand the circumstances that impact these estimates’ reliability. Automated online estimates are more likely to be accurate when:
- The home and surrounding homes are newer (public records are more likely to be accurate for newer homes).
- Your home has not had many unpermitted upgrades or additions.
- Your home is located in a tract or subdivision where most surrounding homes are similar aesthetically and otherwise.
- Your home is located in a neighborhood, district and town where the areas within a few miles’ radius are relatively similar in school district quality and desirability to buyers.
On the other hand, automated online estimates are less likely to be accurate when:
- Your homes and surrounding homes are older.
- Your home and/or surrounding homes have had lots of changes and additions over the years.
- Your home is located in an area where nearby properties vary widely in style, size, even usage types (i.e., you have single-family homes, apartment buildings, condos and commercial properties all in the same area).
- Your home is located near the boundary of a city, county, school district or neighborhood that is very different from yours.
3. Be careful what you use estimates for. Because of these strengths and weaknesses, it’s critical that you be very careful what you use online home estimates for.
I believe that the best uses are to track movements in the value of your home and your area’s homes over long periods of time, like you might want to do if you are considering refinancing when you get to a certain value or if you want to apply to your lender to have a private mortgage insurance policy removed at a certain value benchmark.
You also might use these online estimates to determine whether your home’s value is so far off from its tax-assessed value that you should consider applying to have the assessed value reduced.
However, I don’t think these online estimates are well-used to determine the list price of your home. Overpricing is such a serious, potentially harmful misstep (it turns otherwise interested buyers off and can cost you thousands if you overprice and your home lags on the market) that I’d encourage you to opt for getting several estimates of your home’s value from experienced, local agents or even to get a formal appraisal, if your budget allows. Use these human professionals’ value estimates as the basis of your home’s list price.
via inman.com
Homes of Former Presidents | Bedford Corners NY Homes
via zillow.com
U.S. Mortgage Fraud Initiative Data Included Older Cases | Bedford Hills NY Real Estate
The announcement from the Obama administration was that a yearlong crackdown on mortgage fraud netted charges against 530 suspects in the year ending Sept. 30.
In fact, the list included cases filed as many as two years before U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the initiative began.
Holder said at a news conference in Washington yesterday that the initiative ran from Oct. 1, 2011 to Sept. 30, 2012 and resulted in “285 federal criminal indictments and informations against 530 defendants for allegedly victimizing more than 73,000 American homeowners — and inflicting losses in excess of $1 billion.”
A sampling of cases incorporated in the data Holder cited shows those numbers include cases filed as early as 2009.
Cases filed before the start of the initiative were included because some type of “law enforcement action” occurred during the yearlong period, according to William Carter, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those actions could include indictments, convictions and sentencings, he said.
“There is no attempt to fudge the numbers or make it look like it was a bigger problem than it was,” Carter said. “Through our intelligence, we saw this as a rising problem and we’re trying to get ahead of it.”
The “Distressed Homeowner Initiative” was spearheaded by the FBI, which began to recognize a sharp increase in frauds aimed at struggling homeowners in the years following of the 2008 housing crisis, Kevin Perkins, the FBI’s associate deputy director, said at yesterday’s news conference.
FBI Survey
The information used to compile the results from the initiative came from an FBI survey of the agencies involved in the Mortgage Fraud Working Group.
The Justice Department didn’t provide a list of the 285 cases. Of 11 cases touted by individual U.S. attorney offices as being part of the initiative, six were filed in 2009 and 2010. Another two were filed before October 1, 2011, the date cited by Holder as the start of the fraud crackdown.
One fraudulent loan case against operators of a mortgage brokerage, an attorney and legal staffer was filed in Trenton, New Jersey, on July 20, 2009.
Charges against one of the defendants in the case were dismissed two years ago. Four others pleaded guilty this year to assorted charges including wire-fraud conspiracy and tax evasion. Another defendant was convicted at trial in March of conspiracy and money laundering.
In a case involving falsified loan documents in Washington, the defendant pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge about two weeks before the initiative began. She was sentenced to 40 months in prison in January.
Politics Denied
Holder said yesterday that the timing of the announcement, less than a month from the 2012 presidential election, had nothing to do with politics.
“The notion that this is a campaign event — I mean, there’s a logical break,” Holder said. “This thing started with the fiscal year last year and ends with the fiscal year September 30. So we’re now reporting on what happened over the past fiscal year. That’s what this is all about.”
Adora Andy, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, didn’t respond to e-mail and telephone requests for comment.
The press conference yesterday was meant to draw attention to the issue that has become a growing problem on the FBI’s radar, Carter said.
“We want to get the word out to the public that these fraudsters are out there,” he said.
Desperate Targeted
The FBI also released a public service announcement with Tim DeKay, an actor from the television series “White Collar,” warning about fraud schemes “that target Americans desperate to modify loans and avoid mortgage foreclosures.”
In 2010, fewer than four percent of the FBI’s mortgage fraud cases involved distressed homeowner fraud, Perkins said at the press conference. This year that number has risen to 20 percent.
As President Barack Obama’s administration rolled out plans aimed at increasing mortgage modifications to keep people in their homes, the number of fraud schemes targeting those same homeowners began to increase, Shaun Donovan, the Housing and Urban Development Department secretary, said yesterday at the press conference.
Typical schemes involved promises to homeowners that foreclosures could be prevented by payment of a fee. As part of the scams, “investors” purchase the mortgage or the titles of homes are transferred to those taking part in the fraud, resulting in homeowners losing their property.
via businessweek.com