More discussion was raised in the House Financial Services Committee regarding regulatory reform to cram down mortgage loans. The legislation, if passed, would allow bankruptcy judges to retroactively cram down or modify mortgage loans to terms more affordable for the homeowner if service providers won’t perform more loan modifications.

Springing into action, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) promptly responded.  David Kittle, MBA Chairman, issued a blistering statement noting that should the legislation pass, it would destabilize the mortgage industry, an industry [...]

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In tackling the very grown-up and serious tasks of selling and buying a house for the first time, the first term that made me panic was “pre-approval letter,” because I simply had no idea what it meant. When I heard it I was nowhere near a computer and still didn’t have an iPhone, so I couldn’t look it up on the internet, which is my first instinct in that kind of situation. Thank goodness for the internet, because [...]

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The national unemployment rate rose to 8.1 percent as employers cut an additional 651,000 jobs in February. This is the highest unemployment rate that this nation has seen since late 1983. There have been almost 2 million jobs lost in the last three months alone.

The figures were far worse than analysts had expected and unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any upside coming in the next several months. So how is the high unemployment rate going to affect real estate?

Previously [...]

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So the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to try and save your home. Really? They launched the “Making Home Affordable” or “Home Affordable Modification “initiative today and if you have nothing better to do, you can read the 17 pages of Government speak at:

http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/reports/modification_program_guidelines.pdf

For those of you looking for some of the high-level highlights so you can move on with your day, here they are:

Eligibility Requirements

Origination Date of Loan Subject to Modification:
The mortgage to be [...]

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The credit crunch, bank failures and Wall Street meltdown has been the negative talk for the last several weeks. And before that all we tended to hear about was how bad the housing market had become. Has all this negative talk killed the American Dream of owning a home? I think not.

If you look at the increased traffic to real estate and real estate related websites like Roost.com, people are still out there trying to grab on to that [...]

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