Sunday

New law extending the foreclosure process by 90 days!


BIG HELP FOR STRUGGLING HOMEOWNERS!

90-DAY EXTENSION TO FORECLOSURE PROCESS

California Foreclosure Prevention Act: Mortgage Lenders foreclosing on certain loans are prohibited from giving a notice of sale until the lapse of at least 3 months plus 90 days after the filing of the notice of default A loan servicer can obtain an exemption from this requirement by demonstrating that it has comprehensive loan modification options.

The goal of the California Foreclosure Prevention Act is to release the pressure on foreclosures and their severely negative consequences. Aiming to provide additional time for lenders to work out a short sale or loan modification with borrowers while also providing incentive for lenders to establish better short sale and loan modification programs.
This bill, which was enacted into law on February 20, 2009 will stay in effect only until January 1, 2011
With the current time-line, a lender who files a notice of default has to wait at least 3 months before giving a notice of sale. The new law extends that 3-month period by an additional 90 days.
Along with that in the preexisting law, foreclosure process would take a minimum of 4 months from the filing of a notice of default until the final trustee’s sale.

Under the new law, that period extended by 90 more days for a total of about 7 months.


Is this positive or negative? How do you think that this will affect the market?



For any help with Property Foreclosure questions contact:

Oliver Graf
Real Estate Expert

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Monday

Buy a house and get $8,000 Back!!



$8,000 Homebuyer Tax Credit!

-The new American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 bill offers an $8,000 tax credit to first time home buyers!

-This first-time home buyer credit is available for people purchasing a primary residence on or after January 1, 2009 through December 1, 2009.

-The credit does not require a repayment.

-Many of the fundamentals of the credit will be similar to the act under the 2008 rules: The credit will be claimed on a tax return to reduce the buyer's income tax liability. If any credit amount remains unused, then the unused amount will be refunded as a check to the buyer.

If you are a First time home buyer, take advantage of this eight thousand dollar credit...this is a great opportunity to buy a piece of Real Estate!

Do you think that they should extend the credit, and why?


If you have any questions contact:

Oliver Graf
Real Estate Expert

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Friday

Foreclosure Process Time Line



General Foreclosure Timeline

The time line below is a typical California non-judicial foreclosure. The foreclosure process does not begin until the lender feels they have tried all avenues for fixing the payment delinquency. Normally, this will happen after the borrower has missed 3 monthly mortgage payments. The lender will contact the borrower several times prior to beginning the foreclosure process .The official foreclosure process then begins by the lender contacting a Trustee and instructing them to file a Notice of Default.


Day 1 - Notice Of Default recorded with County Recorder

The first 10 business days
- Trustee mails Notice of default to borrower(s) with recording the date

1st month- Lender Mails Notice of Default to borrower again

90 days after Notice of Default - Set Sale Date, time and location Unless a bankruptcy has been filed, or other event occurs that holds the timeline( At this point Short sale is a great last resort option http://www.shortsale2020.com )

25 days before Sale Date
- Send Notice Of Sale to IRS (if applicable)

20 days before Sale Date- Begin publishing Notice Of Sale in an adjudicated newspaper. (must run for 3 consecutive weeks).

20 days before Sale Date
- Post the Notice of Sale on the property itself. Most services will photograph the posting location for your records.

20 days before Sale Date- Mail Notice of Sale to borrower and required parties.

14 days prior to Sale Date- Record Notice of Sale with county recorder's office

5 days prior to Sale Date- The borrower's right to reinstate expires.

On sale Date- The property is sold to high bidder or reverts back to lender

For any help with Property Foreclosure questions contact:

Oliver Graf
Real Estate Expert


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Thursday

Tips for purchasing a home with FHA or VA financing


Tips for purchasing with FHA or VA Financing.

If you are planning on purchasing a home soon and will be using a VA or FHA loan in order to finance your purchase, you must include that information in your offer since government loans place additional financial and performance obligations on the seller know as Non-Allowable Fees
Non Allowable Fees
For starters, FHA and VA loans prohibit buyers from paying certain fees that are often charged by lenders, escrow companies, settlement agents, and title companies. They are known as "non-allowable" fees. These fees still get charged, but as the buyer of the property, you are "not allowed" to pay them. The result is that the seller will have to end up paying them instead of you.

Most of these "non-allowable" fees come from your lender. By the time you are ready to make an offer you should have already been pre-qualified by a loan officer, so you will want to ask how much the lender’s non-allowable fees will be. You might also want to get an idea of what non-allowable fees will be charged by the escrow company and the title insurance company.

Since these are fees the seller would not pay on an offer with conventional financing, this information must be included in your offer. You should also realize that since the seller will be paying these additional fees, they may not be as willing to go down on their price. If not, you as the buyer could also offer over asking price and ask the seller to credit that overage towards those fees.
VA and FHA Appraisals

Home appraisals and inspections on FHA and VA loans are stricter than on conventional loans and generally more expensive. These appraisers are required to perform a certain minimum number of inspections as well as evaluate the current market value of the property. These inspections are generally not as detailed as a professional home inspection and should not be considered a substitute, but sometimes they require repairs which you might want to negotiate with the seller.

If there is significant repair work required, add a clause to your offer that goes something like this. "If required repairs cost less than the maximum amount allowed, the excess will be credited toward buyer’s closing costs."


What have you noticed about FHA offers?

To your success,

Oliver Graf

Real Estate Expert


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Monday

Short Sales- A better way to sell your home and avoid Forclosure!

Short Sales Are Helping Countless Homeowners...

















In todays Market nearly 20% (9 million people) of homeowners across the country- are "upside down" on their mortgages. Meaning, they owe more on their mortgage balance than their properties are actually worth.

Some people would predict that these people will walk away and accept loosing their home to foreclosure.... But there is light at the end of the tunnel! A lot of homeowners are starting to understand the benefits of a Short Sale rather than a foreclosure. Both serve the homeowner the same in the sense that they will be a walking away from a depreciating asset, but the Short Sale holds a lot more benefits to the homeowner:

Credit Impact: For starters a Short Sale will affect a person’s credit significantly less than a foreclosure. Meaning that someone with a Short Sale in their credit is a lot more likely to qualify for a new mortgage in as little as 12 months, whereas a foreclosure and/or bankruptcy will haunt someone for up to 7 years.

Stress: On top of the credit implications nobody ever talks about the effect on homeowner’s moral when they are going through a foreclosure. It’s never a good feeling for someone that is just watching the bank take their homes away. With a Short Sale, the homeowner will have more time to make moving preparations.

Homeowner Help: With a Short Sale the homeowner is completely involved in the process, making their own decisions with the help and guidance of a Short Sale Professional. The Short Sale specialist will handle all communications with the lender, as well as market and sell the property with the help of an Real Estate Agent. This allows the homeowner a great alternative to foreclosure or bankruptcy!

Homeowners that are upside down on their property or facing foreclosure should contact a Short Sale Specialist once they have missed at least one mortgage payment. You can contact Short Sale Pros who offers a short sale service at no cost at no cost to the homeowner. People will contact short sale professionals since very few Realtors have the skills to process complex short sale transactions, and some short sale companies can charge thousands to process a short sale.



San Diego school teacher Marlen Sepulveda stated, "When my adjustable rate mortgage increased and my salary was jeopardized due to economic conditions, I couldn't afford my mortgage any more and I didn't know where to turn. I contacted the Short Sale Pros and they answered all my questions and negotiated my short sale, all at no cost to me."



Remember…You have options if you need to sell or are facing foreclosure! Don’t just let the bank take your home!


Sam Khorramian

Success Expert


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Tuesday

Obama Administration's is trying to make Homes affordable for desperate homeowners



New mortgage guidelines to help struggling Homeowners...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are extending the suspension of all eviction proceedings through March 31, 2009 as Fannie Mae implements the Home Affordable Refinance and Home Affordable Modification initiatives. Both programs are available to its servicers and borrowers as part of the Obama Administration's Making Home Affordable program.

-Most borrowers refinancing an existing Fannie Mae loan will not be required to buy new or additional mortgage insurance if the loan at the time of the refinance is more than 80% of a home's value.

-Fannie Mae can refinance loans up to 105% of a home's value with this new flexibility, so even borrowers who are "underwater" may be able to refinance.

-Beginning in April, all 1,600 lenders and 29,000 mortgage brokers using Fannie Mae's Desktop Underwriter platform will be able to process an application to refinance any existing Fannie Mae loan, allowing for greater origination capacity and easier refinancing for borrowers.

Through the Home Affordable Modification, loan servicers participating in the program may reduce interest rates, lengthen the payment time frame or take other steps, such as principal forbearance, to bring the monthly payments down to as low as 31% of the borrower's gross income. Fannie Mae has also issued special foreclosure sale requirements. A foreclosure sale may not occur on any Fannie Mae loan until the loan servicer verifies that the borrower is ineligible for a Home Affordable Modification and all other foreclosure prevention alternatives have been exhausted.

Kevin Caylor

Pacific First Mortgage
San Diego



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Monday

Buy Properties for under $10,000



DETROIT – Landlord Nation, where foreclosure notices are plentiful and there are at least 1,800 homes for under $10,000 that once were worth at least 10 times more.

In extreme cases, homes are on sale for $1 or less, which has enticed investors to Detroit from as far away as the United Kingdom and Australia.

"In the past few months, I've picked up 10 new clients from out of state that are buying in bulk," said Mike Shannon, a suburban Detroit real estate agent. His office specializes in foreclosures in a city that's among the national leaders.

"They're coming to us, saying `Look, I want to buy 50, 100, 1,000.' They want to own every decent and cheap house they can find."

Despite a stagnant retail housing market, real estate sales of foreclosed homes are booming. Agents regularly fields calls from eager prospects, and recently sold 30 homes in one day to one buyer. A trio of U.K. investors has bought a half-dozen and plans many more.

The outside investors aren't only interested in Detroit, but it's been targeted because of the sheer volume of homes and the fact that values have fallen so much more than elsewhere.

Detroit now has the lowest ownership rate for single-family detached homes of the 20 largest cities in the country, according to data analyzed by longtime Detroit demographer Kurt Metzger.

Even the sale of U.S. Housing and Urban Development homes has been impacted by the poor housing climate in Detroit. The average sales prices of such homes plunged from $46,702 in 2003 to $8,692 last year. Through the first month of 2009, average sales were $6,035.

Still, not all of Detroit's real estate market has bottomed out. Listings include a seven-bedroom, 11,580 square-foot Tudor in Detroit's historic Indian Village neighborhood for $849,900, and a $765,000 penthouse condo in the city's Albert Kahn Building.

What's the effect on a city whose population has plummeted to half its size since the 1950s with no sign of return? The winners might be the renters lucky enough to live in a home that's been fixed up by a legitimate landlord.

Click on the picture below and see this great resource to finding great deals, get HUD Foreclosed Homes now..

Search Foreclosures, Nationwide!



Where are you seeing the best deals?

To your success,

Oliver Graf

Real Estate Expert
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af360


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Wednesday

Ex-lenders profit from delinquent home loans Countrywide's former execs buy mortgages

CALABASAS — Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation's economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering.

So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford Kurland, Countrywide's former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect from borrowers.

“It has been very successful – very strong,” John Lawrence, the company's head of loan servicing, told Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom at PennyMac's spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it's off-the-charts good,” he told Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his white leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.

As hundreds of billions of dollars flow from Washington to jump-start the nation's staggering banks, automakers and other industries, a new economy is emerging of businesses that hope to make money from the various government programs that make up the largest economic rescue in history.

They include contractors who are supplementing the labor of overworked government bureaucrats, big investors who are buying up failed banks taken over by the federal government, and lobbyists helping businesses receive a chunk of the bailout money. And there is PennyMac, led by Kurland, 56, once the soft-spoken No. 2 to Angelo Mozilo, the perpetually tanned former chief executive of Countrywide and the firm's public face.

Kurland has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from big players such as BlackRock, the investment manager, to finance his startup. Having sold off close to $200 million in stock before leaving Countrywide, Kurland has also put up some of his own cash.

While some critics are distressed that Kurland and his team are back in business, the executives say that PennyMac's operations serve as a model for how the federal government, working with the nation's banks, can help stabilize the housing market and lead the nation out of the worst recession in decades.

“It is very important to the entire team here to be part of a solution,” Kurland said, standing in his office, which has views of the nearby Santa Monica Mountains.

It is quite evident that their efforts – and the nascent government program to encourage other private investors to work with lenders – are helping many distressed homeowners.

“Literally, their assistance saved my family's home,” said Robert Robinson, of Felton, Pa., whose interest rate was cut by more than half, making his mortgage affordable again, even though he recently lost his job.

But to some, it is disturbing to see Kurland and his former Countrywide executives in the industry again.

“It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it,” said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, which for more than a decade has sought to place limits on what it calls abusive lending practices by Countrywide and other companies.

More than any other major lending institution, Countrywide has become synonymous with the excesses that led to the housing bubble. The once-high-flying firm's reputation has been so tarnished that Bank of America, which bought it last year at a bargain price, announced that the name and logo of Countrywide, once the biggest mortgage lender in the United States, would soon disappear forever.

Kurland acknowledges pushing Countrywide into the type of higher-risk loans that have since, in large numbers, gone into default. But he said that during his tenure, he always insisted that the loans go only to borrowers who could afford to repay them. He also said that Countrywide's riskiest lending took place after he left the company, in late 2006, after what he said was an internal conflict with Mozilo and other executives, whom he blames for loosening loan standards.

In retrospect, Kurland said, he regrets what happened at Countrywide and in the mortgage industry as a whole but does not believe he deserves blame.

“It is horrible what transpired in the industry,” said Kurland, who has never been subject to regulatory actions.

But lawsuits against Countrywide raise questions about Kurland's portrayal of his role. They accuse him of being at the center of a culture shift at Countrywide that started in 2003, as the company popularized a type of loan that often came with low “teaser” interest rates and that, for some, became unaffordable when the low rate expired.

The lawsuits, including one filed by New York state's comptroller, say Kurland was well aware of the risks and even misled Countrywide's investors about the precariousness of the company's portfolio, which grew to $463 billion in loans from $62 billion, three times faster than the market nationwide, during the final six years of his tenure.

“Kurland is seeking to capitalize on a situation that was a product of his own creation,” said Blair Nicholas, a lawyer representing retired Arkansas teachers who are also suing Kurland and other former Countrywide executives. “It is tragic and ironic. But then again, greed is a growth industry.”

David Willingham, a lawyer representing Kurland in several of these suits, said the allegations related to Kurland were without merit, and motions had been filed to seek their dismissal.

Federal banking officials – without mentioning Kurland by name – added that just because an executive worked at an institution like Countrywide did not mean he was to blame for questionable lending practices. They said it was important to do business with experienced mortgage operators such as Kurland who know how to work with borrowers creatively to renegotiate their delinquent loans.

PennyMac makes its money by buying loans from struggling or failed financial institutions at such a huge discount that it stands to profit enormously even if it offers to slash interest rates or make other loan modifications to entice borrowers into resuming payments.

By Eric Lipton

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

2:00 a.m. March 4, 2009



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Commercial Real Estate Calamity?

Real Estate Commercial Investing?


Today’s results indicate that the commercial real estate decline has firmly arrived and it is notable with a marked decline for all components with three of the four now showing annual declines resulting in the first year-over-year decline to the total index on record.

It’s important to keep in mind that the commercial real estate decline is coming from data that was settled well in advance of the historic stock market and wider macroeconomic crisis which, in all likeliness, will result in significant additional downward pressure on commercial real estate prices.

Clearly, commercial real estate, having already matched and surpassed the level of decline seen after the dot-com bust, now sit poised on the verge of an unprecedented slump.


When do you think the commercial market will start decline?

To your success,

Oliver Graf

Real Estate Expert
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Monday

Fannie Mae Increases number of properties someone can purchase from 4 to 10!


Fannie Mae recently raised the property limit that a person can have under their name back up to 10 properties. This is great news for qualified investors, now instead of a limit of 4 they can purchase 10 cash flowing properties.

To qualify for properties 5 through 10 using conventional financing a buyer:
- Must have amiddle credit score of at least 720
- Must be able to fully document their income with their tax returns
- Must be able to put down 25% of the sales price.
- Must have income strong enough to result in a debt-to-income ratio of 45% or less.
- And the kicker- the buyer must also show 6 months of liquid reserves for principal, interest, taxes and insurance on not only the subject property but on all their properties -including their primary residence.

Assets from IRAs and 401(k)s may be used but could be devalued depending on the type of asset. One example would be stocks which would be reduced to 50% of the face value.


What do you think this will do for the market?

To your success,

Oliver Graf

Real Estate Expert


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"Green" Money for Free!

The “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” was passed into law - a barely publicized “sweetner” to the new Bill was an unlimited tax credit for installing some alternate energy systems.clip_image002

Solar Water Heating systems have been approved for 30% of the cost of the system or up to $2,000. If you install a Photovoltaic System (electricity via solar power) to your house you can claim up to 30% of the total cost! That’s is a potential credit of around $7,500-$9,000 based on the cost of typical system.

Other items that would be considered “energy efficient home improvements” are replacement windows, insulation, small wind energy systems and non-solar water heaters. The maximum claim amount allowed is up to $500 for these types of improvements.

How it works is if you want to install qualifying energy efficient products into your home from January 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009 you can earn tax credits. Unfortunately 2008 installations do not qualify for the tax credit.

So now you will be rewarded for taking the time to make energy efficient improvements to your home and help save valuable resources at the same time.

Great Solar Website, Go to www.BuySolarPanelsHere.com

How do you think this will motivate people to get involved with the "Green Movement"?

To your success,

Oliver Graf

Real Estate Expert
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