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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Big Mother (page 14 of 15)

February 25, 2009

The three little pigs and the housing rescue plan, a modern fable

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Once upon a time there were three little pigs, and, although they were brothers and looked a lot a like, they could not have been more different.

The first little pig was hard-working and thrifty. He spent very little of his income, saving and investing as much money as he could. He lived with his mother well into adulthood, helping her with her expenses. He finally bought a home of his own when he could afford to pay for it all in cash. As you might expect, the thrifty little pig’s home wasn’t flashy, but it was all his, free and clear.

The second little pig didn’t save very much of his income, but he earned a lot of money as a rising executive, and he had an uncanny luck in the housing market. He bought a condominium on his 18th birthday, then traded up to his first single-family home before he was 21. By the time he was 30, the lucky little pig owned a very stately executive home — and he had been able to make a whopping 50% down-payment.

The third little pig wasn’t very good at working hard, and he had never kept a job long enough to get a raise. He wasn’t at all good at saving money, but he could borrow and spend it better than any little pig anywhere. Like the lucky little pig, he moved away from home early, but he just kept moving — from apartments to friends’ couches to rental homes and then to one girlfriend’s house after another.

If you are a liberal, you may be thinking of the third brother as the unfortunate little pig. If you are a conservative, you will want to call him the lazy little pig — or worse. To keep the peace, let’s just call him the puerile little pig — the little brother who never quite grew up.

The original version of this story was about construction quality as a metaphor for planning ahead, anticipating disasters so they don’t take you by surprise. But the world of real estate has changed a lot since then. The most important Read more

February 24, 2009

Sorry Europe. Our President Might Just “Cowboy Up”

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Bank of America is getting slaughtered by short sellers.  The stock has plummeted to under 10% of its March, 2008 value.  Of course, a few things happened on the way to the slaughterhouse:

  • The bought Countrywide, America’s largest mortgage originator.
  • They bought Merrill Lynch, America’s largest retail securities firm.

Ken Lewis took on a lot of crap on the road to ubiquity.  2009 promises to be more bad news for the financial supermarket as  Countrywide option ARMs and  subprime loans, originated in 2007 by Merrill Lynch unit First Franklin, become wallpaper.

Comrades Obama and Geithner will surely nationalize the Company, to better reflect its name, right?

“Not so fast” says Jason Schwartz of Seeking Alpha.  Just because Obama admitted to sharing his toys in Kindergarten, that doesn’t necessarily make him a died-in-the-wool Marxist.  Schwartz chalks the whole thing up to wishful thinking by our European cousins:

The market is running wild on some hyped up article written in the Financial Times that claims Obama is considering nationalizing the banks. If you actually read the article you’ll notice the anti-American sentiment at the very beginning when they say that ‘nationalization has long been regarded in the U.S. as a folly of Europeans…’ Ok, I get it, Europe has been right all along. Whatever. Obama’s true feelings on nationalization came out in his ABC interview after Geither’s banking speech when he laughed out loud and said, “Sweden had like five banks. We’ve got thousands of banks…managing and overseeing anything of that scale…wouldn’t make sense. And we also have different traditions in this country.”

Source documents suggest that Schwartz might be as credible as our resident “tin foil hat” theorist:

Long regarded in the US as a folly of Europeans, nationalisation is gaining rapid acceptance among Washington opinion-formers – and not just with Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman. Perhaps stranger still, many of those talking about nationalising banks are Republicans.

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator for South Carolina, says that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agree with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”.

“Nationalisation” sounds a whole lot more “civilized” than Read more

February 21, 2009

Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

President Barrack Obama came to Mesa Wednesday to announce his new housing initiative. The location made for good political theater, given that metropolitan Phoenix is one of the hardest-hit real estate markets.

The president promises millions of refinanced or renegotiated mortgages, at a price tag of $275 billion. The putative beneficiaries are homeowners, who may be able to negotiate their monthly payments down to less than 30% of their monthly incomes. But it is the lenders who will cash in, if the Obama plan works.

How’s that? Obama is hoping to shove a floor under still-declining home prices. Lenders will take a hit on millions of reformulated mortgages, but the hope is that this will save them even more money, in the long run, by stemming the rising tide of foreclosures.

In other words, the Obama plan is a price-support scheme. The market argues right now that homes are overpriced — which in turn suggests that the available supply of homes substantially exceeds existing demand.

That’s important. Prices for premium-quality homes are very low, and interest rates are still hovering at historic lows. Mortgage money is easily available to owner-occupants, and Fannie Mae just loosened its standards for rental-home investors. Even so, the number of homes being offered for sale at current prices still exceeds the number of buyers willing to pay those prices.

In reality, prices need to continue to drop until demand matches or eclipses supply. It wouldn’t hurt to convert some housing to other uses, or simply to tear it down altogether.

But forcing an arbitrary floor under prices is unlikely to have happy consequences. Despite his rhetoric, Obama’s plan can only reward our economy’s wasteful grasshoppers, at the expense of its thrifty ants. A price-support will serve to delay recovery, since it will do nothing to solve the supply and demand problem. And, as the worst of all foreseeable consequences, a price-support plus the $8,000 tax credit from last week’s stimulus bill could Read more

February 20, 2009

Bankrupt Ideas for Changing Bankruptcy

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Two excerpts from a local article:  Bankruptcy reform could help hard-up homeowners

Overwhelmed by debt from credit cards, a $536-a-month truck payment, $8000 in overdue property taxes and two mortgages, the single homeowner is hoping (San Diego bankruptcy attorney) Colwell can remove the $84,000 second loan on his home, which is now worth about $100,000 less than what he originally paid.  (emphasis mine)

———————————

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (says) Congress is prepared to act on the (bankruptcy) legislation so “responsible homeowners can stay in their homes.” (emphasis mine)

The obvious question here is: Does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi know she’s a caricature?

But let’s go beyond the obvious for a moment and take a rational, economically based look at President Obama and Congress’ plan to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages.  Why?  Because the effect of this legislation will impact not only home buyers, real estate agents and lenders but pretty much anyone who plans on using a mortgage to purchase or refinance a home in the foreseeable future.

This is not the venue to bore you with arcane language and minutiae on how mortgage back securities work.  Suffice to say that, as with all investments, investors in mortgage backs (upon which all mortgage rates are based) are happiest when they feel safest.  The more comfortable they are in their expectation of future redemption rates, the less profit they expect in return for purchasing mortgage backs.  Translation: a safe & happy mortgage back investor equals a low mortgage rate.

But, when you give a bankruptcy court the power to modify a loan at their own prerogative, you introduce the unknown and unstable into the world of our happy little mortgage back investors – you introduce risk.  Confronted with an increase in risk, investors naturally want an increase in reward.  That means higher rates across the board. This is not rocket science.

Says Dustin Hobbs, spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Association,

“If there’s the fear that judges can at any time modify mortgages, it’s no long the safe investment it was, and investors will charge mortgage bankers more to buy the loans – costs that will be passed on to Read more

February 19, 2009

The bad news: Obama’s housing relief plan is a giveaway to lenders, not homeowners. The worse news: It won’t work, anyway.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you read the news this morning, you’ll find Realtors all over the country rejoicing that President Obama has surged into the depressed real estate market on a white charger, bearing with him an heroic plan to rescue everyone — borrowers, lenders and especially Realtors. No discouraging words? To the contrary. Some Realtors think Obama’s promise of $275 billion in mortgage bailouts does not go far enough.

Here are two important questions to put the matter into perspective:

1. By how many dwellings will the standing inventory of housing be reduced under Obama’s plan?

2. By how many households will Obama increase demand for housing?

Since the answer to both of these questions is zero, we can predict with certainty that President Obama’s housing relief plan will do nothing to relieve the housing crises.

What will it do? The true essence of the plan is Rotarian Socialism for lenders. Obama’s hope — probably hopeless — is that if lenders take a lot of small hits now — by refinancing homes for substantially less than is owed on them — they can avoid a lot of much bigger hits later — by not having to foreclose on those homes.

But the real problem — in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Sacramento, South Florida, the Rust Belt, etc. — is that the residential real estate market is overbuilt. There are more houses seeking homeowners than there are homeowners (or tenants) seeking houses. The real estate crisis will not end until supply is reduced, demand increases — or both.

Obama is trying to shove a floor under home values. But since this does nothing to correct the systemic problem — oversupply — he is simply pissing away money while delaying the ultimate and unavoidable market correction.

Want a true housing relief plan?

Here in Arizona, we could do ourselves a huge favor by repealing the employer I.D. check law that drove all of our undocumented friends out of the state — just at the wrong time.

And it would make great sense to make immigration to America easier and faster. Imagine having neighbors who work hard, pay their bills on time and can spell correctly!

But those Read more

February 16, 2009

Honoring Great Leaders for President’s Day

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Did you ever have the feeling something very bad just happened?  You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you sense something is wrong.  Or worse, there’s that feeling you sometimes get that not only is something bad happening, but someone, somewhere is orchestrating it.  Very eerie: the hint of impending doom, the frustration, the uneasy awareness  something dreadful has been laid out for you and there’s nothing you can do.

As painful as those feelings may be, they’re not normally accompanied by anger – not unless there’s also a sense of outrage.  To be really and truly angry, you must not only sense something very bad is happening and someone else is causing it to happen – but the added insult that they enjoyed doing it.

As if maybe they were laughing at you…

stimulus-bill-laughing

Democratic House members, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (second from left) and Rep. Charles Rangel of New York (right), laughed at a news conference Thursday after the House had approved the stimulus bill.

February 10, 2009

Swanepoel’s Top 10 Real Estate Trends matter to me — and to real estate — quite a bit less than my own list of burning issues

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Stefan Swanepoel sent me a copy of his Top 10 Real Estate Trends Report, which was gracious of him, considering that neither me nor any of the Bloodhounds nor BloodhoundBlog itself are mentioned anywhere in the book — at least as far as I could detect on a cursory examination. I don’t mind, mind you. I’d be amazed if we were cited. That kind of attention is reserved for the likes of Sellsius and Agent Shortbus — the biggest little PR3 weblogs in real estate. Every pundit or entity even remotely connected to the official world of real estate honors us by ostentatiously affecting to ignore us. And: Even then: We care a lot.

I did surprise myself by actually cracking the book. I had it last year, too, but I don’t remember if I looked at it. And I don’t want to seem to be hyper-critical of Swanepoel’s effort. It ain’t for me, that much should be obvious. I can’t think of anything in the tome that strikes be as being either important or non-obvious — or non-trivial. The whole thing, and everything and everybody in it, seem like deck chairs on the Titanic to me — but so does everything else even remotely connected to the world of official real estate.

Here are the issues Swanepoel takes up:

  • Nightmare on Elm Street: What if Your E&O Insurance No Longer Existed?
    If the tenth biggest issue in real estate is a FUD factor, we’re in better shape than we knew. Excellent reason for getting rid of the broker’s license, but, of course, that doesn’t come up.
  • The “Real” Energy Crisis: Factors Shaping Housing Values and Development
    Predictions about energy are as reliable as predictions about the weather.
  • Winning the Gold: Green Movement Gains Grassroots Support
    If we assume an energy problem, much of the green issue will concern money, not the environment. For now, I read it all as a fad.
  • Information Highway Congestion: Too Much Traffic Creates a Virtual Parking Lot
    More FUD, in this case I suspect fuddy-duddy FUD. We are overwhelmed by information. Our only hope for salvation will come from Luddite real estate brokers who can’t Read more
February 9, 2009

Some ugly questions about that $15,000 home-buyers tax credit…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I let the hoopla over the $15,000 tax credit for home-buyers of all incomes slide last week. There’s way too much sick-making news coming out of Washington right now, and, somehow, Republicans dancing in triumph because they had managed to squeeze out a little theft for the rich — and for the NAR — was more than I wanted to try to digest.

Actually, my pet bette noir last week was the ridiculous idea of a compulsory 4% mortgage rate. What this economy really needs is a mandatory 720 FICO score!

Pinocchio — the NAR — is a vampire, a dead thing that feeds on the living, we all know that. But I was writing about that $15,000 gift from the taxpayers to the NAR this morning, and some ugly question came to me.

For one thing, this is a direct transfer of funds from the Federal budget to the housing industry. Normally I love the idea of starving the government, but the net effect of this tax credit is that we will artificially buttress home prices, delaying but not avoiding the ultimate price decline that we have to go through to achieve a true recovery.

Am I wrong? I read the tax credit as being a net reduction in taxes paid. If you owe $15,000 in taxes, but if you bought a primary residence, you pay no taxes.

I can’t see lenders resisting a bait like that. They will find a way to lend you the dough now, and you pay it off over the next 12 — or 24 or 36 or 360 — months. Your $15,000 can pay for up to 10% of the purchase price of the home, and your net tax liability will be reduced by $15,000 next April. If you have another $15,000 in cash — set aside for taxes, perhaps? — you’ve got an 80/20 loan on a $150,000 home with no PMI.

Let’s go once better: $15,000 down on an FHA loan gets you to a $428,571 purchase price — in excess of the jumbo limits in Phoenix. Have you been craving that $400K house up the block. It Read more

February 4, 2009

You’re Gonna Need a Shovel

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

When I was young, my father taught me a very simple story:

A man walks by a big room and sees that it’s chest high in manure.  “Quick,” he says “someone get me a shovel.  There must be one helluva horse in here somewhere!”

Now the message was always clear: don’t be afraid of hard work and look upon every situation with an optimistic eye. Lately though, reading the paper has been a lot like running into that room; only I’ve begun to realize there’s no horse in there. Just a whole lot of shovelin’.

The latest pile can be found in a column by Dean Calbreath, a well-respected staff writer for the Business section of our local paper: The San Diego Union Tribune. You can read the full story here: Government Spending is Tool to Revive the Economy, although the title itself is about as subtle as a sledge hammer to the head. (I wonder if he was being ironic with the word “tool”?) In the column itself, Mr. Calbreath expects politicians debating the “stimulus package” will take heart in a new study by UCSD economist Valerie Ramey which concluded that for every $1 the government spends, it generates $1.40 in economic growth. Uh… yes, you read that right. The government is generating 40% growth on its spending programs. Wow! We really can spend our way out of a problem.  I mean Mister, at 40% growth we’ll be out of this recession in a quarter or two if the government will just get it through their thick heads to spend enough. (When I read utter nonsense like this I am reminded, as I so often am, of the wit and wisdom of Homer Simpson. Upon realizing he and a few other characters were literally trapped at the bottom of a hole they themselves had dug, Homer hit upon an elegant solution:  “We’ll dig our way out!” As the screen fades we can here Chief Wiggum say, “No, dig up, stupid…”)

“Raising spending stimulates the economy,” Ramey said.  “On average, government spending raises gross domestic product and raises employment, although it sometimes leads to Read more

January 20, 2009

Reading the signs and portents of Obama’s America

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We call it inauguration after the Romans, of course. Beginning at midnight on January 1st of each new year, the priests would take the augurs — the signs and portents — for the two new consuls, the duoviri who would govern the Republic for the next year. The ceremony would end with a long, slow march to the top of the Capitoline hill at dawn, at the end of which the senior consul for that year would sacrifice a bull. Only then would the new consuls and the senators convene in the Curia to take up the Republic’s business for the year.

And Janus, for whom January is named, is the god of doorways, presiding not just over beginnings but also endings. Today marks not just the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but also the end of the Bush era in Washington.

Both Bushes, pere and fils, seemed to me to be fundamentally decent people, quite unlike the man who served between them. But Bush the younger, by being so roundly reviled as president, has nowhere to go but up from here. Someday Americans will have the fortitude to thank this man for calling Islamofascism by its true name: Evil. In the mean time, the bull is no longer his to slay.

I’m less afraid of Obama than I was on election day, but still I fear for capitalism and for individualism. The good news, always, is that socialism cannot work. The bad news, always, is that millions perish in the process of discovering that socialism cannot work. Janus may well be opening the door to a renewed appreciation for classical liberal virtues, but it seems likely that the glorious light we associate with ages of reason may be found at the end of a long, dark hallway.

The one hope I hold today is to be found in the photo at the top of this post: I hope that today is the beginning of a post-racial America. Everything we’ve done about race so far, for four hundred years, has been pretty stupid. I hope it turns out that electing a black president was the first Read more

December 30, 2008

A 4.5% Mortgage In Every Pot

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Embrace the New Deal!  The Bailout has made its way to Main Street.

The Fed’s gonna do it..for real:

The Federal Reserve on Tuesday announced that it expects to begin operations in early January under the previously announced program to purchase mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and that it has selected private investment managers to act as its agents in implementing the program.

Under the MBS purchase program, the Federal Reserve will purchase MBS backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae; the program is being established to support the mortgage and housing markets and to foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally.

Here’s Sean Purcell and I, talking on BloodhoundBlog Radio, about today’s announcement (15 minute podcast)

PS:  Expect an orgy tomorrow and Friday, in the MBS markets….if the traders fly back from Cabo tonight

December 23, 2008

Learning to Appreciate the Arts

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Not everyone appreciates the entertainment value of watching the body politic.  But I do.  I stand hands on hips, amazed by the intricate movements each player contributes to their tap dance around the truth.  I listen to their spin, enthralled by the rhythm and stunned by their ability to stand upon the dais and look us in the eyes.  For all its pleasures though, most dedicated fans recognize the elements of tragedy that underlie every production.  There may be action and there will most certainly be humor; but the end is always the same: hubris and self-importance combine to bring about tragedy.  In the audience we may see it coming, but our recognition is too late to avert the inevitable.

Residents of California have been blessed with a double header as of late; two shows for the price of one.  True aficionados of this delicate art form will not only revel in the production value both shows offer, but the clever juxtaposition between them – the contrasting views of power they represent.

On the main stage we find the Federal Players and their prime-time rendition of The King and I.  The legislative branch of democracy writes a blank check and hands it to King Henry (Paulson) and his trusty side-kick President Bush.  They spend it on assorted items, many never contemplated when the check was written.  The legislature must be commended, however, for its heartfelt portrayal of the country bumpkins who did not see any of this coming.  In the final act, a chagrined upper house – the Senate – reasserts itself.  They choose not to spend money they don’t have on an industry that does not deserve it.  (This decision aligns with the wishes of the audience, but we assume the relationship to be coincidental more than causal.)  At the last moment: a twist!  We see the King spending the money anyway!  He usurps the Legislature’s constitutional and historical role as the means of appropriation.  It is a dramatic twist, shocking in its brazen contempt for law.  As the curtain comes down the audience is too dazzled by it all to recognize Read more

December 20, 2008

Joe Strummer: My thoughts on the looming crisis

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Joe Strummer” is the pseudonym of a frequent commenter on BloodhoundBlog. He runs a weblog of his own — under a different pseudonym — and leads a life of joy, contemplation and undisturbed privacy under his real name. But no matter how he is denominated, Strummer is an expert in the Austrian School of Economics, a colloquium of great minds who are, alas, the eternally unheeded Cassandras of the decline of Western Capitalism. In this essay, penned yesterday, Strummer shares with us his reflections upon the burgeoning economic crisis:

 
My thoughts on the looming crisis

by Joe Strummer

This is a graph of the nominal value of the assets that the Fed has “owned” over time. Notice the fairly flat, slightly rising line until September/October of 2008.

Two points about this graph. First, the Fed did not get value for the $1.2 trillion it has purchased in “assets” since October. The $1.2 trillion in nominal value is actually nearly worthless. That’s because these “assets” are the mortgage backed securities backed by now- or soon-to-be-broken promises to pay by individual homeowners.

Second, the Fed has merely pumped about 1.2 trillion of dollars into the market place free. In other words, it has taken nothing out of the economy of value. When the government adds currency – what Jim Cramer calls, dropping wads of cash from helicopters – without getting anything in return, it’s called inflation.

Now, $1.2 trillion in new currency is bad, but not nearly as bad as when the Fed loans money to banks at a .5 interest rate. The Fed simply is printing money for any bank that wants to borrow it at .5 percent. Consequently, banks are now borrowing to 1) cover the losses they incurred to make themselves solvent, and 2) to have cash reserves that they can then use when the economy picks up to lend at future, higher interest rates.

All of this inflation hasn’t hit the real economy because banks are hoarding that money to wait for better borrowers or because borrowers simply are hunkered down right now trying to wait out the storm.

When the economy starts Read more

December 14, 2008

Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. I turn to my work because that’s what I love most in my life — and my purpose in living is to love my life.

But I come up short, I think, because I’m so badly equipped to prepare for desperate times. We’re headed into an economic recession, perhaps a depression, and I truly don’t know what to think about it. I’ve lived through several of these episodes in the past, and I worked right through all of them and Read more

November 16, 2008

Thus does Big Mother make gonophs of us all: How to keep your house by taking taxpayers for a ride

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is choice, from the San Francisco Chronicle:

To qualify, you must be at least 90 days delinquent and live in the home as your primary residence. You must owe at least 90 percent of the home’s value. It’s fine if you owe more than it’s worth.

Your mortgage must be owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or held by one of the participating loan companies.

If you meet these requirements and can document your income, your servicer will reduce your monthly mortgage payment – including property taxes, insurance and association dues – to 38 percent of your gross income.

The reduction can be accomplished in one or more ways:

— Reducing the interest rate, but not below 3 percent. (The new rate, if below market, goes back to a market rate after five years.)

— Extending the term of the loan up to 40 years.

— Reducing the principal on which monthly payments are calculated. Unpaid principal is added to the loan balance and due when the homeowner sells or refinances. The reduced interest payments never have to be repaid.

If you owe more than the home is worth, the plan will only reduce principal down to 100 percent of market value, according to an official for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which supervises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If all three of these maneuvers can’t reduce your payments to 38 percent of income, you won’t get a fast-track modification but could still request a customized deal, says the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The streamlined process looks only at income, not assets. If you refinanced your home to buy a Mercedes or own another home, you won’t be expected to sell them to pay your mortgage.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schiff says. “People are going to Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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