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Canadian real estate sales slip 2007-10-16 14:57:58 Sales in Canada’s red-hot real estate market cooled in September, but average prices ticked up, according to new figures from the Canadian Real Estate Association. Seasonally adjusted sales last month in 24 major markets fell 3.1 per cent from August to 28,591, CREA said. Sales in the four biggest markets of Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary all declined. But the average price of a resale home rose by almost $3,000 to $328,660 “? up 11.1 per cent from September last year. Prices were up year over year in every major market except Thunder Bay, Ont., where they were 0.9 per cent lower. The big price increases in Saskatoon, Edmonton and Calgary showed some signs of easing. Saskatoon’s average resale home sold for $242,091 in September “? still up 49.3 per cent from last year’s average. But the number of new listings in those hot western markets also rose dramatically year over year, CREA said, helping to bring more balance to those markets. “ ...

Lehman Shutters Maryland Aurora Loan Services Office 2007-10-16 14:23:46 Lehnman Brothers, the Wall Street giant that closed their subprime mortgage origination arm BNC Mortgage in August has shuttered the Maryland branch of their Alt-A mortgage unit, Aurora Loan Services (hat tip friends of Blown Mortgage readers!) amid continually deteriorating market conditions. From Yahoo! Business: Aurora Loan Services LLC, owned by investment banking giant Lehman Bros. Holding Inc., specialized in mortgages that often featured no-money down options and didn’t adhere to stricter lending standards established by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lehman representatives could not be reached for comment, but the decision to shutter the Gaithersburg office was part of a broader strategy unveiled by Lehman in September that resulted in 850 layoffs. Market conditions necessitated “a substantial reduction” in resources, according to a release issued by Lehman. Aurora filed a notice of the layoffs Sept. 7 with the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regula ...

Bitch-N-Moan, Bitch-N-Moan”¦ FINALLY I Am Not Alone 2007-10-16 13:15:00 For over a year now I have been venting the personal frustrations I have with the fact that I see more and more POORLY qualified people entering the field of staging. For the sake time and space, I don’t think it is important that I regurgitate what I have already written of, but if you are interested reading what I had to say, check out these past posts”¦ Under Qualified “stagers” Flood the Market Another FEISTY BLOG about “Professional” Staging! ASP? HSE? What’s-a-stager-SUPPOSED-to-be? Stone Cold Reality: Dying Dreams & Limited Opportunities Inconvenient Truths about Home Staging Anyway, I find am no longer alone. Lately more and more expirienced stagers all across the US have begun to email me and/or called me to voice similar concerns and frustrations.In fact, quite recently, I received a set of photos (above) of a Bad Staging sent to be by an experienced stager (CF) that says they “”¦have had it with crappy staging ...

Paulson: Housing is Biggest Threat to Economy 2007-10-16 08:45:33 Welcome to the party, Hank Paulson - what took you so long to get here?  Waiting for Bernanke, I suppose?  Well it sure is nice that the two of you finally decided to show up.  While you were busy perpetuating the white lie that subrpime mortgage problems were contained; we’ve been busy shooting holes in your theories over here, and are glad to see someone with authority finally come “to the confessional” (as Tanta from C/R likes to say). From Paulson - to you (via Market Watch): “The ongoing housing correction is not ending as quickly as it might have appeared late last year,” Paulson said in remarks prepared for delivery at Georgetown University. “And it now looks like it will continue to adversely impact our economy, our capital markets and many homeowners for some time yet.” “Let me be clear,” Paulson said, “despite strong economic fundamentals, the housing decline is still unfolding. … The longer home prices r ...

Oct. 18th is National Get Smart About Credit Day 2007-10-16 07:53:13 My question is will Mozilo, Bernanke, Paulson, et al. be in attendance picking up some much needed tips about credit use and quality? Couldn’t hurt, right? October 18th is the American Banker’s Association Education Foundation’s “National Get Smart About Credit Day” designed to promote wise credit use. And in light of our current mortgage morass and sea of consumer debt I hope this day gets more run than say “Talk Like a Pirate Day” because our kids need not make the same mistakes of the current generation - hellbent on collecting as much crap as possible before they die - and wiping out any chance at a solvent future for them and their families. No one talks enough about credit, and I’m glad to see that someone is working on some basic credit awareness. Credit comes out of no where - a $5,000 Providian credit line when you are 18 - and promises freedom to acquire the things you want with out any requirement that you understand what y ...

Redfin Palo Alto Meet-Up Today”¦ 2007-10-16 07:40:52 Attention Redfin customers, would-be customers, job-seekers, students, start-up junkies, bloggers, real estate quibblers, grudge-holders and anyone else who would like to meet: legendary Redfin engineering leader Sasha Aickin and I will be in Palo Alto today from 3:15 “? 3:45 at Caffe del Doge, and again at around 6, for as long as people want to meet! Feel free to come by and ask us for a job, or a free cup of hot chocolate, or suggest how our search site could be better, or ask about the model we posted on Guy’s blog, or find out how using our service to buy a home really works. We’d love to meet you all. This should be an improvement over our last meet-up, a chimichanga night at a flooded Azteca. Email glenn (at) redfin (dot) com if you plan on joining us, so we don’t leave without you. We’ll spend the rest of the time kicking off our Stanford recruiting rampage, which involves sitting in a café all day, bloated with muffins, trying to seem hip enoug ...

Where Celebrities Live 2007-10-16 00:53:48 Eddie Murphy had this resort-sized, Mission-style $20 million monster built in 90210 in 2005. Guess his old place was a drag! Oprah’s got 14 bathrooms and 10 fireplaces in this $55 mil Montecito, CA estate. Where does Steadman sleep? J.Lo and Marc bought this red-roofed palace with seven bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms.. Only 12,217 sq. ft.! Jenny from the entire block! Gov. Arnold and wife Maria Shriver live in this $11.9 million dollar college-like manse in Brentwood. Casa la vista, baby! John Travolta built this $2.5 million dollar Florida house at the end of a private runway in Ocala, Florida, which includes parking for his Boeing 707 and Gulfstream jets. Oh, and a 16-car garage. Thank you for flying Air Xenu! Halle Berry’s hang in Malibu cost $8 million. Nearly every room has a coastline view. A nice litterbox for Catwoman. ... Celebrities

Petition to Correct the Wrongs in Current Mortgage Industry 2007-10-15 20:31:00 A petition has been created by the founder of the Market Ticker forums to address the current abuses and absurdities associated with the mortgage industry and current structure of the mortgage market pyramid.  It is now available to sign and submit to your Congressman. To be honest, I don’t agree 100% with everything that is in the petition, but I do think it is better than anything else that is out there and represents the first concerted efforts to let politicians know how people for responsible lending feel on the issue of any type of mortgage bail out.  Read the petition on responsible lending here; and if you agree with the spirit of the document I would recommend signing. No one agrees 100% on the right way to fix this thing (or if it should be “fixed” at all) but I believe there is enough in this particular petition that we can all agree on to warrant signing.  I personally have done so. Let me know what you think and if you’re choosing to sign it or n ...

Chain of Title, Title Seasoning and Land Trusts 2007-10-15 15:53:51 These three strange concepts are tightly related and may make or break your deal. Chain of Title is the real estate property ownership history. You may think that only current state of title is important, but in reality last couple years of ownership are important because of two words: mortgage fraud. Here is the most common scenario of mortgage fraud. A scammer, mortgage broker and crooked appraiser work together to pull this off. Let’s say a scammer buys a house worth 100k, appraisal is done to show that house is worth 150k, mortgage broker falsifies documents and buyer from behind the interstate overpass is brought to the closing to sign the papers. The homeless buyer gets his $100 for troubles and $50k get split up by the 3 scammers. New mortgage never gets a single payment made and the house goes into foreclosure. Banks are not dumb, after couple hundred cases like this they instituted a new requirement “? Title Seasoning. What they saw is when house gets sold 2-3 tim ...

The rock stars of real estate? 2007-10-15 15:38:22 There seems to be a clamor by a certain segment of the real estate community who are looking for a leader, for a rock star of real estate, a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs to lead us into the next paradigm. Does anyone remember when Century 21 hired Ringo as spokesmodel? Century 21 even had an agent recruitment CD hosted by Ringo. Anyone got a copy of that? Everyone’s looking for a rock star, even head-hunters: (Active Rain seeks Ruby-on-Rails Rock Star) ...

The Countrywide Pledge - for those interested 2007-10-15 12:21:35 Here is it in full (hat tip to friends of Blown Mortgage for sharing with us) - the Countrywide pledge being signed by Mozilo’s employees in a sign of desperation solidarity against the unfair attacks of media and others surrounding the mortgage industry. For nearly forty years, Countrywide has executed the mission of our founders to lower the barriers to homeownership for all Americans. We’ve helped more than 20 million Americans attain and preserve homeownership. We intend to carry this mission forward for another forty years. Today, we’re being attacked by competitors and detractors. They’re attacking our business policies, our morals and our ethics. These unwarranted and malicious attacks are directed at all of us. It’s now become personal, and it’s time to remind everyone who we are and what we stand for. We must go on the offense and tell our story with pride. Countrywide Home Loans is launching a coordinated, comprehensive effort to Prot ...

Redfin Model on Kawasaki Blog”¦ 2007-10-15 08:25:02 For those of you who like to track our daring exploits around the web, Redfin has posted a generic version of its financial model along with a brief overview of what might be useful about it on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Whereas the initial post provided a few actual data-points, this one offers only sample data, but hey! there is an entire model that you can use for formulas and formats. We published the generic model because so many people asked for it, not to make a statement about whether our actual projections are accurate or not. We’re not so smart as to believe our projections are any better than anyone else’s. Thanks again to Guy for hosting us. We also owe folks an answer to the question we posed a few weeks ago as to which blog sent the most people to Redfin, on a week where we appeared not only on Guy’s blog but also on TechCrunch (a brief but kind mention), and Slashdot, which gave our new devblog its first big hit. In fact, the most traffic came from Life ...

Dead Man Walking - Wholesale Lending is Marching Towards Extinction 2007-10-15 07:13:49 There has been a whisper in the mortgage-lending winds, subtle at first, but growing louder everyday: wholesale lending by mortgage brokers is on its death bed. It hasn’t been proclaimed, in fact the big players are adamantly voicing support for their affiliated brokers, but the actions of large banks belie their big talk. For all of the kudos and reassurances as an important business channel lavished on top of brokers by lending institutions, the rug is slowly and silently being pulled out from under the broker population. This isn’t a conspiracy theory - the facts are clear for all who choose to look past the PR spin put out by lenders; whose only motivation is to drain the last red cent out of this feeble business model before finally cutting off its oxygen with the heel of their mighty boot. If you don’t see the change, it is because you are blinded by both the slow, silent moves of the attack and your own hopeful optimism of a return to normalcy. But there wil ...

Google Street View Grows Bigger 2007-10-15 03:54:00 Google Maps’ controversial Street View feature (for more, see Google Maps Hits the Streets) expands to six more cities today with the addition of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson to its database. As a bonus, the images in Phoenix, Tucson and parts of Chicago are all in high resolution and the service has added the ability to pan up in any of the views, which is especially useful when looking at tall buildings. We could open our web browser and find zillions of pictures of hot babes within seconds. In better quality. And more naked. But, there?s something about finding a blurry pic of a semi-naked babe drawn on a truck on Google Maps that makes our heart race… ... Google

‘Home stretch’ for Toronto tax vote 2007-10-15 02:59:33 Both sides of debate on vehicle registration and land transfer tax gear up for final week of lobbying It’s a week to go until the crucial October 22 vote at city hall, and groups for and against the land transfer tax and vehicle registration fee are strategizing over how best to influence Toronto councillors. “Clearly we’re in the home stretch. This is a critical time,” said Von Palmer, a spokesperson for the Toronto Real Estate Board, a group vehemently opposed to the house purchase tax Mayor David Miller wants to implement to address the city’s serious revenue shortfall. Leading up to the July vote at city hall on the two controversial taxes, groups like the real estate group and Toronto Board of Trade lobbied councillors heavily. See full story in the Toronto Star » ...