Rain City Guide

There is a lot about the real estate industry that needs improvement.  But, there are some very stand-up hard working salt-of-the-earth real estate agents and loan officers that are working in a challenging market and who are literally bailing out financially challenged homeowners.  They are making things happen and are doing what they can to [...]

The intersection of ethics and real estate meet again
As if WaMu didn’t have enough on its public relations plate, CNN Money reports:
Jeniffer Wertz, who is seeking unspecified damages, says WaMu stopped accepting her appraisals in mid-2007 a month after she reported that her local housing market in California was “declining.”
Evidently, Wertz claims that Washington [...]

Escrow is one of the toughest jobs in real estate, for a lot of different reasons. But, it is by far the most interesting from our experiences in that both Lynlee and I have sold (circa 1990) as licensee’s, bought and sold homes as homeowner’s and today as owners of an escrow company.
For example, [...]

A friend of mine contacted me the other day about a property investment opportunity that her brother-in-law (BIL) was placing in front of her and her husband. The property in question is located in the city and state where the BIL lives - and it’s far from the Seattle area at roughly halfway across [...]

The Hope Now program currently being proposed in the other Washington is designed to assist current homeowners with Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARM’s) in which their ARM’s may adjust upward causing financial hardship. An issue of immense concern is how do you sift through the thousands of homeowners and qualify those who’s mortgages are [...]

I had someone email me an interesting question recently:
I had a quick question about private money loans. Have their been any posts on this? I tried searching “private money”, “hard money” but nothing came up. I’m looking into rehabbing a house and conventional lending isn’t going to work for me, [...]

This is not a bubble post. It is a post about lending.
Having loan officers and mortgage brokers with Fiduciary duties to their clients is a small step in the right direction. Take a guess as to what the paint spells on each of the individuals chests as you read the link below.
Live [...]

A friend of mine that works in a small town bank in Kansas called me in a panic the other day because the officers at the bank were freaking out during a meeting saying that Countrywide was going bankrupt. For them there is concern because Countrywide buys all of their residential loans. Apparently [...]

What will lending standards look like 6 mos. or a year from now? Will lenders with more stringent qualifying standards be a drag on the market? At minimum, it will change the complexion of the pool of buyers. Some ramifications of tighter standards that come to mind:

reduces ability of consumers with [...]

Yesterday’s theme was PreFab, today I’m back to simply providing links to 10 interesting real estate conversations…

Prosper is an online marketplace for people to lend money to other people. Shaun has been playing with Prosper and has some interesting observations.
I don’t agree with Mark’s conclusions, but I think he makes an interesting case [...]