With the economy in the doldrums and house prices stalled, short sales boom - PowerTeamHomes.com

The federal government’s massive HAMP rescue program failed when lenders balked at any reductions in mortgage principle. Lowered interest rates and longer terms reduced monthly payments somewhat but not nearly enough, many borrowers re-defaulted.

That was then. With the home market possibly poised for another slip downward, lenders are more willing to deal. CoreLogic says short sales have tripled since 2008 with 400,000 likely to close in 2010.

A recent Washington Post story tells us it’s happening as well in the D.C. metro area, a region envied everywhere for its many thousands of well-paying government jobs. Fannie Mae says it did 36,534 short sales in this year’s first half.

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SHORT SALES-REO/FORECLOSURES-MORATORIUM WHAT’S NEXT?

Realtors can never get old or outdated, our industry changes so fast that it leaves us no time or choice:

always moving forward and always learning new models and how to deal with a crazy and non-stop real
estate environment. If that wasn’t enough, Illinois is requiring all Realtors to move up to Broker status
by 2012 at the tune of many more hours of class time and studying!

As the national/global meltdown began we found ourselves selling homes with no equity and in most
cases way below the even mark. Besides retooling ourselves, it was not an easy task to sit with sellers
and tell them the value of their homes had gone south, they were up-side-down and yes, we’ll need
your check book at the closing table.

So we transacted higher numbers of short sales by spending countless hours negotiating with lenders
who were not happy to take less, tax issues and homeowners associations just to mention a few. Along
with that we usually have one or more junior liens just to spice up the equation and they will kill a deal
for just a few hundred dollars, just because they can in a short-sale scenario.

The fine printing was hiding the other eight hundred pound gorilla: deficiency judgments; just when you
thought you had it all covered, the lender wanted to recover the unpaid part of the short sale from the
homeowner after the fact. Some lenders packaged the unpaid balances/individuals and “sold” them in
“bundles” (here we go again with bundles) to collection agencies who will tie you up in knots for the
next several generations.

If the short sale didn’t do the homeowner in, then foreclosure came in from the back side and put the
homeowner out on the street. Now Realtors are doing BPO’s and watching vacant properties fall apart
for months/years while the lender/new owner follows the due process to regain possession, along with
ownership, of the same home.

Three to four months after the judge awarded the property, on the conservative side, the home comes
out of redemption and the real work begins for the needed repairs. Now the home is ready and a buyer
buys it in good faith. This should be a happy beginning for a new homeowner who got in at a nice
reduced price and has a growing family.
Not so. That final judicial deed could in fact be tainted. As the homeowner’s loan was sold a few times
from one holder to the other via “securitized bundles” the paperwork did not necessarily follow as it
should have. The big guys were too busy making huge money on each bundles’ turn that there was no
time for the paperwork. Now the final note holder may not have the “paper right” to foreclose on the
non-paying borrower/homeowner.

Realtors are still in all of this and left watching out for their clients as well as their very own survival. As
they submitted offers on foreclosed homes, on line or in hard copy form, the lender/seller would require
them to fill in certain blanks assuming all liabilities on the property from general conditions to possible
title problems the lenders created.

The Paul Paterakis Power Team and RE/MAX Showcase quickly brought liabilities back on the lenders’ laps where they belong with our own Addendum/Rider which allowed us to submit all offers and prevented us from assuming the lender’s liabilities via their required fields. Imagine a seller, other than lenders/sellers, who tell the world, including Realtors: when you submit an offer and purchase this property you are taking on all the past liabilities on the same property including clean title to it! Is this not absurd? Look out, it’s very real and lawsuits are going on right now in various parts of the country on this very issue.

Currently we are in a moratorium phase with only a handful of lenders closing transactions, but not
really resolving title issues. We are looking at a future full of lawsuits and if the national/global economic
meltdown didn’t shut a company down, these kinds of lawsuits will. The damages and legal fees will be
unbelievable.

Very sad and painful to accept the fact that entities outside of real estate made billions on the way up
with all that “bundling”; they are now making as much money on the way down and we are left holding
the bag and paying for their careless quick money turnovers. Inflated home prices going up, blow out
home prices going down and a few more years needed to “stabilize” the market.

On the positive side just under ninety percent of homeowners with a mortgage remain current while
more than a third of all homes in the U.S.A. have no mortgages on them at all. The good numbers are
huge compared to the distressed mortgages and homeowners. Going forward changes will be needed to
assure ourselves and future generations that this misery will not be repeated again.

When we talk about low accident rates or any kind of low statistics it is very easy to accept them on
their face value; however, we must keep in mind that even a small one percent foreclosure rate is
everything to that one individual who is now on the street while the other ninety nine individuals are
just fine.

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Deep Thoughts on the National Moratorium on REO/Foreclosures - PowerTeamHomes.com

The magnitude of the moratorium on REO/Foreclosure properties and how it came about is national and Congress or President Obama will have to address it quick. The best way out of it is to stop all lawsuits, let the foreclosure judgment stand and let the lenders do all the necessary paperwork through the various “bundles”. Be sure that the last lender who is holding the mortgage note and foreclosing on a non-paying-homeowner has the “paper right” to do so. Every coin has two sides…Suspension of REO/Foreclosures opens up a much larger window for short sales. Buyers and sellers now have more time to take advantage of a short sale. Those pasty junior liens, besides the first position lender, debate and mess us up in a transaction right up to the closing table but, once closed, it’s a done deal. Unless the RESPA did not match the disbursement sheet or some “side deals” were made at the closing table by unscrupulous attorneys.

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New Inductee into the RE/MAX Hall of Fame! - PowerTeamHomes.com

Congratulations! to Paul Paterakis of The Paul Paterakis Power Team -RE/ MAX Showcase of Long Grove, Illinois on being inducted into the RE/MAX Hall of Fame. This is RE/MAX's highest honor given to an agent.

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Exercise is no fun, how about just not sitting? - PowerTeamHomes.com

My friend’s grandmother, born in a small town in Italy, grew up in a family that could not even afford a horse and buggy. She walked to school, church, the library etc. Walking was a way of life. Due to the time involved in walking from place to place and because there were always chores to do around the house, there was very little time for sitting down. If she were alive today she would most definitely wonder why people spend so much time sitting during the day!

According to research from the Cancer Research Center at University of Queensland, prolonged sitting is very bad for our health. Absence of whole body movement is associated with obesity, abnormal glucose metabolism and the metabolic syndrome, researchers looked at breaks in sitting time and how this corresponded with biological markers of metabolic risk such as weight, height, HDL cholesterol, waist circumference and resting blood pressure. This study provides evidence of the importance of avoiding prolonged uninterrupted periods of sedentary or primarily sitting time. They explained that when the large muscles in the legs and buttocks, which are designed to be standing and maintaining posture, are immobilized for long periods of time, there is a failure to activate an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase, which is responsible for reducing the above mentioned risks.

A follow up study by the same researchers found that television viewing time was associated with increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. “In addition to the promotion of exercise, chronic disease prevention strategies could focus on reducing sitting time, particularly prolonged television viewing” says Dr. Hunter Yost, M.D. The most serious and well known complication of prolonged sitting is venous thrombo-embolism (VTE), a condition in which blood clots occur and travel through the veins. When a blood clog forms in the deep veins of the legs, thighs or pelvis, it is known as deep vein thrombosis (DVT). When this blood clot breaks off from its original location and travels through the venous system, it can become lodged in the arteries leading from the heart to the lungs: a very serious condition.

For the majority of people who don’t want to engage in “formal exercise,” follow my grandmother’s advice who would come to us kids sitting around and after looking right in our eyes…we knew, we better get up and do something. She would send us across the farm to pick up a tomato for her when she had hundreds of them in the next room! Today I fully understand what she was doing and why. As we go through our day to day activities let’s make it a point to get up and walk at least every hour.

Maybe when at our desk and need a form we’ll get up and get it instead of calling staff to email it to us or looking for a quick answer by just calling out to someone across the office. We forget that the body we currently are in is the only one we have: no returns or exchanges; let’s do our part to protect and preserve it any way we can.

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Deep Thoughts on Election Madness - PowerTeamHomes.com

As we enjoy our second “late summer” I could not help but to take a moment and remember Nat King Cole singing about those “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.” It may have been the last quiet moment as Nat was obviously not thinking about the 2010 primary election season in Illinois and all over the country.

There has been no “down time” as negative TV commercials, flyers, letters and hit pieces are crowding our mailboxes and roadside signs are jockeying for positions on street corners. Live and recorded telephone calls and campaign workers knocking on doors: it’s all a regular feature of the campaign cycle. The November 2nd election is fast approaching, it will be one for the record books as far as the most governors (37), the most U.S. senators (37) since 1962 and who controls Congress. Over 150 measures are on ballots in 35 states; reapportionment changes will shape state and local politics for a decade in 88 of the 99 state legislative chambers. It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote after 33 of them were wrongly convicted of “obstructing sidewalk traffic” by demonstrating back in November 1917.

One of their leaders, Alice Paul, made sure that the men of her time understood that “courage in women is often mistaken for insanity”. Today we need the women’s vote more than ever before. Whatever you do, please take time to understand the real issues; don’t focus only on their accusations: based on them no one should be elected! Dig in and find out more on which candidates, regardless of their affiliation, deserve your vote.

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Near Complete Stop to Foreclosures Nationwide - PowerTeamHomes.com

What started out within a few lenders has now turned into a major halt to the nation’s REO and foreclosure business by Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bank of America, GMAC, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and many other large and small lenders.

For HomeSteps a foreclosure program,Properties with Sales Pending: Per Freddie Mac, buyer must be notified,through the buyer’s attorneys and buyer’s agents, that all buyers who are under an executed, approved contract, may keep their contracts in place while the issue is being addressed and resolved. However,should any buyer wish to terminate his or her contract, Agents must work with the assigned closing agent to terminate the contract of sale and promptly return the earnest money deposit.

Buyers must be notified, through the buyer’s agents per Freddie Mac, with which Freddie Mac has only accepted verbal offers but have not executed a written contract, that the property is being taken off the market temporarily to address title related issues. Once the property is available, Agents must notify all listing agents affected, and reach out to the buyer's agents to resubmit their offer, with direction from Freddie Mac.

How did it happen? Some bank employees in multiple unrelated cases
around the country testified in court that they could not “verify the accuracy of every foreclosure” put in front of them as they were receiving between 10,000 and 18,000 cases per month. This brought into question the validity of some completed and ongoing foreclosure actions. If the foreclosure was defective because the lender bringing the foreclosure action did not have the legal authority to foreclose, then the buyer at the sheriff’s sale, along with successive purchasers, could be challenged on the validity of the title they are holding. As Wall Street was “re-packaging” loans prior to the meltdown that started in 2007 the actual“final” owner may or not have had legal title to the promissory note and mortgage therefore creating the gap causing the current issues.

If the mortgage holder who brought the foreclosure action did not have the authority to bring the action or otherwise failed to comply with the requirements of the foreclosure statues, then the court has the power to vacate the foreclosure judgment(s) for an ongoing transaction as well as prior closed ones. Lenders will not resume foreclosures until the flaws in the process are resolved, they need time to confirm that the foreclosure was properly initiated by a legally authorized party and that the due process was completely followed.

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