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Matching entries from Dan Melson's Website
Short Excerpt from The Invention of Motherhood
Now Available for pre-order on Amazon or other fine retailers. Official launch October 2, 2017. Only $2.99 in e-book form! It really was no mystery what I had to do. I was pregnant with a Seventh Order child that would...
New Consumer Article: Shopping For The Best Loan In The New Lending Environment
The new consumer article for today is Shopping For The Best Loan In The New Lending Environment. There have been changes in the lending environment in the last few months, changes that are practically designed to make loan officers with...
New HOMESTEPS Property List April 16th, 2009
I'm still trying to catch up from four plus days of being doped up and in bed with a nasty cold. I'm working on new consumer articles for next week, the first of which will consider the changes in...
The History of Suburban Housing
For at least the last thirty years, I've been hearing "affordable housing" advocates yammer about the high cost of housing, and how working families can no longer afford "decent" housing, which they apparently consider to be the three or...
Unsustainable Loans You Should Not Use to Purchase a Property
You've probably heard the horror stories, and I've mentioned the possibility more than once. Some unsuspecting person is looking at properties beyond their price range, and it therefore has all kinds of attractive features that properties which are in their...
Mortgage Lenders Don't Want to Compete on Price
Yet that is exactly what you want them to do. To avoid competing on price, they have all kinds of distractions they offer to make life more convenient, but not cheaper. They offer automatic payment options, the convenience of having...
Can I Afford This Property?
Cold Hard Fact for today: The average Real Estate Agent or Loan Officer is not motivated to tell you that you can't afford your property. For the agent you are trying to talk people out of a property after they...
Sellers Lending to Buyers and Selling the Note
I am seeking to sell my properties to my tenants. I want to create a mortgage and then sell the mortgages. Properties are undervalued in this area as they have been historically fixer-uppers. Ours are in very good condition...
Real Estate: Giving Someone a Monopoly Does Not Encourage Top Performance
From an e-mail I've been talking to agents lately and I ask them about the things I've learned about from your site. I thought I would say things like "I want to apply for a backup loan" and they would...
Steering: The Most Violated Law In Real Estate
I just picked a random ZIP code in my local MLS, and out of the first twenty listings I came to, ten had explicit violations of one or more of the sections of RESPA regarding steering right there in the...
Manufactured, Modular, and Site-Built Homes: How Lending Practices Drive the Sales Market
Many people are unaware how profoundly lending policies influence the market for residential property. So I am going to go over the various gradations in available loans for various types of property. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the standard...
Real Estate and Mortgages: Back to Basics?
Over the course of the last few months, I've gotten mass messages from basically every lender I do business with, saying it's time to "get back to basics". About a week ago, my favorite A paper lender became the last...
New Proposed Federal Reserve Rules: Is This Supposed to Be Helpful Regulation?
I was thinking we were ready for a recovery here in San Diego, but if these go through unamended, that will not be the case. Just in time to be the Grinch that Stole Christmas, the Federal Reserve has...
The Doctrine of Delaying The Moment Of Truth
One of the worst things about the loan process, and indeed, found throughout the whole real estate industry, is the idea that if you can just delay telling the client about something they won't like, it's more likely they'll continue...
An Apparent Red Flag that Isn't
For all of the rants I post about bad business practices, there are a lot of things the mortgage industry gets right. One of these looks like a red flag not to do business with them, and may seem like...
How to Avoid A Repeat of the Housing Market Mess
HR 3915 is not the answer. We've been here before (in the early 1990s), congress did something remarkably similar except a little bit more sane. It didn't work then. Why would we expect it to work this time? Among many...
Is This Supposed to be Helpful Legislation? (A bad example from Illinois)
A reader named Terri at Educating the Wheelers sent me an email giving me a heads up on the antics of the state of Illinois. here is the link. Here is the original article at blackprof. The link to the...
"Fixes" for the Mortgage Meltdown - You Can't Keep A Bad Idea Down
Scapegoating, anyone?Brian Brady notes Barney Frank's misplaced quest for one. 1- Prohibition of "yield spread premium" as compensation to originators. 2- Mandatory licensing of mortgage originators by a Federal registry or state regulator. This Bill does direct the Office...
How Loan Providers Make Money
In an attempt to debunk some of the slanders that are floating around out there, this article is an itemization of how lenders and brokers make money on loans. The first method is obvious: Origination or discount points charged to...
Low Equity (or Worse!) Relocations in a Buyer's Market
Hi, Dan! I just came across your website and you strike me as the type of guy who has answers for our situation: My husband and I built our home 2.5 years ago. We took out a second mortgage...
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