As usual, there are a couple of good posts on the Altos Research blog this week.
"It's up. For now." looks at the overall market nationally and latest Case Shiller numbers. The Altos data is highly correlated with Case Shiller but leads it. This means that they can typically see where Case Shiller and the market is headed before we get there.
Also member Laura Duggan has a really good market update post on her blog The Heart of Austin. Her market update for July shows a break-down of home sales by price band, plus she's added the month's of inventory and color coded them to indicate what these inventory levels mean given the current levels of demand:
This is exactly the sort of information and market insight that buyers and sellers expect to receive from their agents.
Everything you need to know about the Making Home Affordable
Program and the mandatory process, rules and paperwork for Short Sales...
The ILHM Center for Asset Preservation (CAP)
announces new training specific to the Making Home Affordable Program
(MHA). The central focus of our CAP training is doing Short Sales
using the new mandatory process, guidelines, and required paperwork.
The training also provides an overview of other MHA foreclosure
avoidance options, as well as key information on the Mortgage Debt
Forgiveness Act -- all of the key things agents must know for
successful short sales under the new rules.
We created CAP
and began developing this Short Sale training for our ILHM members, but
when we discovered that no one was offering training covering Making
Home Affordable, we decided to open the training to all agents.
This information is ‘must have’ information for agents hoping to
help homeowners avoid foreclosure and, it is essential for completing
successful short sales for borrowers who must sell.
Be sure to watch the “MHA Myths” video above if you’re hearing that Making Home Affordable isn’t important!
At ILHM, we believe strongly that all of America’s REALTORS® must get
involved, get trained and get to work to help homeowners in their
battle to avoid foreclosure and minimize the negative credit and tax
consequences they are facing. As an industry, Realtors are key to
helping get American households back on their feet and the economy back
to good health.
For agents who have taken short sale training in the past or even
earned a distressed property designation, the CAP course is ongoing
Making Home Affordable resource your must have.
Making Home
Affordable covers almost nine out of ten home loans and changes almost
everything about how Short Sales are done. CAP’s new up-to-date
training reflects the new processes, rules, guidelines and standardized
paperwork which are now required. In fact, we challenge agents to take
the quick quiz about Short Sales on our CAP website. We think most agents will be surprised by the correct answers.
Agents completing CAP training online or at live events will earn a CAP Short Sale Achievement Certificate.
Texas agents will earn 15 hours of continuing education credit for the
live CAP training event in Houston which will be held at the Hilton
Post Oak Hotel near the Galleria Shopping complex.
In addition
to the Making Home Affordable training, The Short Sale Success Summit
2009 will include panels and presentations featuring government
officials, loss mitigators, and real estate agents specializing in
Short Sales.
A special module on the impact of MHA and the
Debt Forgiveness act on luxury properties will be included. There will
also be special networking opportunities. Call or email us with your questions.
Based on Deutsche Bank analysis, 14 million U.S. homeowners had
negative equity at the end of the first quarter 2009, that's about 27% of
owners with a mortgage.
According to a story yesterday in MarketWatch Deutsche Bank estimates that 25 million homeowners, or 48% of those with mortgages, will owe more on
the loan than the house is worth by the first quarter of 2011.
This summer the Obama administration has announced new rules and procedures that change the way loan modification, short sales, deeds-in-lieu-of-foreclosure, and foreclosures are handled by the banks and their servicers.
These new rules are just beginning to be implemented. In fact earlier this week the Treasury publicly reprimanded a handful of banks for their lack of action in implementing some aspects of the plan. The government is also having Freddie Mac develop a "second look" process to audit MHA
modification applications that have been declined on an ongoing basis.
Also, day before yesterday, Treasury published the first of its monthly Servicer Performance Reports, which track loan modification activity at the individual servicer level.
Bottom line?
Forget what you know. The rules are changing and its a whole new ball game when it comes short sales. We'll be covering the New Rules for Short Sale Success in our webinar for members on August 20th.
Invitations went out by email today. If you are a member and didn't receive one, drop us a line.
In our July webinar for members, "Web and Social Media Tools for Real Estate" Aaron Wheeler and Dustin Luther shared some great tips and tricks on variety of topics (members can access the recording here.) Honestly there was so much to cover an hour just wasn't enough. We hope to bring each of them back to dig a little deeper.
Many of the questions about Facebook centered around how to separate one's WORK and PERSONAL worlds on Facebook. Dustin talked about using Facebook business PAGES to connect with business associates and keeping your Facebook Friends personal.
This is easy on a going forward basis, but since Facebook Pages are relatively new and most of us have both business associates and personal contacts as our Facebook Friends, figuring out how to effectively deal with the existing mix might seem tricky. Regrettably we ran out of time before we could explore this issue in more depth.
Well, this morning I stuumbled across this post by Mike Mueller on his Trulia blog that talks in more detail about ways to handle this. It is worth checking out if you are struggling with "business and pleasure" on Facebook.
