Irvine Housing Forums

Advice on Rent-to-Own?

2008-12-01T13:53:43-08:00

Can anyone give me some info to pass along to a friend? She lives in another state (Montana). She does not have a lot of money… is a single mom… and can only afford to rent. A friend of a friend offered her their home in a “rent-to-own” situation. I don’t know all the details… and neither does she, yet. But it sounds like the owners have had the house for sale and haven’t had any luck. So now they want to rent it out ... but I don’t get the “own” part. I don’t know if this means they transfer ownership once the house has been “paid” for so in other words they are essentially carrying the loan for the renter or if it’s just a sham. To me it sounds very risky especially in these times. Besides hiring an attorney (I really doubt she would because of her finances), what is some good advice I could pass along to her? I personally feel she shouldn’t even be considering this but she has stars in her eyes and won’t listen. Thanks in advance.

I’m not even a Victorian house nut but…

2008-11-14T16:43:01-08:00

I heart this house. I even like the yellow paint. Seems like you could actually make some money as a B&B too. [NewToOC starts to google Plainfield City NJ].

B&B for sale in NJ

Lancaster homeowners suing K. Hovnanian Homes

2008-11-24T14:08:13-08:00

Homebuyers believe that K. Hovnanian knew there were problems with the water system in their neighborhood. Needless to say, the homeowners aren’t happy.

The CA cities October #s are here

2008-11-21T15:27:53-08:00

California Unter Alles

And here’s the LA Times breakdown

check out the volume in lancaster and palmdale, and the lack of it in tons of 20K+ la county zipcodes.

Palm Springs and surrounding desert towns

2008-08-30T11:18:03-08:00

OK, it’s time for P.S. to have it’s own home.

The End of Wall Street’s Boom

2008-11-18T01:28:29-08:00

A must-read. http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom

Midway through the article are great anecdotes about subprime lending practices:

“And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he’d just done so he could do it better. He’d call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. “The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,” says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. “She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,” he says. “One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ‘How did that happen?’ ” It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. “By the time they were done,” Eisman says, “they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments.”

Long Beach general thread

2008-07-16T12:11:00-08:00

Well, I’ll start it off with a doozy:

Short Sales In Long Beach are 26.6% of the market

Here is a story from a local LB realtor’s blog. He never gets responses or comments, but keeps plugging along….

Long Beach

Lennar and SunCal update

2008-11-20T19:01:07-08:00

Graph and No_Vas

Graph I know you follow these things. It is very interesting that Lennar got behind the power curve on this one.

There are various related links there also.

No_Vas

I think this was in your part of the country.

enjoy!

New DQnews october #s

2008-11-18T10:34:47-08:00

300K on the nose, with sales up 2/3 y-o-y

Just think, one more San Berdu REO and we would be at 299,999.99! Or something like that…

Amusing Property Finds

2008-11-17T09:44:23-08:00

Desert Home For Sale!

I’m not sure what the bottle caps or the cactus-covered lady have to do with this property, but it makes for fun viewing!!