Irvine Housing Blog

How important are NaR national statistics to an individual making a decision to buy in a given market?  If anything is pent-up in the housing market, it is REO and defaulted supply.  Where I live, banks foreclose relatively quickly, but once they take possession, the properties hit MLS almost immediately.  Where my parents & in-laws live (So-Fla) - not nearly as much.  Couple with that, the double-digit default rate in their county vs. the sub-5% default rate here, and you have two situations that are very different.  I don’t know how you get that info from national NaR info.

People can influence the system.  Do some research yourself.  Ask your potential realtor some tough questions.  If you get BS, go to someone else and tell your friends that this realtor is just pushing getting a deal done.  Realtor behavior is a local phenomenon also.  The problem is that the pushiest realtors get the deals done, and have the biggest marketing budgets to get new clients.

Down payments are not the end-all solution, and we should probably step up from current levels.  Or you can use PMI or other higher-current payments to improve equity position.  The higher current payments also gives wiggle room, and makes sure the cash-flow side of underwriting is stronger.

The NAR should be disbanded and prosecuted under RICO.

Realtors should be ground into cattle chow.

NAR executives should be thrown out of helicopters over the Atlantic.

It’s time to outlaw mortgage financing.

Banks and brokers have proven they are too criminally insane to trust with underwriting.

From here on out, it’s cash or fuck you!

And remember, if you are starving to death, eat a Realtor. No jury would do anything but burst into applause.

Dennis Green said it best “they are who we thought they were!”... a sales organization based on tactics designed to create pressure on buyers on any given offer regardless of market conditions… their only leverage the best kind, unverifiable competition for the place you happen to be making an offer on…

You said: “Unfortunately, they (FHA) have become the replacement for subprime in the deflation of the bubble, and the losses from strategic default are starting to add up.”

Correct, as far as you went; but you missed something important. When the Countrywide, WAMU, New Century & Wichovia subprime bubble collapsed in ought 8, the mortgage “originators” - brokers and some banksters - shifted over into originating FHA low down mortgages.

FHA signed them up without ANY due diligence or inspection. Mistake, very bad mistake. Not only did FHA go as you point out from 2%, but they rose to 25% of the new RE financing market. Those are the bad RE loans that FHA is having to deal with.

NAR did not do that, Realtors did not do that, mortgage originators did it - to U.S., once again.

While the link I typed in under URL isn’t my site, it’s one that is relevant to this article.  I was with this org in the early 2000’s doing research on fraud in housing.  A most interesting set of documents was on the FBI website, on white collar crime, financial crime, and mortgage fraud.  In these doc’s I and other consumer org’s had no trouble understanding statements that mortgage fraud was so rampant the agency predicted it would take out the economy. Nor that the agency found almost all the time these crimes are committed not by “home buyers” as the media and industry say, but by the industry itself. Everyone from consumer groups operating on a shoestring budget, to bloggers, to the FBI, knew and were trying to warn that the housing bubble was fraudulently conceived by the industry and was a house of cards.  Consumers, though, were not aware of these warnings because they weren’t on TV news.  Even as prices fell, even now, at least one of the major networks gives regular air time to a real estate shill who always tells people it’s a great time to buy, we’ve reached bottom, etc.  What BS.  I see that many more consumers now see this is BS but it’s too late for those who are upside down in loans, victims of criminal fraud, or for taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill for all of this.  Many in these industries should be in jail, but instead the people who created the whole scam are rewarded with high salaries and govt bailouts and tax breaks, all the while claiming their industries are “victims” of those greedy buyers.  I think if I ever saw the truth on TV news I’d faint.  Thanks for your article and the many excellent parody cartoons etc, in it!

The American stupidity will continue, until the US $ no longer is the worlds reserve currency.  Then the new dark ages will be upon us.  Until then, women will continue to convince their man that they can afford a huge overvalued house, and the stupidity will continue….

So what would be the actual commission paid for the sale of this house?