Irvine Housing Blog

To add, part of the answer, at least in California, is a mixture of the “one action” rule and not being able to get a deficiency judgment for a purchase money mortgage.

They way it works generally, and there are exceptions, is if the mortgage, first second or third, is used to buy the home the only recovery is the property.  If the mortgage is not for purchase of the property, HELOC etc, the lender can obtain a deficiency but it all has to be done in one action.  If the second moves to foreclose, since they are second in priority, if the house sells for less than the first, then the only thing the second gets is a deficiency judgment.  The lender must then pursue and obtain the judgment, which for people who were just foreclosed on, is usually not worth doing. 

I think as this mess goes up the food chain and when people with higher net wealth start walking, it is possible that some banks might consider doing deficiency judgments as the wealthy may still have assets after a foreclosure. And there is usually enough money at stake to make a lawsuit worth it. A good lawyer can usually find the assets and seek judgment against them or make life hell for the debtor to the extent they would negotiate a deal for the judgment, but its obviously not free.

Given the carnage with layoffs in the legal field, I think there are enough lawyers to handle the work, but the courts, with all the furloughs, do not have the resources.

Thanks for all the explainations. What is the statue of limitations in CA on defaulting.  On the purchase loan, that’s the first set of loans on the inital financancing of the purchase and not future refinancing? 

If so IMHO, lots of borrowers that refinance will be in bigger touble with the non-recourse loan becoming a recourse loan.  Not only can they loss the house but their 401k and other future assets.

I’ve read that are buyer who will purchase a new house at the current low and short selling their highly morgaged house as Kishore wrote. Banks are trying to stop it by making the new loan basis on ability to pay for old house and new house without rental income from the old house or only verified income from the “rental” by a signed lease (but lots of phony leases).

Some in the IE are getting their principle reduced if the house was purchased with nothing down or have large negative equility.  Those with equity or large down payments have a tough sell for reduction of principle.
The govt and banks are still rewarding the ilresponsible and punishing the responsible.

It’s a FSBO.  Pride of ownership on display here.

I don’t know how you can improve an image of granite, or a front yard, or a swimming pool with an airbrush tool.  It is, what it is.

Or when you simply figure out that the rooms are much much smaller than they looked in the pictures, which apparently must have been taken with a wide-angle (but non-fish-eye) lens from the doorway above the agents head.

That’s a big turn-off too. Traffic is useless if all the buyers are dissappointed in what they find.

You never know.  A few years ago I found a date online.  The girl had a picture that showed her looking pretty good.  No lie, when I met her in person she was 100 pounds heavier than in the photo.  The photo was a couple of years old.

Did she think I wasn’t going to notice the 100 pounds?  Did she think she was going to be able to begin a relationship with anybody based on a lie to kickstart the relationship?

Yes, it would be interesting to see if the quality of photos and listing descriptions actually declines in Irvine because they know it would gain them free publicity on the IHB….

So that’s where it came from. I didn’t check there. Nice catch.

Thrifty, also funny are listings with only a photo of the ocean—meant to be a quintessential Huntington Beach photo, even though the home itself has NO ocean view!

“…didn’t load all the way…”

Worse yet - I’m pretty sure it’s the thumbnail that shows above the “street view” link in Google maps.

I was able to reproduce the image artifacts quite well by taking the thumbnail, enlarging it using Bell resampling, then passing the result through a 50% quality JPEG compression.  That would also explain why they used the default camera pose instead of pan/tilt/zooming the lamppost out of the center.

I suspect that they didn’t know how to extract the full sized image from street view.