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Housing market’s latest obstacle: Appraisals | Armonk Real Estate

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I believe there is a screaming flaw in the mortgage process when it comes to appraisals (but it is not the appraiser’s fault). I never fully understood why this didn’t get more attention when I worked as an appraiser some 7+ years ago, and I especially don’t understand why this hasn’t gotten serious attention after the housing crash, since I believe it is a direct factor in the extent of the losses suffered by the banks. 

Disclaimer: in recent years I have not worked in the real estate business, and I don’t know if things still work exactly the same. I’m not aware of any fundamental shift.

In the mortgage process, it is the loan officer is the one who hires the appraiser in most cases (with the buyer/borrower’s money). The loan officer gets paid a commission when a mortgage loan is closed. They do not lose any money should this loan end up in default later, somewhat in the same way that a car salesman won’t lose money on a car that gets repossessed down the line. They are in effect commission based sales people, with the objective to sell and close loans for the broker or lender. This is usually true for mortgage brokers, and also direct lenders like banks.

Of course there are rules and guidelines to follow, but the fact of the matter is that the motivation of the loan officer is to close loans to earn commissions, plain and simple. Therefore, their interest is to get an appraisal with a number on it that supports the deal so the loan can close. This number is almost always made known to the appraiser (with any sale for example, the appraiser must be given a copy of the sales contract, and analyze it as part of the appraisal).

The result of this dynamic is that the loan officer can exert pressure on the appraiser to hit the magic number they need. Depending on the situation this can be implicitly done, or blatantly explicit; either way, the appraiser knows that his livelihood depends on getting jobs, and getting future jobs depends on keeping the loan officer happy. Even when the loan officer does not purposely wish to influence the appraiser, the implicit pressure is still going to be there as the appraiser knows getting future business depends on closings getting done, and naturally a loan officer prefers an appraiser that helps makes closings happen more than an appraiser with impressive analytical and research skills, and accurate assessments.

The end result is a lot of appraisals with higher valuations than the true value of the property, with of course bigger losses for the lender in the event of foreclosure later, sometimes substantially so. It can also be bad for a home buyer, who ends up borrowing and paying more than the property is really worth (though at times, especially with refi’s, the borrower knowingly pushes for as high a number as they can, so they can pull more cash out of the house).

Please understand that I’m not blaming loan officers for what they do (except in those cases where they blatantly push the appraiser for numbers they know are dishonest and/or are dishonest themselves), they are for the most part only trying to be as successful as they can at their jobs, and earn as much money as they can. It is the process that is flawed.

It is interesting that the lender’s underwriters, whose job it is to protect the lender from risk and make sure the loan is in order and everything is above board, can order a review appraisal (basically another appraiser’s review and verdict on the quality and accuracy of the original appraisal, including its own estimate of value) if they have reason to believe the appraisal is not up to par. If I was a lender that did not want to lose money on foreclosures, I would ALWAYS have the underwriter or handle the appraisal, completely detached and independent from all parties with a stake in the closing.

While I never fully understood this, the best explanation for why lenders do this I have come up with, is simply greed – making as much money as possible off as many loans as possible, many of which are re-sold anyway. But then I still don’t understand why the lenders who end up holding the bag (like the secondary market) allow this situation to exist, even though if I recall correctly Fannie Mae guidelines (which lenders must adhere to if they want to sell the mortgage to the secondary market, like most do) specifically prohibits anyone with a financial interest in the closing to control the hiring of appraisers. Yet it happens all the time.

Anyway, thankfully these days I don’t have to think about this much anymore.

via marketwatch.com

How to privately share a Vine video | How To by Armonk NY Realtor

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Yesterday Twitter launched a new video sharing app called Vine. The service lets you compose and share six-second videos using its iPhone app. As Sharon Vaknin pointed out, currently there’s no way to set any of your videos, or even your profile, to “private.” Any videos you upload are going to be public; viewable by anyone using the service.

There is a way to create a video using the Vine app and share it privately, however. It’s not an ideal workaround (that would be privacy settings in the app) but it’s an easy way to still be able to get creative with Vine and share your work with friends without the rest of the Vine community seeing it.

What you’ll need to do is create a Vine as you normally would. Once you tap “Next” to go to the share screen, the video is saved to your Camera Roll. Since the video is already saved, you can either turn off the “Share on Vine” switch and tap “Done,” or go back to the compose screen, tap the X, and delete the post.

With the video saved to your Camera Roll you can then share it — privately — through MMS, iMessage, e-mail, and so forth.

Again, it’s not an ideal sharing method, but it does allow you to maintain your privacy should that be a concern.

via howto.cnet.com

5 SEO Tricks for Pinterest | Armonk Realtor

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SEO for Pinterest

Pinterest, without a doubt has been one of the fastest and every growing social media platform for brands with over 11 million users. I have always maintained that it is one medium every B2C brands should explore. Pinterest also has a great potential for brands to increase their reach unlike the conventional marketing channels, especially in the emerging economies.

With more people trying to make their purchase based on finding of products over Pinterest, there are few tricks that can optimize those simple looking pins get the desired attention.

1. Long tail keywords

As with any SEO strategies, it is very important to choose your keywords wisely. More important, try to have ‘long tail’ keyword – keywords with better and longer shelf life. How do you do that? Well, you can personalize the pin to cater to particular geographic location or gender. This apart from having the product description in place. In effect, you’re making the pin searchable for – product, place & person.

2. Using hash tags

Like Twitter, Google Plus or Instagram, Pinterest too latched on to the popularity of hash tags. These hash tags help you anchor the pin to a particular subject and makes it easily discoverable. Many of the brands track their marketing campaigns using hash tag like the recent Lakme campaign where it has asked users to pin with hash tag

via socialmediatoday.com

Home prices spike 19.4 percent in Chicago in December | Armonk Realtor

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Median home prices in the city of Chicago shot up 19.4 percent in December from a year earlier, and sales of existing homes jumped 14.6 percent, according to the latest report from the Illinois Association of Realtors.

The median price rose a smaller 4.5 percent in the Chicago metropolitan area, and sales spiked 19.2 percent.

 

The report showed the median price in the city rose to $185,000, in December, up from $155,000 in the year-ago period. There were 1,806 homes sold, up from 1,576.

In the Chicago metropolitan area, the median price rose to $151,500 last month, up from $145,000 in December 2011. Home sales totaled 7,372, up from 6,184.

“Positive signs for the housing market continue,” Geoffrey Hewings, director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois, said in a statement.

“The housing market is likely to experience some bumpiness in the first quarter of the year until there is resolution of the fiscal challenges in Washington and Springfield.

Consumers are unlikely to explore major purchases, such as a home, when tax rates, mortgage interest deductions and pension obligations remain unresolved, he added

via suntimes.com

 

Luxury homes: Buyers say bottom has passed | Armonk Homes

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Semi-retired hotel executive Howard Friedman and his wife, Connie, paid nearly $1 million for a three-story townhome in downtown Boca Raton. They don’t have an ocean view, but they love the urban setting that keeps them close to the city’s nightlife.

“We have maybe 50 bars and restaurants within walking distance,” Friedman, 57, said of his new digs in the 200 East development along Palmetto Park Road. “We felt that this environment was very, very attractive.”

A resurgence of sales of high-end homes and condominiums is helping South Florida’s housing market recover from the six-year downturn.

During the bust, luxury properties valued at $750,000 and above didn’t fare any better than more modestly priced homes. In some cases, it was worse.

Sellers waited months, sometimes longer than a year, slashing prices time and again with no takers. Even with the chance to buy trophy homes on the water or in gated communities at 50 cents on the dollar, prospective buyers feared the falling market.

“Back then it was awful,” remembers David Serle, broker for RE/MAX Services in Boca Raton. “Sellers really had to change their mindset.”

But now most buyers believe the bottom has passed, brokers say. The 200 East project sold nine units in nine weeks for $7 million. The condo-townhome community is roughly 90 percent full, said John Poletto, principal at Nestler Poletto Sotheby’s International Realty in Boca.

Higher price ranges also are doing well.

Broward County last year posted 464 sales of homes and condos valued at $1 million or more – the third consecutive annual increase and a 51 percent jump since 2009, according to an analysis of property records by Focus Real Estate Advisors in Coral Gables.

The 2012 sales volume in Broward hit $768 million, up 47 percent from 2009.

Palm Beach County last year had 791 sales of $1 million-plus properties, down slightly from the year before but still 33 percent higher than in 2009, the Focus data show.

Miami-Dade County has by far the biggest share of the region’s luxury market because of an abundance of foreign investors and ultra high-end condos in downtown Miami and along the coast.

Across South Florida, the high-end market has rebounded with the help of investors buying up nearly all of the excess condos that were built during the housing boom.

“The absorption of the overhang of inventory opened the opportunity for new construction to enter the marketplace,” said Philip J. Spiegelman, principal of International Sales Group.

Developers have announced or started building 99 condo towers featuring nearly 14,500 units in the tri-county region, mostly in Miami-Dade, according to CondoVultures.com, a Bal Harbour-based consulting firm.

One of the first announced projects in the past two years was Apogee Beach, a 49-unit Hollywood condo where prices start at more than $1 million. The development by Jorge Perez is sold out and expected to open later this year.

New construction remains soft in Palm Beach County because it doesn’t have as big of an economic base as the two counties to the south, said Craig Werley, president of Focus Real Estate.

Paulette Koch, an agent with Corcoran Group Real Estate, said a shortage of homes for sale is a problem on the island of Palm Beach just as it is in other parts of the county.

Koch expects the luxury market to continuing stabilizing, albeit slowly.

“We are not going to see enormous (price) gains over the next several years,” she said. “But people have gained confidence in the marketplace.”

via sun-sentinel.com

Foreclosure filings up in half of US states in 2012 | Armonk Real Estate

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Half of U.S. states saw an annual increase in the number of foreclosure-related filings in 2012, but most of those were judicial foreclosure states where loan servicers were catching up on the backlog from the “robo-signing” controversy, according to a year-end report by data aggregator RealtyTrac.

All told, RealtyTrac reported foreclosure-related filings against 1.84 million U.S. properties in 2012, down 3 percent from 2011 and down 36 percent from a 2010 peak of 2.9 million homes.

All but five of the 25 states seeing an increase in foreclosure-related filings (default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions) were states where courts handle most foreclosure proceedings.

Many foreclosure proceedings against homeowners in those states were stalled, but not derailed, by allegations that loan servicers failed to follow proper procedures in filing legal documents.

After loan servicers reached a settlement last March with state and federal officials last over so-called “robo-signing” practices and revised their procedures, they began pushing new and existing proceedings through the system again (many also started approving more short sales to meet their obligations under the terms of the settlement).

Foreclosures are handled by courts in the six states seeing the biggest annual increase in 2012 foreclosure filings — New Jersey (up 55 percent), Florida (53 percent), Connecticut (48 percent), Indiana (46 percent), Illinois (33 percent), and New York (31 percent).

Homes in New York took the longest to move through the foreclosure process — 1,089 days — followed by New Jersey (987 days), Florida (853 days), Hawaii (781 days), and Illinois (697 days).

In the 25 states that saw foreclosure filings drop from 2011 to 2012, 19 handle most foreclosures outside of the court system, and  loan servicers in those states continued to move homes through the foreclosure process during the robo-signing controversy.

Nonjudicial foreclosure states seeing the biggest drop in foreclosure filings in 2012 were Nevada (down 57 percent), Utah (down 40 percent), Oregon (down 40 percent), Arizona (down 33 percent), California (down 25 percent), and Michigan (down 23 percent).

RealtyTrac warned there could be a foreclosure backlog building up some states that saw filings decline in 2012, as the result of new state legislation and court rulings that make it more difficult for lenders to foreclose.

So 2013 could see “two discrete jumps in foreclosure activity,” at the beginning and end of the year, said Realty Trac’s Daren Blomquist.

“We expect to see continued increases in judicial foreclosure states near the beginning of the year as lenders finish catching up with the backlogs in those states, and another set of increases in some nonjudicial states near the end of the year as lenders adjust to the new laws and process some deferred foreclosures in those states.”

The rise in foreclosure activity in many local markets in 2012 “should translate into more foreclosure inventory available for sale in 2013 in those markets,” Blomquist said. “That is good news for buyers and investors, but could result in some short-term weakness in home prices as the often-discounted foreclosure sales weigh down overall home values” in those markets.

States with the highest foreclosure rates in 2012 were Florida (with filings against 3.11 percent of homes), Nevada (2.7 percent), Arizona (2.69 percent), Georgia (2.58 percent), California (2.33 percent), Ohio (1.75 percent), Michigan (1.69 percent), South Carolina (1.66 percent), and Colorado (1.64 percent).

Among metro areas with a population of 200,000 or more, Stockton, Calif., had the nation’s highest foreclosure rate (3.98 percent). Six other California cities made RealtyTrac’s list of the 20 metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, and Florida landed eight cities on the list, including Miami (3.71 percent) and Orlando (3.46 percent).

Zillow is projecting that a half-dozen markets in California, including some Central Valley cities hard hit by foreclosures, will see double-digit home price aprreciation in the months ahead. The real estate portal’s analysis of more than 250 markets predicts that national home prices will appreciate 2.5 percent in the year ending November 2013.

“The U.S. housing market bottomed in the fourth quarter of 2011 and has since entered a sustainable recovery,” Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries said in a blog post.

California metros Zillow expects to see the biggest gains are Modesto (projected to gain 14.7 percent), Merced (12.1 percent), Bakersfied (10.7 percent), Vallejo (10.4 percent), Sacramento (10.1 percent) and Visalia (10.0 percent).

via inman.com

N.Y. newspaper removes online map of gun-permit holders | Armonk Homes

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A White Plains, N.Y., newspaper has removed an online interactive map that detailed who has handgun permits in two counties. The posting of the map on the paper’s website last month had sparked outrage and prompted changes in state law to give permit holders greater privacy.

The Journal News map showed the names and addresses of people with pistol permits licensed by Westchester and Rockland counties.

Journal News President and Publisher Janet Hasson said Friday the decision to take down the map came in response to a provision in New York’s new gun law that was passed last week. The law also gives permit holders a way to request that their personal information be kept private.

Hasson criticized the new rule as overly broad, but added in a letter that “we are not deaf to voices who have said that new rules should be set for gun permit data.”

Still, a snapshot of the map — without the names and addresses — has been kept on the paper’s website “to remind the community that guns are a fact of life we should never forget,” she wrote.

The new law, signed Jan. 15 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also stopped the release of permit-holder data for 120 days. The Journal News had been battling Putnam County to release the names and addresses of permit holders, but officials there had refused.

The state government’s top open-records official had warned that refusing the request would be illegal.

In her letter to readers, Hasson said the paper published the interactive feature using public information after the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, because the “Journal News thought the community should know where gun permit holders in their community were, in part to give parents an opportunity make careful decisions about their children’s safety.”

via latimes.com

5 Twitter Tips — Setting Up for Success | Armonk Real Estate

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Social Media continues to see substantial growth among companies cementing Twitter and the other social media tools as serious business resources and not just a passing trend. Companies are realizing the need for a Twitter page to provide useful information linking back to their business. Here at Power Ten, Inc., it never surprises me, that while performing an evaluation of a company’s social media usage, many businesses overlook taking simple yet important steps to help make Twitter as beneficial as it can be. Keeping Twitter up-to-date is simple and can be a great tool for keeping your brand in front of its audience. The following are 5 easy tips that can help you use Twitter successfully.

  1. Keep your handle simple. Whether you are a company or an individual make it easy for people to find and interact with you, choose a straightforward handle. For Power Ten, Inc., we use @powerteninc as our handle. Due to the length of your name, it may not completely fit so @CorsairEng was chosen for one of our clients at Corsair Engineering Inc.
  2. Use your company logo, or an image that is well connected with your company as your photo. It is important that the logo or picture is clear and crisp (high resolution). In some examples I’ve noticed that the profile picture is pixilated or blurry. This is because a file that was too large or small for the profile image was used. There are several programs that can be used to size your logo correctly such as Photoshop, Inkscape, or even a web application such as Pixlr.
  3. Make sure to include your company URL. If a user is viewing your Twitter page, there is no better way to drive them to your website than by featuring your company’s URL on your Twitter profile. Twitter profiles provide the opportunity for you to include a clickable link to your website. This link will also provide another link back to your website for increasing your Google search placement.
  4. Fill out tour Twitter bio. Tell people who you are and what your company does. The company description should briefly answer these questions and can use @mentions of key people at the company.
  5. Finally, connect with people and connect regularly. Companies often send out Twitter updates and don’t build connections. Twitter is a platform where you can speak to anyone (using the @mention) about any topic using the #hashtag for subject. This is one place where it isn’t bad to be a follower. Follow people and companies you want to know about and connect with, reach out to them and connect.

The best way to get maximum results from Twitter is to use it. Don’t worry about making mistakes, if they do happen, learn from them and move on. Begin by following, retweeting, mentioning and sharing, this will get you going and help raise your comfort level. After you have established your desired level of comfort, move on to creating your own content. Remember, as with any marketing or advertising, be patient, your company on Twitter may not be an overnight sensation, but it can help position you for the masses to see.

via socialmediatoday.com