Bedford NY jobless claims report
Jobless Claims for the Real Estate Market | Bedford NY Real Estate
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: Bedford NY Homes
House of Week: Restaurateur’s Artful Chicago Home | Bedford NY Real Estate
via zillow.com
Inspector, contractor disagree on settlement concerns | Bedford NY Realtor
DEAR BARRY: When we bought our home, our contractor was with us on the day of the home inspection. They both inspected the attic but had different opinions. The inspector said there were no problems, but our contractor said the ceiling joists were separated more than an inch from a beam. The inspector took a second look and said this was due to old settlement and was not a problem.
We should have listened to our contractor because since moving in we’ve noticed other evidence of building settlement. The front and back walls are leaning and the floor is sloped in one corner. If we had known all of this, we would not have bought the house. Do we have any recourse with the home inspector? –Dora
DEAR DORA: The home inspector apparently did not do an adequate job and should be accountable for failure to report observable defects. Separated framing in an attic is not something to dismiss as “old settlement.” Instead, your inspector should have recommended further evaluation by a structural engineer.
Recourse, however, is a legal issue that varies from state to state and is largely affected by the terms of the contract that you signed when you hired the inspector. These are points to review with an attorney. In the meantime, you should find out if the home inspector is insured for errors and omissions. If major repairs are needed, insurance coverage could determine whether the matter is worth pursuing.
But before you do any of these things, you should hire a structural engineer to determine the extent of the problem, whether it is a major issue or just old settlement, as reported by your inspector. Once you have an engineering report, you will know what work is needed and can obtain bids from contractors. At that point, you’ll be prepared to pursue recourse.
It is also recommended that you obtain a second home inspection. But this time, try to find an inspector with many years of experience and a reputation for thoroughness. If your home inspector missed evidence of building settlement, he probably missed other issues that need to be discovered.
DEAR BARRY: Our buyers backed out of the purchase contract because the home inspector’s repair estimates were very high. I was wondering if it is legal for a home inspector to provide such estimates. We and our agent were very angry with the inspector. Now our home is back on the market. Should we attempt to fix all the problems addressed in the inspection report before we can make a sale? What should we do now? –Yvonne
DEAR YVONNE: Some home inspectors provide repair estimates. Most do not. Whether the estimates in this case were accurate or inflated is the big question. The only way to know for sure is to get bids from contractors. Once you do that, you will know what is actually needed to make repairs.
At that point, you can repair some or all of the defects. Those that you do not repair can be disclosed to future buyers, along with the contractor’s bids.
via inman.com
Mitt Romney’s housing policy: GOP candidate offers ideas on mortgages | Bedford NY Real Estate
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign made the odd decision to release a new policy document about housing issues last Friday in the late afternoon. The Friday afternoon “news dump” is when you put things out that you think will reflect poorly on you, knowing that reporters will give them scant attention. The housing paper was doubly-obscured, first by the weekend and second by release of Romney’s tax documents the same day.
Burying housing policy was a strange choice for the Romney campaign, because housing policy (foreclosures, mortgage disasters, etc.) has been a giant failure for the Obama administration, and one where Romney could easily score substantive points.
Having spent my weekend perusing the Romney position paper, I’m prepared to offer an explanation for why they buried it: It sucks.
Faced with the opportunity to take a nice big swing at the piñata of Obama-era foreclosures, Romney whiffed, offering a “plan” chock of platitudes, bromides, and non sequiturs. Why the campaign preferred dumping it out when they thought nobody would notice to simply not releasing it is a mystery. But perhaps the greater mystery is why they couldn’t stir themselves to write a policy that made sense.
The context here is the epic failure of the Obama administration to do anything of sufficient scale to address the foreclosures roiling the nation. Foreclosures aren’t just unpleasant to the families that experience them, but also have significant knock-on consequences for the rest of the community and consequently constitute secondary shocks to a country already devastated by a severe recession.
In 2009, when the administration was at the peak of its powers—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalized by the federal government, banks desperately in need of federal money, the president popular and backed by large congressional majorities—President Obama didn’t think addressing the issue was important. His primary premise was the not-unreasonable one that the best solution to housing pain was overall economic recovery. A secondary, less-reasonable premise was that restoring the “confidence” of the banking sector was a key element of broad economic recovery. So at the margin the administration wasn’t interest in diverting federal time and money to housing problem, and discouraged solutions that would help indebted homeowners at the cost of hurting the very banks that TARP was supposed to prop up.
Later programs such as HAMP and HARP were hamstrung by extreme political paranoia about delivering aid to “unworthy” borrowers. So while the programs (especially HARP) have done some good, the policy has been to specifically not target the most severe needs. Bigger plans released this year would do more, but are being blocked by a holdover Fannie/Freddie regulator whom the administration didn’t replace when it had the chance.
To all this, Team Romney has essentially nothing to say. One of their five bullet points is that we need to improve the job market. Another is to sell government-owned foreclosed property to private investors, which is already happening. A third is to encourage short-sales as an alternative to foreclosure, which the administration has been doing for years now through various initiatives that seem to be bearing some fruit.
In terms of something the parties actually disagree about, Romney proposes to replace the Dodd-Frank Act with “sensible regulation.” If we repeal Dodd-Frank and its tools for orderly liquidation, what would we do instead? Well, the last plank of the Romney plan argues that “the Romney-Ryan plan will completely end ‘too-big-to-fail’ by reforming the GSEs,” i.e. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This is a real head-scratcher. Not only does Romney not say how he would reform Fannie and Freddie, he doesn’t even begin to try to explain how this would end the “too-big-to-fail” dilemma—presumably because it wouldn’t. Fannie and Freddie may have exacerbated the extent of the housing bubble, but this has literally no bearing on the question of whether or not the economy can survive the liquidation of a diversified mega-bank. If a bank goes bust under Romney’s plan—what happens? Nobody knows. Presumably something “sensible,” but Fannie and Freddie have nothing to do with it. Conservatives have long been rightly critical of Fannie and Freddie, and accurately warned that the free lunch they seemed to create for homeownership might someday prove quite costly to the taxpayer. But retreading a timeless conservative argument about the risks of federal loan guarantees, no matter how valid, isn’t a credible response to too-big-to-fail private banks or problems in today’s mortgage lending.
Romney’s housing plan is depressing. Faced with a clear policy area in which Obama has not succeeded, his opponent came out with a seven-page white paper so embarrassing the campaign dropped it on a Friday night.
This housing issue is the entire 2012 economic debate in miniature. There’s stuff to like in the Obama administration’s record, but there’s simply no denying that overall economic performance has been bad and the president deserves his share of the blame. But rather than giving us a pragmatic turnaround guy, the Republicans are offering a copy-and-paste agenda that could have been rolled out any time in the past 20 years and has nothing to do with today’s specific problem
via slate.com
20+ Tools To Supercharge Your Dropbox | Bedford Real Estate
via hongkiat.com
Why You Need to Get 3 Bids for Your Construction Project | Bedford NY Realtor Robert Paul
Getting prices from contractors for your construction project probably scares the daylights out of you and for good reason: You don’t really know what you should be paying for the work.
How do you know whether the price you’re offered for your new home or remodeling project is a “good” price?
How do you know whether you’re paying too much?
There are no window stickers to compare
Hiring a contractor isn’t at all like buying a car.
By the time you get to the car dealer, you’ve already checked KBB.com, Autotrader.com, Edmunds.com and maybe a few other websites. You’ve checked newspaper car ads and talked with someone you know who bought the same car you’re considering.
You know exactly what you should pay for the car because there are hundreds — maybe thousands — of cars for sale just like the one you want; the price is pretty much set.
What’s the “set” price for your one-of-a-kind custom home or remodeling project?
How custom projects are priced
When a general contractor picks up a set of plans from the architect, he starts by making a series of take-offs — estimates of the amount of a particular finish or material based on the plans.
The contractor might estimate he’ll need 80 square feet of granite countertop in the kitchen, for example, and at $50 per square foot, that’s a line item in his bid of $4,000.
He’ll also send copies of the plans to his suppliers and subcontractors for prices on the work he’ll hire them to do. The window supplier will price each unit and send a total to the contractor, and the contractor will be responsible for figuring the price to install the windows.
The contractor will add line items for permits, insurance, temporary utility services and dozens of other things. Finally, he’ll total them all up and add his overhead and profit.
It’s a time-consuming and nerve-wracking process for the general contractor because he’s got to get it right — too high and he won’t get the job. Too low and he’ll lose money on the project.
Different contractors, different prices
Surprisingly, different contractors bidding from the same set of drawings can come up with substantially different prices, especially when the drawings aren’t as detailed as they should be. That’s too often a culprit.
But just as important, and frequently overlooked, is your choice of contractors to bid on the project.
Choose three qualified contractors, and you’ll get comparable bids. Choose poorly, and — well, read on …
Apples and oranges
We recently completed the construction drawings for a medium-sized but fairly complex remodeling and addition project with a construction budget of about $240,000.
I recommended two qualified contractors to the owner — contractors I’d worked with before and knew well. The homeowner added the third bidder, someone their neighbor had used for work on their house.
I’d also worked with that third bidder and knew he did top-quality work — but for significantly higher prices than other contractors in the area. I also knew that he rarely bid on work; he preferred designing his own projects.
I didn’t think he was a good fit for our project, but the owner insisted, and we kept him on the list. Here’s how the three prices came out on the $240,000 project:
- Bidder 1: $236,000
- Bidder 2: $243,000
- Bidder 3: $363,000
Clearly, something’s wrong with that last bid at 50 percent higher than bid No. 2 — a math error perhaps?
No, the contractor told me; that was his price. More importantly, it was the price he would expect to get on a similar project.
Imagine if the owner had chosen to not bid the project and had only taken a price from bidder No. 3 — he would never have known that he was paying $120,000 more than he had to!
This is not the contractor you’re looking for
Bidder No. 3 boasts a wall of awards, does great quality work and has a long list of satisfied clients. And if you’re willing to spend a lot more to assure quality, it might be the right choice for you.
But with the help of your architect, you should be able to get the same quality work for a far more reasonable price. And with properly-detailed drawings, a good list of specifications and three qualified, comparable contractors, your bids should come in reasonably close to each other.
Two bidders aren’t enough to give you confidence in the bids; four or five are too many to manage — and you’ll greatly decrease a contractor’s motivation to bid if he has only a 20 or 25 percent chance of getting the job.
The key is three: Always, always get three qualified bids on any significant custom home or remodeling project.
And maybe you’ll save enough on the project to go out and buy that new car you’ve been dreaming of.
via zillow.com
7 Hot Trends in Social Media Marketing | Bedford NY Real Estate
via mashable.com
How to Get the Best Firewood for Clean and Affordable Energy | Bedford NY Realtor
BofA mortgage workforce swells even as it tightens belt | Bedford NY Real Estate
The Bank of America Corp unit that handles troubled home loans has grown more than tenfold since the bank bought ailing mortgage lender Countrywide Financial in 2008, documents obtained by Reuters show, shining new light on the scale of the clean-up the purchase entailed.
While most attention has focused on the No. 2 U.S. bank’s $35 billion in mortgage losses stemming from settlements and repurchases of soured home loans, information the bank provided to the Federal Reserve in 2008 and recent company reports show the mortgage mess could undermine efforts to improve profits for some time to come.
Bank of America now employs some 42,000 people – or nearly 1 in 6 of its 275,000 employees – in Legacy Asset Servicing, the unit that services problem mortgages. Operating costs in the mortgage servicing business reached $2.7 billion in the second quarter, up 29 percent from a year ago, as the bank added 7,000 workers to handle foreclosure reviews and loan modifications required under government settlements.
The bank has also had as many as 16,000 additional contractors working in the unit, according to company reports.
In 2008, as Bank of America was seeking regulatory approval for the Countrywide deal, it told the Fed the two companies had a combined 3,900 employees working on “housing retention,” a number that had already doubled in the previous year, according to the documents, which were obtained by Reuters through a Freedom of Information request.
That is not a direct comparison to the 42,000 full-time employees in the mortgage servicing unit now, as it has been restructured over time to include servicing for borrowers who have not defaulted. But default servicing is the largest team within the group, and its overall staffing levels are a good proxy to show how much the bank has had to ramp up to deal with the mess.
The hiring has come as the bank has set out to eliminate 30,000 consumer banking and technology jobs under a program called Project New BAC to cut $8 billion in annual expenses by the middle of 2015. It means that while 20,000 jobs have been eliminated in the past year, the overall headcount is down by only 13,000.
Despite the hiring and spending, Bank of America recently ranked last among five big lenders in modifying mortgages. Like some of its peers, borrowers and consumer advocates have repeatedly accused the bank of losing borrower paperwork, speeding up foreclosures and giving homeowners the runaround when they try to get their loan payments reduced.
Reining in these cleanup costs will be critical to financial performance over the next couple of years, as the bank retools to offset reductions in revenue due to new regulations, a tepid economy and low interest rates.
The $2.7 billion in operating expenses equaled 15 percent of Bank of America’s noninterest expense in the second quarter. It is also more than five times as high as the $500 million per quarter that CEO Brian Moynihan has projected the bank could spend on servicing in times of more normal delinquencies. The figure doesn’t include mortgage-related litigation expenses.
“This is perhaps the biggest earnings lever they have,” said KBW analyst Jefferson Harralson.
Investors will get an update on its costs when the bank reports third-quarter earnings on Oct 17. It is likely to post a small loss after reaching a $2.4 billion settlement of allegations that it failed to disclose bonus payments and ballooning losses ahead of its 2009 Merrill Lynch acquisition, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Bank of America spokesman Dan Frahm said the bank has invested heavily in its Legacy Asset Servicing unit to assist customers, boost the housing market and help the company move forward after the Countrywide acquisition.
“We will not sacrifice service to our customers in need of assistance,” Frahm said, adding that the team has helped more than 1.4 million mortgage customers avoid foreclosure.
“As the economy improves and we continue to resolve customer needs, we will further reduce the number of delinquent loans to service and the size of the Legacy Asset Servicing organization will be reduced,” he said.
The unit was designed as a “temporary solution to address specific needs” and was built up using contractors and vendors so the bank could eventually reduce it in size, he said.
‘TOO EARLY TO SCALE BACK’
For now, though, the bank is struggling to bring the problem under control.
Moynihan said in October 2011 that mortgage servicing had peaked, but expenses have climbed since then. In May, he told investors the costs should start coming down in the second half of this year, but then in July he said “meaningful” improvement would not begin until the end of this year or early in 2013.
Last month, Chief Financial Officer Bruce Thompson said at an investor conference that lower costs for servicing are “going to be very much in the future.”
The bank has underestimated the extent of problems at the business in the past, the Fed documents show.
In May 2008, the bank said it planned to maintain the “historically high staffing levels” for at least a year after the deal closed, according to the documents.
Despite ramping up staffing, Bank of America has fallen behind rivals in meeting terms of a $25 billion pact finalized in April with state and federal officials.
As of June 30, the bank had not modified any first-lien mortgages under the national mortgage settlement, according to a report issued by monitor Joseph Smith. The other four lenders in the settlement had completed some modifications.
The agreement requires banks to pay penalties over foreclosure-related errors, modify mortgages by reducing principal owed and refinance loans for customers whose mortgages are worth more than their homes. Bank of America owes the most: $11.8 billion in payments and consumer assistance.
Bank of America has called Smith’s report an “early snapshot” and has said it has made significant progress since June 30, completing nearly $600 million in loan modification as of August 21. The bank has said it plans to meet conditions of the settlement.
“It’s clearly too early to scale back because they haven’t even scaled up to meet all of the obligations that have been imposed on them,” said Stella Adams, director of the National Fair Housing Training Academy, which provides fair housing and civil rights training to government agencies, industry officials and others.
via reuters.com
Think twice before charging for waterfront access | Bedford NY Realtor
Many fishermen cut through private property to reach their favorite section of a river. Often, that entry can be illegal trespassing, but there are many places where access is granted and encouraged.
For example, there is a private property owner on a river who for years had a deposit box on a cleared acre of land, a pie-shaped parcel whose “point” was a makeshift boat launch. “Honor system” steel headers crammed coins into the slots of a metal box for the right to use the launch and park their trucks and trailers. The name of the fishing hole opposite the launch got its name from the size of coin that fit the slots in the metal box.
Several years ago, when there was an accident on the launch involving a teenager, I thought about the liability, not only to that parcel but to other properties adjacent to natural bodies of water, such as riverfront restaurants, Puget Sound marina docks and city beaches.
Most states now have guidelines as to how business and rental property owners treat and protect their waterfront, especially when children are present. In summary, these owners are required to make “reasonable” efforts to protect children on their property and from natural bodies of water.
One of the challenges is the definition of “reasonable.” There is no written rule that says that a property owner must fence off a body of water in order to avoid potential liability. And reasonable care applies only to a property owner who derives some economic gain from the children’s presence. A private homeowner has no such duty to protect children who are social guests from the dangers of natural bodies of water.
The reasons for the precautions stem from a terrible case where a 2-year-old child was left a quadriplegic with brain damage after nearly drowning in a creek at a mobile home park. The boys’ parents paid rent for a mobile home space there, plus an additional $1 a day for each of their five children.
According to court documents, there is a clear, shallow, slow-moving creek in summer that can be deep, swift and murky during the winter months. The landlord required families with small children to live at the far end of the park, away from the families without children and in the area closest to the creek.
Although the mobile home park was partially fenced, there was no fence running along the property nearest a grassy play area adjacent to a steep embankment leading to the creek. The parents did not allow their young children to play outside alone and did not allow them to go near the creek by themselves.
The boy was riding a bicycle while the father was making repairs on their home. According to the father, the boy was out of his sight “for less than one minute.” The father found the bicycle at the bottom of the embankment, partially submerged in the creek. A neighbor helping to search for the child eventually found the boy in the creek.
The father and boy, through his guardian, sued the mobile home park for negligence. The trial court ruled that a landowner’s duty to maintain the premises in a reasonably safe condition does not require affirmative acts to protect tenants from the inherent dangers of natural bodies of water.
The father and boy appealed and the high court reversed the trial court’s decision. The case eventually was settled for the full amount of a $500,000 insurance policy.
Generally, a landowner owes a trespasser or a “licensee” only a duty to refrain from “willfully or wantonly” injuring them. A licensee is someone who enters upon the land with the landowner’s consent.
An exception to this rule is the attractive nuisance doctrine. This doctrine, the result of concern for kids who trespass on property to use an attractive and sometimes dangerous element (such as a pond), elevates the standard of care and states the landowner is liable if the danger is not eliminated. However, this does not apply where the hazardous condition is a natural body of water.
According to attorneys familiar with the case, the decision means there is no exception for natural bodies of water where the landlord gets cash from the users. Again, a private homeowner has no such duty to protect children who are social guests from the dangers of natural bodies of water.
However, if you charge to reach the waterfront, make certain you have ample insurance in place.
via inman.com