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The majority of sales in my area, MD and Northern Virginia, are foreclosures, short sales and a few lower priced new homes. That cannot sustain a market. The vast majority of home owners who would, could sell cannot because they owe far more than the assessed/market/appraised value of their property. How can they sell. This important segment of the market, move-up buyers and sellers are now hostages in their properties watching their assessments go down and unable to sell their homes, even in case of emergency, job transfers or outgrowth. How can the market recover when the average home owner sees that their property is worth about 2/3 of what they owe? Lenn Harley Broker Homefinders.com http://www.homefinders.com
Right on target. The consumer is the key to recovery and, as of today, the consumer is completely absent in the scenario of the "fixers"; Treasury, HUD, Fannie, Freddie, Fed, SEC. Only the FDIC has even voiced proposals for any relief for the victims of the perfidy perpetrated by the cabal of Wall Street and the Regulators and Oversight Committees in Congress. We have, IMO, witnessed a monumental failure of government of such scale that it will affect the national economy for decades to come. Worse yet, it just got started. Lenn Harley Optomist
Predatory lending is not new. It's been around forever and will always be around. Back in the early 1900s, prior to mortgage insurance, lenders routinely charged high interest, pre-payment penalties, etc. and foreclosed on a dime with no forebearance or refinance or loan modification. The difference today and what caused the meltdown in this mortgage mess was the systematic securitization of mortgage backed sedurities and the lack of disclosure for these products What investor wouldn't trust Fannie and Freddie to offer safe securities?? HA! Now that we know the full story, we know that the Wall Street investment bankers formulated these instruments without disclosure. In fact, many of them were "off balance sheet" products. Of course, as long as Fannie and Freddie kept up their schedule of payments to the "oversignt" committee politicians, the public was not going to find out what was happening to their mortgages. We've been had folks and now the country, even the world is paying. This was the biggest financial fraud perpetrated on the Unites States citizens, home buyers, investors in history. Every Wall Street and Fannie and Freddie executive that produced a fraudulent financial statement shoule be in jail. What are the odds? The FBI will go after some mortgage brokers, lenders and even a few appraisers and real estate brokers/agents, but the Wall Street crowd just got handed a few $Trillion Dollars to keep them in business. Lenn Harley Broker Homefinders.com http://www.homefinders.com