Archive for February, 2012
Lastest Bankruptcy Advice auctions
bankruptcy advice eBay auctions you should keep an eye on:
Lawyer Advice.com Lawyers Dui Car Accident Bankruptcy Legal Office Website Civil| US $6,995.00 End Date: Monday May-21-2012 6:02:14 PDT Buy It Now for only: US $6,995.00 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
Florida bankruptcy attorney faces suspension over claim objections
A Miami attorney who filed claim objections for two Chapter 13 debtors allegedly without conducting a reasonable investigation into their validity is facing a 31-day suspension from practicing before the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Thomson Reuters News & Insight: Bankruptcy Law – Insight
The Daily Docket: A&P Wins Bankruptcy Plan Approval
A judge on Monday approved Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.’s plan to exit bankruptcy proceedings as a leaner grocery chain by both store count and cost of labor, more than a year after the owner of A&P and other supermarkets filed for Chapter 11. Read the Daily Bankruptcy Review article here.
Dippin’ Dots Inc.’s biggest lender wants the bankruptcy court to oust the founder and president, Curt Jones after accusing him of manipulating the Kentucky manufacturer’s sale and putting its future at risk. Click here to read the article in DBR Small Cap.
(The Daily Bankruptcy Review and DBR Small Cap are daily newsletters with comprehensive coverage and analysis of emerging and in-progress insolvencies and turnarounds. For a two-week trial to DBR, click here. For DBR SC, click here.)
Eastman Kodak Co. is seeking bankruptcy-court authorization to terminate certain medical benefits for about 16,000 Medicare-eligible people who retired in the past two decades, DBR reports.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.’s top official said American Airlines parent AMR Corp. doesn’t need to put responsibility for pensions on the government.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s former top lawyer, along with his two brothers, will repay $ 556,017 in inherited money that was tied to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Wall Street Journal reports.
According to the Associated Press, the owners of the New York Mets are excited about the upcoming baseball season despite the litigation they’re going through with Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and a big payroll drop.
Developer William Lyon Homes has emerged from Chapter 11 protection, Reuters reports.
According to the Boston Globe, Saab Automobile said it’s gotten several potential bids from investors looking to take the auto maker out of bankruptcy protection.
Entropic Communications Inc. said it would buy part of Trident Microsystems Inc.’s set-top box business for $ 65 million, Dow Jones Newswires reports.
According to the Washington Post, though the Howrey law firm is no more, 55 years’ worth of documents and data are still left over.
Follow Bankruptcy Beat on Twitter.
“Understanding Today’s Foreclosure Defense Part 2: Lender Vulnerabilities,” Robert Napolitano

Link to Lawline CLE Seminar: www.lawline.com Course Description: In these difficult economic times, more and more homeowners find themselves struggling to keep their homes out of foreclosure, especially in light of rampant loan modification scams and lender deceit. In Part 2 of this series on foreclosure defense, Robert Napolitano starts off by discussing the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) and its involvement in mortgage loans and assignments in the US Mr. Napolitano then sheds light on the new development of “robosigning” and gives real examples and case studies of this new type of mortgage loan servicing. The course then reviews standing and how it is an important technicality to ensure the transfer and clear title of a property. Mr. Napolotino also explains the problems caused by defective indorsements and REMIC violations. By sharing his expertise, Mr. Napolitano equips attorneys with all the information they need to become successful foreclosure defense advocates. (Parts 3 and 4 of series will be soon added to our catalogue).
Community Banks Prosper as MegaBanks Lose Customers
MOST POPULAR ARTICLES
CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT
CUSTOMER SERVICE 520-405-1688
Editor’s Comment:
There are a lot of good reasons for the 10% defection rate at big banks — and the benefit flowing to smaller community and regional banks. The biggest reason appears to be a visceral dislike for the large banks and massive distrust over what these behemoths will do next. Add to that factor that it costs less to deal with community banks for the same service that the large banks have monopolised, and you barely have any reason at all to stay with the big banks.All the services are now produced electronically and even the smallest banks have access to that. Add to that the personal factors of actually knowing your banker and the knowledge that deposits will be used for loans somewhere in your geographical region and now you also have a good reason to go to community banks and credit unions.I would add one more — safety. The balance sheets of the big banks are bloated with non-existent or overstated assets and are missing huge liabilities reaching into the trillions to pay back those investors who bought $ 13 trillion in bogus mortgage bonds. But add to that mix, the facts that management of these mega banks have trillions parked off shore that the government wants to see repatriated PLUS the tacit deal in which the Federal Reserve agrees to lend at 0.25% in exchange for the big banks buying US Treasury debt at 3% and you can see why Washington is addicted to the toxic idea that they should still do business with, and therefore prop up these mega banks whose actual net worth is a tiny fraction of what has been reported. Eventually they must fall, which is another reason for not having your money there.More customers leaving big banks
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — New fees and poor customer service have sparked an exodus among big bank customers, many of whom switched to smaller institutions last year.
The defection rate for large, regional and midsize banks averaged between 10% and 11.3% of customers last year, according to a J.D. Power and Associates’ survey of more than 5,000 customers who shopped for a new bank or account over the past 12 months. In 2010, the average defection rates ranged from 7.4% to 9.8%.
Meanwhile, small banks and credit unions lost only 0.9% of their customers on average last year — a significant decline from the 8.8% defection rate they saw in 2010.
These smaller institutions were also able to attract many of the customers who left the big banks. Over the course of last year, 10.3% of customers who shopped for a new bank landed at these smaller institutions — up from 8.1% in the prior year.
New and higher bank fees at the nation’s biggest banks led many customers to switch to smaller institutions over the past year, with about a third of customers at big banks reporting fees as the reason for looking elsewhere.
“When banks announce the implementation of new fees, public reaction can be quite volatile and result in customers voting with their feet,” said Michael Beird, director of the banking services practice at J.D. Power and Associates.
Community banks team up to fight the megabanks
Checking account fees have been on the rise at the nation’s biggest banks over the past year, and customer revolt against big banks really began to mount after Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) proposed amonthly fee for debit card use last fall.
Even though the bank later backtracked on its decision, the announcement led to a nationwide, social media-fueled “Bank Transfer Day”, during which customers encouraged each other to dump their big banks for community banks and credit unions.
The report also found that many customers were already unhappy with the customer service at big banks, so when fees were announced or raised, there was even more of an incentive to switch institutions.
‘I dumped my bank!’
“Service experiences that fall below customer expectations are a powerful influencer that primes customers for switching once a subsequent event gives them a final reason to defect,” said Beird.
More than half of all customers who said fees were the main reason for switching banks also said they had received poor customer service at their prior bank, he said.
Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud Tagged: 60 minutes, affidavits • attesting • Daniel Edstrom • DTC-Systems • fabricating • false information • false sworn documents • foreclose • illicit business practices • improper statements • imp, AHMSI, appraisal fraud, attorney general, auction fraud, Chris Koster, community banks, credit bids, credit unions, DocX Indictment, foreclosure fraud, FORECLOSURE SETTLEMENT, foreclosures, forgery, housing market, housing prices, investors, linda green, LPS, Missouri, mortgage fruad, mortgages, Robo-Signing, settlement, strategic default, Wells Fargo
![]()
Livinglies’s Weblog
Investors Getting Wise to Conflict of Interest With Banks and Servicers
MOST POPULAR ARTICLES
CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT
CUSTOMER SERVICE 520-405-1688
by Isaac Gradman, www.subprimeshakeout.com
Having received copious kudos for engineering an $ 8.5 billion investor settlement with Bank of America over soured Countrywide residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS), “pitbull” lawyer Kathy Patrick, of the Houston-based firm, Gibbs & Bruns, has now trained her sights on the other big dogs in the world of pre-crisis MBS issuance.
Patrick’s most recently disclosed target is Wells Fargo, one of the Big Four Banks that up to now has stayed largely out of the RMBS litigation spotlight, as investors and insurers have gone after more notoriously irresponsible lenders such as Countrywide/BofA and EMC/JPMorgan. But that all changed on January 5, 2012, when Gibbs & Bruns issued letters to RMBS Trustees US Bank and HSBC, stating that its clients held 25% of the voting rights (the critical threshold for legal standing) in 48 trusts that issued these securities and instructing them to open investigations into ineligible mortgages backing $ 19 billion of RMBS issued by Wells Fargo affiliates.
Recall that it was just such a letter that kicked off negotiations between Patrick’s bondholder clients, BofA-Countrywide and Bank of New York Mellon (BoNY) as Trustee. Despite purposefully avoiding a more aggressive stance with the Trustee that may have involved declaring an event of default and triggering the Trustee’s fiduciary duties (as other bondholders were contemplating), the letter got the Trustee’s attention and was the precursor to the $ 8.5 billion proposed settlement that is currently being challenged in federal court.
A Pattern Emerges
The Wells Fargo letter comes on the heels of two other recent assaults by Patrick’s bondholder group. On December 16, 2011, the group announced that it was going after JPMorgan. In the announcement, Gibbs & Bruns said that it had issued instructions to BNY Mellon, US Bank, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and HSBC, as Trustees, to open investigations into ineligible mortgages in pools securing over $ 95 billion of MBS issued by various affiliates of JPM. The most eye-popping number in this announcement was the law firm’s claim that its clients held 25% of voting rights in 243 JPMorgan trusts, even more than the 180 Countrywide trusts in which the group currently claims it has standing (now that it’s no longer counting Freddie Mac’s holdings).
Prior to that, on October 18, 2011, Gibbs & Bruns sent a letter to Morgan Stanley, saying that its clients held 25% of the voting rights in 17 MBS deals issued by the investment bank, and that it had found a large amount of servicing violations and false or fraudulent information that had been published in connection with the offering of those securities. The letter, which has not been released to the public, only became public knowledge after Morgan Stanley disclosed it in its 2011 Q3 10-Q report. The original face value of the 17 MBS deals was reported to be over $ 6 billion.
Subsequently, on January 31, 2012, Gibbs & Bruns issued a formal announcement regarding Morgan Stanley, in which the law firm stated that it had instructed RMBS trustees US Bank, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo to open investigations into ineligible mortgage securing $ 25 billion of Morgan Stanley-issued RMBS. In that announcement, the firm claimed to have standing in 69 different Trusts. It’s unclear why the numbers disclosed by Morgan Stanley in their earlier 10-Q are only a quarter of the size of the holdings announced by Gibbs & Bruns, but perhaps the firm has been able to attract a number of new clients in the last few months.
Shotgun Approach
By the numbers, the Wells Fargo deals represent the smallest original principal amount of RMBS out of the four issuers that Patrick has confronted thus far. But what makes that effort particularly interesting is that it illustrates that Patrick’s group, which currently contains at least 22 major institutional investors, is not exactly taking a surgical approach to selecting the deals it wants trustees to investigate.
For example, several of the WFB deals contained in Gibbs & Bruns’ press release are experiencing delinquency rates of less than 1% and minimal cumulative losses. One analyst has also pointed out that some of the deals Patrick has identified in the past contain few actionable reps and warranties and extremely high procedural hurdles (such as voting rights thresholds of 50% just to petition the trustee).
What this indicates is that Patrick is not examining individual deals and hand picking the ones on which she is most likely to recover significant returns for her clients through putback litigation or other legal claims. Instead, she’s identifying every trust in which her clients have standing, in the hopes of giving her the broadest platform from which to negotiate a global putback settlement for each targeted lender – a settlement, by the way, that will bind every investor in these deals, not just Patrick’s own clients.
But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to Patrick herself, quoted in her firm’s press release on the Wells Fargo letters:
Our clients continue to seek a comprehensive solution to the problems of ineligible mortgages in RMBS pools and deficient servicing of those loans. Today’s action is another step toward achieving that goal.
Or take Patrick’s quote in this Forbes article from October 2011:
This group did not come together just to deal with Bank of America. They came together because they wanted a comprehensive industrywide strategy and an industrywide solution… They started with Bank of America because they thought they could achieve a template that they could extend to other institutions.
These quotes may not seem remarkable until you delve into choice of language and the objections raised in the past to to Patrick’s efforts, including allegations regarding conflicts of interest and the secretive manner in which she negotiated the settlement. What Patrick is not saying is that she wants a comprehensive solution for just her 22+ institutional clients; she’s saying that she wants a comprehensive solution for the entire industry. Recall that the big banks (who should be Patrick’s biggest opponents) have been saying much the same thing since the early days of this litigation – that they want a comprehensive, industrywide solution – and their support for efforts such as the proposed 50-state robosigning settlement have backed that up.
This only gives more credence to the fears of many of the bondholders outside of Patrick’s group: that she’s actually working to achieve sweetheart deals for the banks that would allow her institutional clients to maintain their cozy relationships with the financial firms while allowing the conflicted investors, Trustees and issuers to put these issues behind them. But while it may be clear that Patrick is trying to architect a comprehensive settlement of all putback liabilities for the major banks along the lines of her groundbreaking settlement with BofA, what’s also clear is that this time around, her opponents will be better prepared to thwart her efforts.
A Mobilized Opposition
In the world of MBS litigation, bondholders and bond insurers have thus far gravitated toward a select few attorneys who have made their names by diligently pursuing investor interests. This short list includes Philippe Selendy, whose firm, Quinn Emanuel, represents a number of bond insurers, including MBIA, and bondholders like the FHFA; David Grais, who represents many of the FHLBs, the distressed debt fund Baupost Group (aka Walnut Place), and TM1, to name a few; Talcott Franklin, who created the Investor Clearinghouse and represents Knights of Columbus in its lawsuit against Bank of New York Mellon; and Bernstein Litowitz, which represented the class that settled with Merrill Lynch for $ 315 million and currently represents Allstate and a number of European funds in recent suits.
But none of these attorneys has been the source of more controversy, more media adulation or more rampant speculation than Patrick. The adulation stems in part from the fact that Patrick represents some of the biggest names in the world of MBS investors, such as BlackRock, PIMCO and the New York Fed, and the fact that Patrick’s firm stands to make $ 85 million in fees if the proposed $ 8.5 billion settlement between BoNY and BofA gets court approval.
Yet, Patrick has also been the source of significant controversy, primarily because of the manner in which Patrick steered her bondholder clients – many of whom have significant conflicts of interest with the issuer banks – away from more aggressive approaches to putback litigation. While I have been skeptical of the strategy behind Patrick’s efforts since she sent her first letter to BofA in September 2010 (as she failed to include any of the powerful supporting evidence she had at her disposal), recent revelations have only reinforced that belief.
Specifically, at a hearing before Judge Pauley over whether to keep the proposed $ 8.5 bn settlement in federal court, it emerged that Patrick had submarined efforts by the Investor Clearinghouse by urging her clients to avoid taking the more aggressive stance that was being advocated by Franklin. This revelation came after lawyers for Gibbs & Bruns had argued that they were the only group of bondholders doing anything about MBS losses.
In addition, conflicts of interest identified between Bank of New York and Bank of America (such as the fact that BofA provides BoNY with over 60% of its trustee business and the fact that BofA has agreed to indemnify BoNY from all liability stemming from its conduct as Trustee of Countrywide trusts) have drawn the ire of bondholders and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who sought leave to file a counterclaim under the Martin Act against BoNY in court proceedings surrounding the proposed settlement. In short, these developments have caused many bondholders, commentators and regulators to view this settlement as a sweetheart deal concocted by funds that want to maintain a cozy relationship with the big banks while satisfying their fiduciary obligation to do something about the massive losses they’ve suffered in their MBS portfolios.
Thus, it would be no exaggeration to say that Patrick and her bondholder group have been the single greatest galvanizing force for bondholders, motivating a diverse and largely passive group of institutions to band together, hire counsel, and begin taking steps to enforce their legal claims against the banks that sold them atrociously performing private label RMBS. For this reason, Patrick will likely face a stiffer challenge the next time she works with a trustee to seek judicial approval for a proposed global settlement.
Challenges to Next Set of MBS Settlements
As I see it, Patrick faces three major challenges to accomplishing her goal of piecing together global settlements with the remaining MBS issuers. First, most of these issuers did not use the same Trustee on all their deals, as Countrywide did with BoNY. This will make it significantly harder to coordinate a global settlement, as Patrick’s group does not have standing in the majority of any particular issuer’s trusts and needs the cooperation of a friendly Trustee to impose the settlement on the remainder of the bondholders. For banks like JPMorgan, who used at least five separate Trustees (all with varying interests and motivations), getting all Trustees to buy into any settlement could be a logistical nightmare.
Second, the world has changed since Patrick’s BofA settlement was first proposed in New York State Court. Since then, bondholders have organized and mobilized in opposition, with over 40 bondholder groups having now retained counsel and filed petitions to intervene in the proposed settlement proceedings. These bondholders have also had success in forcing the settlement outside of the favorable posture in which Patrick, BoNY and BofA sought to adjudicate it – in state court, under the deferential standards of Article 77. Opposition bondholder groups, led by Walnut Place, LLC, have successfully removed the case to Federal Court, where (pending success on appeal) it will presumably be treated more like a class action, meaning it will be subject to an entire fairness standard, more robust discovery, and bondholder rights to opt out.
Finally, opposition bondholders are now on guard against another settlement negotiated in secret. There was a significant amount of controversy in the BofA settlement surrounding whether David Grais was denied the right to participate in negotiations. This time around, opposition bondholders are not likely to let another deal get to court without making some serious noise and creating a record showing that they tried to participate in negotiations but were stonewalled.
Meanwhile, Patrick’s group will probably start down the path of negotiating with issuing banks, who themselves will be armed with the benefit of hindsight after watching how the BofA settlement has fared in court. While these banks likely won’t have the luxury of seeing how that first settlement is ultimately resolved, rest assured that they will learn from the pitfalls suffered by their competitor thus far and dream up new strategies to allow them to put these legacy mortgage issues behind them. The upcoming battle, involving some of the best legal minds in the country, promises to be a chess game for the ages.
Thank you to India Autry for her meaningful contributions to this story.
Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud Tagged: 60 minutes, affidavits • attesting • Daniel Edstrom • DTC-Systems • fabricating • false information • false sworn documents • foreclose • illicit business practices • improper statements • imp, AHMSI, appraisal fraud, attorney general, auction fraud, Chris Koster, credit bids, DocX Indictment, foreclosure fraud, FORECLOSURE SETTLEMENT, foreclosures, forgery, housing market, housing prices, investors, linda green, LPS, Missouri, mortgage fruad, mortgages, Robo-Signing, settlement, strategic default, Wells Fargo
![]()
Livinglies’s Weblog
Florida Bankruptcy Lawyer: The Chapter 13 Plan, Part 2
What the Chapter 13 Plan “may” do – Lien Stripping
Video Rating: 0 / 5
Company That Sold Statue of Liberty Scraps Seeks Chapter 11

- Getty Images
A Tennessee company that sold off chunks of the country’s most well-known symbol of freedom—the Statue of Liberty—has filed for bankruptcy protection after years of trying to make money selling the scraps it salvaged from the monument’s renovation in the 1980s.
With a warehouse full of metal and brick scraps outside Nashville, Gold Leaf Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month after a judge determined that the company owed $ 315,855.95 to a Florida man whose loan kept the company operating.
In the lawsuit that triggered the judgment, the lender accused the company of improperly transferring the monument’s materials, including metal support bars that were extracted from within the original Statue of Liberty and bricks from the Ellis Island immigration house.
Gold Leaf’s bankruptcy case, filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chattanooga, Tenn., automatically halts the progress of the lawsuit, giving the company some breathing room. The company’s attorney did not return several calls seeking comment.
Gold Leaf sold the aging innards from Lady Liberty, who took her perch in 1886, to companies such as Liberty’s Legacy, which has the exclusive right to use the material to make and sell Statue of Liberty replicas that are smaller than 16 inches. On its website, the company advertises eight-inch monument replicas made from the statue’s original artifacts for $ 39.95.
But in recent years, Gold Leaf executives used the scraps for more curious ventures, including a copper-colored Liberty Bike motorcycle that was featured on the “American Chopper” television show. The scraps of wood from the steps and doors of the historic main immigration building at Ellis Island became a Gibson Les Paul-designed guitar.
Gold Leaf salvaged the hundreds of thousands of pounds of scraps during an eight-year long renovation process that started in 1984. Those materials, according to news reports, were originally destined for the bottom of the New York Harbor.
But even though some money from the salvage effort was eventually supposed to make it back to a foundation that supports the statue, the move drew criticism from within the U.S. National Park Service and others who argued that making money off the country’s patriotic icon was crass.
Reporting on the controversy in 1986, journalists at Newsday unearthed a memo from the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island National Monument, urging those in charge of the renovation efforts to keep it classy. Lady Liberty, it seems, would have wanted it that way.
“Let us not assist in turning it into a yard sale,” the superintendent wrote.
BUYING OR LENDING ON A HOUSE IS STILL RISKY
MOST POPULAR ARTICLES
CLICK HERE TO GET COMBO TITLE AND SECURITIZATION REPORT
CUSTOMER SERVICE 520-405-1688
Editor’s Analysis: It all started with flooding the market with money in deals that even Alan Greenspan couldn’t understand with an army of over 100 PHD’s. Median income was going down, median expenses were going up, and people were having an increasingly difficult time making ends meet even with 3 jobs per household.
Along came Wall Street and convinced millions of homeowners that they could afford “payments” that would reduce their monthly rent or current mortgage payment and give them an investment that would rise in value without any work on their part. It was a lie.
For a while it worked. Between the flood of money coming in, the absence of underwriting standards and the complicity of developers who raised prices to give greater credence to the actual price of the house, people were lured into deals where the value of the house was falsely inflated by bank manipulation of appraisers and then die was cast.
The payments would go up beyond anything the borrowers could ever afford, the house values would go down leaving the borrowers with a debt much higher than the house would ever be valued for the foreseeable future and the good and bad loans would collapse, providing a payoff to banks and other speculators who bet on a sure thing: foreclosures would rock the nation, the value of the bonds sold to pension funds would plummet and the payoff on the bet went to the banks instead of the investors and borrowers who were defrauded.
So now we are back we we started from in 2001 — median home prices at around $ 154,000, which was still out of reach for many borrowers. Home prices had been falsely inflated to a median price that was over 140% of the starting prices. While realtors are trumpeting the low prices as the reason for growth in the volume of home sales, Zillow continues to forecast a continued slide in prices for 2012.
The Banks made a mountain of money doing the deal telling investors that these were Triple A rated insured investments while knowing that the bulk of the loans were garbage and that for good measure they created transactions within each pool where the best tier of loans would still be brought down in a crash because they had guaranteed the worst tier. There was no way for the Banks to lose — and plenty for them to make, especially when the U.S. Government paid off the bets.
Most of us who analyze the real figures and apply the context of illicit behavior on the part of the banks realize two things: (1) as long as wrongful foreclosures continue, the housing market will continue to drag down our economy and (2) the balance sheets of the large banks who created this mess is vastly overstated on assets and vastly understated on liabilities.
At some point, this will all come home to roost. In the meanwhile, buying a house is risky not only because the value is mostly likely going down, but because of the corruption of title by the Banks through the nation, there is no assurance that buying a house will actually get you clear title unencumbered by prior mortgages of record.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Home prices fell to their lowest point in more than a decade in January, which helped to lift the pace of home sales, according to a report from an industry trade group.
The National Association of Realtors reported that the median home price in January fell 2% from December to $ 154,700. That’s the lowest price reading since November 2001, before the run-up in home prices that became known as the housing bubble.
The median price is the point at which half of homes are sold for a higher price, and half are sold at a lower price. (Multi-million dollar foreclosures)
Serving as a drag on existing home prices is a large inventory of homes in foreclosure. Distressed home sales, which includes homes in foreclosure and so-called short sales in which the home is sold for less than what is owed on the mortgage, made up 35% of sales in January.
“Prices will continue to fall through the first half of 2012 due to the high share of distressed sales,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist with PNC Financial. “The recent agreement between the big mortgage servicers, state attorneys general and the Obama administration will also result in more homes going to foreclosure over the next few months, adding to downward pressure on prices.”
But the pace of sales rose to the highest level since May of 2010, helped by the low prices and rock-bottom mortgage rates. The seasonally-adjusted annual sales pace of 4.57 million homes was up slightly from the revised 4.38 million in December. The last time homes sold at that pace, buyers were rushing to qualify for an $ 8,000 homebuyer’s tax credit that was about to expire. The latest reading was roughly in line with the expectations of economists surveyed by Briefing.com.
“The uptrend in home sales is in line with all of the underlying fundamentals — pent-up household formation, record-low mortgage interest rates, bargain home prices, sustained job creation and rising rents,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors.
The housing market has been showing signs of recovery in recent months. The combination of low mortgage rates and a decline in home prices means homes are more affordable than they’ve been in decades. PNC’s Hoffman agreed that the report is a further sign of recovery in the market, although he cautioned “it will remain a long process.”
Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud Tagged: 60 minutes, affidavits • attesting • Daniel Edstrom • DTC-Systems • fabricating • false information • false sworn documents • foreclose • illicit business practices • improper statements • imp, AHMSI, appraisal fraud, attorney general, auction fraud, Chris Koster, credit bids, DocX Indictment, foreclosure fraud, FORECLOSURE SETTLEMENT, foreclosures, forgery, housing market, housing prices, investors, linda green, LPS, Missouri, mortgage fruad, mortgages, Robo-Signing, settlement, strategic default, Wells Fargo
![]()
Livinglies’s Weblog
Chapter 7 & Chapter 13 Bankruptcy in St. Louis, MO: Still Able to Get Credit
Visit www.StLouisBankruptcyAttorneyHelp.com to access best practices, reports and other expert videos related to debt settlement, Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and Chapter 13 bankruptcy 314-669-4529. Frank Ledbetter
Video Rating: 5 / 5
