Charlotte, North Carolina - October 2008

Wachovia wants to back out of a deal with Citi Group when Wells Fargo decided to buy Wachovias stock for $17 per share. Citi Group had Wachovia sign a deal to purchase Wachovias stock for $1 per share, so that is lead to believe.

Wachovias decision to not sale to Citi via the terms of their agreement, the FDIC took it upon themselves to stand behind Citi and force Wachovia to sale to Citi. I am not sure if the FDIC has the right to stand in the way of an agreement that Wachovia seems to want to buy their way out of. Some critics believe that Citi needs the Wachovia purchase to survive the tough times of the economy. Not hard to believe since Citi wants to buy shares at $1 a piece.

They can easily sale their shares for $17 a share and make $16 instantly if they decide to sale to Wells Fargo.

This whole mess can possibly threaten jobs of Wachovia employees. The amount of lay offs predicted can send a shockwave through the Charlotte - Mecklenburg market forcing more people to lose their homes or sale before foreclosure.

For homeowners that need assistance because they are affected by a job loss can go to http://www.buyersofcharlotte.com

Fewer homes sold can cause a serious strain on the Charlotte - Mecklenburg Market.

Charlotte, NC - September 27th, 2008.

According to recent numbers the Charlotte market and North Carolina, South Carolina are really taking a hit with lower sales. Mecklenburg county has a surplus of houses on the market and with the stricted lending practices lenders has started to practice is making it hard to place the right buyer for any particular home.

The number of jobs can’t keep up with the growth in population. It was said that 60,000 new residences choose Charlotte as their place to live. Creating 60,000 new jobs every year for any city not only Charlotte would be almost impossible. Now that creates a serious problem, the current residences are either bumped out of employment.

This growth creates plenty of problems, landlords are now supporting tenants until they can get the Sheriff out; while others that lose employment because of the new growth, their home tailspin into foreclosure. Foreclosure causes lenders to lose money and forced to spend more money.

The current mortgage crisis is threatening the bring down the Charlotte market. The crisis even has Wachovia suffering. There are multiple options available for homeowners to side step the foreclosure auction and their goals should be to get the lenders their money. Don’t make the lender have to take the house back. That’s the biggest smack in the face and lacks integrity.

Homeowners should actively work with their lender to create a quick quite solution. Selling the traditional way by real estate agent recent numbers prove that the old practices are no longer feasible. The number of houses sold in July 2008 (3,080) had fallen from the previous year July 2007 ( 4,200).

According to Carolina Region of realtors shows that 2,469 houses sold in August which came to $ 669,714,796 inventory sold down from July’s 2,721 or $ 610,393,888. These numbers are really scary when there are 30,088 houses on the market in July 2008 which comes out to $ 10,140,657,536 worth of houses on the market, and that’s with a B for Billion.

All this means that not even 10% of the amount of houses on the market have sold by real estate agent. Real estate agents in Charlotte are overwhelmed with the amount of houses on the market. Lenders have tigten the belt on their lending regulations which put the squeeze on real estate agents.

The amount of foreclosures has sent all shockwave through the country and finally busted the bunker of the Charlotte Meclenburg region. Traditional methods of selling through a real estate agent has proven not to be the best answer to the problem.

There a few options avaiable for those owners that find themselves in situations that need unorthodox strategies. Selling your house by owner might be your best solution according to recent numbers. For more answers to your tough housing crisis questions go to Need Answers or call toll free at (888) 219-8619.

Link: http://www.fha.gov

A few weeks ago FHA the leader in mortgage insurance has decided to waive their 90 day seasoning requirement before insuring a mortgage for one year. What this means is they used require a homeowner to have their name on title or the deed for 90 days before they would approve loans for first time homebuyers.

The logic was that professionals were using FHA financing to illegally flip homes to fake buyers. The fake buyers would sign the applications and buy the house just to get a cut of the profits and then not make any payments. That abuse is what caused FHA to put stipulations on the mortgages they insured.

Since the fiasco with the mortgage meltdown. More and more lenders find themselves in trouble stacking up repossessed homes that they aren’t able to sale to first time homebuyer until the 3 month threshole is crossed. FHA realized the same penalty that was supposed to deter criminals has now hindered lenders in selling their properties to the biggest pool of buyers.

You can go to www.FHA.gov to get more details.

We have a home that is ideal for a small first time home buyer family looking for a nice affordable home. It’s a newer home built in 2001 in the west side of Charlotte, off of Beatties Ford Rd and Sunset. This home has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths and will accommodate a family with 3 children. It only needs carpet and paint if you are in a rush.

Own this wonderful with the seller open to provide down payment assistance.

Seller is requesting that buyer has a conventional loan or close with cash no FHA financing. In return seller is willing to provide down payment assistance to allow the right buyer to move in this home with little cash out of their pockets.

If you don’t have a lender, we have mortgage broker that has lenders that will do a house loan for buyers with credit scores as low as 580 with 100% financing and a fixed affordable interest rate. You don’t have to worry about your monthly payments moving up and down like a jumping jack.

Estimate monthly payments of $780 with all monthly fees included. You can call us at 704-953-6366 for more details, leave a message if the voicemail picks up.

Link: http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=118224,00.html

According the IRS site real estate investors may not be the problem behind most the things going wrong in the market.

There has been a scheme going on that consist of mortgage brokers, appraisers, and fake buyers also known as straw buyers.

The way the scam work is the mortgage broker, real estate broker and appraiser team up to buy properties at market value then turn around and immediately sale the same property for 2-3 times the market value.

So in this case a fake buyer with good credit will pay around $225,000-300,000 for a house that is worth $100,000. The buyer sometimes agrees to make payments for a few months then let the property go to foreclosure.

The reason this blog has been added to inform buyers that even professionals can dupe you into paying more for a house than it is worth.

In order to not become a victim, you must ask for similar home sales in the area also known as comps. After the seller gets you the comps drive by the address to see if you are indeed getting a fair deal. You don’t want to pay more for a home than it is worth.

You have to take sometimes into consideration the condition of the house as well as other factors, but to determine the deal is fair the house you are buying should be in similiar condition as houses that have already sold within the last year.

Insist that your seller gives you homes that have sold not homes that are for sale. There is a big difference.

To see the IRS article you can click the link above or here at Licensed Professionals that Scam and What to watch out for.

Link: http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2007/11/05/foreclosure_1104.html

Black Atlantans often snared by subprime loans

By CARRIE TEEGARDIN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 11/04/07

Black Atlantans of all income groups were much more likely than whites to take out high-interest “subprime” mortgages when buying a home, making them more vulnerable in the ongoing mortgage meltdown.

Nearly half of blacks who bought a house in 2005 or 2006 ended up with a high-interest mortgage, compared with 13 percent of white home buyers, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of federal mortgage data.

The disparity was striking, even in a comparison of home buyers with similar incomes. Among black home buyers making more than $100,000 a year, 41 percent got a subprime mortgage, compared with 7 percent of whites in the same income category.

Experts on mortgage lending offer a variety of explanations. Some say differences in credit history cause the variation. Others argue that subprime mortgage lenders aggressively targeted minority communities that have historically been underserved by mainstream lenders.

More Atlanta homeowners than ever are facing foreclosure. The metro area’s highest foreclosure rates are in minority communities.

“So much wealth for families in this country is tied up in their homes, and that’s even more true for minorities,” said Debbie Bocian, a senior researcher at the North Carolina-based Center for Responsible Lending. “It just exacerbates wealth inequality” if a greater share of minorities end up losing their homes, Bocian said.

At 49 percent, blacks were the most likely minority group in metro Atlanta to end up with a subprime loan. For Hispanics, about a third of home buyers got a subprime loan in 2005 and 2006. Only 10 percent of Asians used a subprime loan to buy a house, the lowest of any group.

The disparity is not unique to metro Atlanta. Federal mortgage lending statistics show that blacks and Hispanics across the country are much more likely than whites and Asians to end up with a subprime loan.

“I’m not surprised,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald, senior pastor at First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta. McDonald said churches throughout Atlanta are seeing an unprecedented number of parishioners being hit by foreclosure and bankruptcy.

“It’s destroying whole families. It’s not just destroying credit,” he said.

Subprime mortgages across Georgia are nine times more likely to be seriously delinquent or in default than prime mortgages, according data compiled by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

A loan is considered subprime if it comes with an interest rate significantly higher than the “prime” rate — or the best mortgage rate available on the market at the time. For this analysis, a mortgage was considered subprime if its annual percentage rate exceeded a threshold set by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act: 3 percentage points above the comparable rate on U.S. Treasury securities. A prime mortgage is typically priced at 1 to 2 percentage points above the cost of the Treasury securities.

The federal mortgage lending data analyzed by the Journal-Constitution includes the race and income of borrowers. But the government does not require lenders to report information about credit history or down payments. Those are key factors in determining whether a home buyer qualifies for the lowest interest rate.

Lenders say credit scores are a better predictor than income of whether someone will pay their mortgage on time.

“People who have low [credit] scores are people who have difficulty managing credit and repaying promptly,” said Anthony M. Yezer, a professor at George Washington University who is an expert on subprime lending. “Many high-income people have very low credit scores,” he said.

A national study of credit scores of all consumers, not just mortgage loan applicants, found that 52 percent of blacks have credit scores that would classify them as subprime borrowers, compared with 16 percent of whites.

Robert B. Avery, a Federal Reserve economist who is one of the authors of the study, said the differences in credit scores explain at least a portion of the differences in the incidence of subprime loans.

“How much of a portion and why those scores have gotten to where they have gotten to — that is something we don’t know,” Avery said, adding that the matter deserves more attention.

If half of black homeowners are going to be paying a subprime rate, he said, “there are real implications for that.”

A study by the Center for Responsible Lending that was able to link information about subprime loans with data on credit scores and down payments found that those risk factors could not entirely explain the higher rates that minorities were paying for subprime mortgages.

Academic studies have found that significant numbers of home buyers with good credit scores end up with subprime loans, even though they could have qualified for prime loans.

Many experts say that differences in credit scores are clearly not all of the story.

“It doesn’t explain all of it, or even most of it,” said Dan Immergluck, a Georgia Tech professor who is an expert on mortgage lending.

Immergluck said the heart of the problem lies in which lenders minority borrowers turn to. He said subprime lenders tend to market heavily in minority neighborhoods.

“If what you get in your mailbox is from a certain set of lenders all the time, then those are the lenders you think about going to,” he said.

Immergluck said lending studies show that subprime lenders tend to focus on minority communities. He said that once a borrower does business with a high-interest lender, the chances are good that their credit rating will suffer. That’s because the hallmarks of many subprime mortgages — adjustable rates, prepayment penalties, balloon payments — make defaults more likely.

“This is a vicious cycle,” Immergluck said. “You get into an expensive loan, or a loan with bad terms, and that will make it harder for your credit to stay good.”

William J. Brennan Jr., a 39-year veteran attorney at Atlanta Legal Aid who focuses on mortgage lending issues, said he has reviewed case after case in which blacks were aggressively targeted for the worst loans on the market. Often, he said, subprime borrowers ended up losing the equity in their homes that they worked years to accumulate.

“Since the day I started working here, economic oppression of black people has been going on nonstop,” Brennan said.

McDonald, the Atlanta pastor, said many minorities who got a subprime loan in recent years were first-time home buyers, and often the first in their family to have a chance to buy a house.

“We have been denied the American Dream,” McDonald said. “If you have the opportunity to get it, you would rather pay to the hilt instead of not getting it, and the lenders know that.”

Link: http://ml-implode.com/imploded/lender_BankofAmerica_2007-10-25.html

Hot News from implode meter

Update (mid-day): We received what we believe to be an official statement from Bank of America:

Bank of America today announced that it will exit the wholesale mortgage business in order to devote increased energy to its expanding retail channels.

We will be fulfilling all of our contractual obligations to you and your customers. You will receive formal, written notification of the termination of our Wholesale Broker Agreement by end of day Friday, October 26 with an effective termination date of November 25, 2007. During this transition period, please be assured that our sales and fulfillment teams will continue to provide you with the exceptional level of service you’ve come to expect. If you have any questions during this time, please contact your account executive.

We thank you for your business and wish you continued success.

Original Posting (10-25-07): Numerous tips have come in regarding the apparent closure of the Whole Lending Division of Bank of America. Account Reps are already sending out farewell notices:

“It is with much sadness that I write to inform you that Bank of America has opted to close its Wholesale Channel effective December 31, 2007. This is a bank strategy to become number one in direct to consumer… do not have much information at this time but it is my understanding that all loans in the pipeline will be honored and we will continue business as usual for an additional thirty days from the date of this announcement.”

Big news across most major newspapers today, B of A announced it is laying off 3,000 employees, approximately 2 percent of their workforce. From Google News and the Associated Press:

“The job cuts, which the company said come “in light of market conditions and strategic imperatives,” are throughout the bank, but the majority are in areas such as business lending, treasury services, and capital markets and advisory services, as well as support staff.”

We will update this during the day. We are looking for hard copy on this, so please email us information as it becomes available. Thank you.

Greetings to everyone!

I just wanted to share that getting started in real estate is not a get rich quick scheme at all. It’s great to know that you can make a great income in this type of business, however, when we go to seminars that want you to invest thousands of dollars(I have nothing against education). We get hyped and want to do a million different things at one time instead of finding a niche, create a plan, and taking it one day at a time in getting our business established. Once, we have gain experience in one thing we can then begin to learn other opportunites to create more income in real estate. We should want to provide a service for those who need our service as oppose to being anxious to make millions of dollars. I am growing up and learning it will take its course in due time. Be patient and take your time and allow your business to be of good report.

Thanks for inviting me to your blog. My name is Rachel Baldwin and I am from Richmond, VA. I look forward to seeing alot more great info and resources available. Have a good day.

I have decided to post a news clip that i came across just surfing the net.

The Charlotte market is different for people converting to home owners. We have some many different loans that are so sweet that you wouldn’t believe it unless i put you in touch with one of the best lenders in the Charlotte region.

They will set you up with a fixed rate that is so low, you will kick yourself for not becoming a homeowner sooner.

With our assistance you can come to closing with no money. A lot of people disagree with no money down, because you normally you will have a higher interest rate. Well i am going to tell you now, not with my special lending buddy.

You will get the best rates than any competitor company can offer. The media is so focused on the nation as a whole so cities like Charlotte get caught in the smoke, but when it clears the media puts Charlotte in the top Cities that hasn’t burst. Actually the media is saying Charlotte has stability when markets around us are crashing.

That means a lot. Our market is so stable that others are moving here by the boatload because this is one of the few cities that is maintaining while the rest of the country has fell between the cracks!