...These visuals (download here) from Ben Bernanke's "heat maps" show a striking picture of some of the hardest hit areas for mortgage delinquencies. I pulled out just one of those maps for display below, showing the change in mortgage delinquency from 2004 to 2007.  What particularly jumps out is that almost all of California and Florida are caked in red.  Others hard hit: Michigan, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

On a fairly regular basis, I hear people comment that this person’s or that program’s form letters or fliers are bad/not for their market/hokey, you-fill-in-the-blank.

The value in ‘canned’ content is not necessarily in that you can take them as they are, and start using them. While it is true that there are some things, some times, that can be good they way they are, or pretty close, it is rare. The value is in the fact that the content, the concept, is already there for you, and pretty much done. What is left for you to do is to tweak it to your personality, and/or your market. The value is in not having to start from scratch. Starting form scratch takes a great deal of time. That’s where the value is; the time savings.

In a previous post, we introduced the topic of mortgage fraud and some of its players.  In this second article of the seven part series, we’ll introduce the first of several scenarios in which fraudulent transactions manifest.

The “Flip.” While not illegal on their face, “flip” closings have been blamed for a number of mortgage fraud transactions in which the title company was allegedly complicit, resulting in fines in the millions of dollars against various title companies throughout the United States, levied both by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the respective States’ Department of Insurance.

There's a bit of buzz about Redfin's recent site upgrade. 

Live as of last Wednesday, the upgrade has added bank-owned foreclosures and FSBO listings to their inventory display.  

The bit of the controversy comes the question of how they were able to get around the MLS co-mingling display issue; the FSBO listings are listed alongside those from the MLS.  (Ref. 4.13 in MRMLS IDX policy... "Listings obtained through IDX must be displayed separately from listings obtained from other sources...")

...or can they?  It was hillarious reading the thread on real estate webmasters initiated by Mr. Ron Park.  Mr. Park was miffed about the results of his $10,500 outlay to try and clone Redfin. 

Zillow has announced that they have entered into a listing agreement that allows all Homes.com hand-entered property listings to be fed directly to Zillow.com at no additional cost to the agent or broker. The first listing Homes.com feed to Zillow was 105,000 active property listings. 

Today’s successful mega-producers are generating plenty of business, but unlike the customers of yesterday, today’s real estate customer is beginning online. According to the latest figures, in excess of 90% (94%) are beginning their search online. In my last installment, I explained how successful agents today are going way “upstream” to capture their business — before the customer has had the opportunity to be attracted by old-school marketing techniques. If you haven’t read it yet, you owe it to yourself to start there.

It's a beautiful day today in Southern California.  So, this post is a quickie and addresses a couple of questions I got on a previous article I wrote about Google's Street View, and which I've been meaning to post here on a slow, rainy day... (ahem).

I debated whether or not to post this article seeing how it isn't exactly one of those "strategic" or "tactical" articles we're used to seeing on this site.  But I didn't debate too long.  I figured it's important, I can write and I have one of those covetted RealBlogging Contributor's accounts.  ;-)

You've probably seen some of the same sound bites and news stories I have about the other/silent victims in home foreclosures: abandoned pets.  

There is hardly a more pervasive problem in lending than of mortgage fraud.  It always involves a conspiracy between a loan originator and an appraiser. Additional conspirators can include a buyer’s broker (who may also be the mortgage broker), a title company, and the seller’s real estate agent. An overlooked conspirator could be the secondary market who is encouraging loan originators to make loans as fast as possible, so the loans can be purchased in the secondary market (even though they are the “victims” who sue!). Since the vast majority of these loans are packaged, processed, and sold based on credit scores and tax returns, most of them are sold with very little due diligence as to the quality of the borrower.