At a very young age, my parents bought me a book of Aesop's Tales. Aesop has gone out of style, probably because these are stories with a moral lesson, and it seems the modern society is actively averse to moral...
It has become a trend for real estate agents who think they're being "smart" to require an automated underwriting approval. These are automated underwriting programs from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saying that Fannie or Freddie will buy the...
I had the idea for this article some time ago. It took me a long time to decide to share it publicly, because quite frankly, knowing what I know now, I was an idiot. I was still young enough to...
Hard as it may be to believe, I've never done an article comparing asking price to sales price. It's way past time. Asking price is quite simply, a written representation of an offer the seller would be willing to...
I recently received an email asking about a Good Faith Estimate on a $200k loan. The person asking my opinion attached the actual "estimate" to the email. In addition to a point of origination and a point of discount...
Scapegoating mortgage brokers or anyone else is not the answer, nor is prohibiting yield spread. 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...
If you have three real estate companies sending you emails with multi-listings, if you want to see one of the properties, who gets the commission? There five properties that I want to see the inside of the houses. Company A,...
It's very easy for loan providers to talk about a much better loan when you're shopping than they have any intention of delivering. Then you give them thirty to sixty days after you sign up, and you're put into a...
This is a real, major and pervasive problem in the industry. For a while, it mostly went away as listing agents were desperate for any offer, but it has come back. At least two properties my buyer clients have...
I am seeing a very disturbing trend these past few months. Rather than do the work they should be doing, listing agents are treating the entire short sale process as a kind of "Black Box", delegating the negotiations with the...
I've heard this story, in all of its variations, at least hundreds of times. Someone will send me an email and say "They told me not to make my loan payment because I was going to skip one. So...
On a regular basis, I get emails that ask me what I think of a particular company. When I check out public forums, I see questions about particular companies every time. "What do you think of X Realty, or Y...
The first thing to consider is that maybe you shouldn't. You never want to get involved in a bidding war. There's a classic riddle I ask every single one of my buyer clients at least once. "How often does...
This is a warning to those who purchase restricted sale property. I've gotten a couple of calls for refinancing these in the past couple months, and I've never covered this subject. A restricted sale property is one where the...
A lot of advice gets given to choose a "top producing" agent. These highly corporate offices may have the name of an individual agent attached to them, but they are in fact transaction mills. They have done pretty well for...
One of the things I'm seeing more of in MLS listings and developer advertising, among other places, is the phrase "$X in closing cost credit (or "$X in free builder upgrades") given for using preferred lender" Sounds like a bargain,...
Every so often, I write about professional responsibility. Every month I get a couple of magazines because I'm a Realtor. There was a letter from someone who was proud of the fact that he had never asked someone if they...
It shouldn't be any surprise to anyone with the headlines of the last few years that shopping for a mortgage loan has radically changed. Indeed, a lot of the regulatory changes seem directly aimed at what were the best...
I've been answering this question for a long time. Whose interests do we need to be concerned about, in a "If they are harmed, we've got a problem" sort of way? Who has a primary stake in a real...
This is one of those commercial gambits I keep seeing that has nothing intrinsically wrong with it, and yet it is most often a tactic employed by the more costly loan providers. In short, sharks and scam artists. The basic...
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