...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. 

After only two hours of deliberation yesterday, the jury unanimously vindicated a buyer's agent accused by his clients of failing to disclose that two other homes in the neighborhood sold for less than what they paid. As a trial court case, this decision in Ummel v. Little is binding on the parties to the case, but has no binding authority for other cases. Moreover, the buyers may file an appeal.

On Friday, Real Estate Radio USA talked to Stefan Swanepoel about the changes shaping the real estate industry. Billed as probably the most informative interview they have done to date the 45 minute interview is a lively, fast-flowing exchange of ideas and commentary about the state of the market, agents in general, knowledge and recommendations for productivity, real estate trends and the future. You can listen to an archived version of the talk here.

New real estate wiki for real estate industry is launched. 

History of wikis in real estate
BiggerPockets (launched in 2006) claims to be the first real estate wiki but it unfortunately closed down in May 2007 due to lack of sufficient content.  Introduced shortly therafter, and still going strong, is InmanWiki (part of InmanNews, InmanTV and InmanBlog).  

America's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced today that they are investigating 14 financial and mortgage companies for insider dealing and fraud as part of a criminal inquiry into the sub-prime crisis. The FBI suspects that the house price boom, once seemingly endless, encouraged mortgage lenders to take increasingly large risks, making loans to people with weaker and weaker credit histories as they sought new customers. 

Read the complete article here.

Interesting New York Times article sent to me by a friend.

By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: January 22, 2008

CARLSBAD, Calif. — Marty Ummel feels she paid too much for her house. So do millions of other people who bought at the peak of the housing boom.
What makes Ms. Ummel different is that she is suing her agent, saying it was all his fault.
Ms. Ummel claims that the agent hid the information that similar homes in the neighborhood were selling for less because he feared she would back out and he would lose his $30,000 commission.   Read the entire article>

The panel judges from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that US District Court Judge Percy Anderson's financial interest in AOL should have disqualified him from the conviction and sentencing of former Homestore CEO Stuart Wolff. Wolff had been convicted of charges of conspiracy, filing false statements, fraudulent insider trading and falsification of corporate records. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, a $5 million fine and $8.64 million in restitution.  Although under home detention, Wolff today, 7 years after the irregularities, is still a free man.

Read previous update here.

Read original blog here.

The number that caught my eye in The New York Times was $9.8 billion. But that staggering sum – the loss recorded by Citigroup – was just the start of the bad news. The fine print was a lot worse.

We all know the cause: Subprime. But if only it had been so good as the headline!

The real number was $22.2 billion – the amount Citigroup wrote off in “soured mortgage-related investments and bad loans.”

Let’s try to get our arms around these numbers by thinking not in terms of dollars, but of seconds. A second goes by pretty quickly, right? A few hundred have ticked by since I started writing this item. So intuition might tell you that any fifth grader would have lived at least a couple billion seconds.

“The world has changed quite drastically – and our view of the world has changed quite drastically.”

I found that stunning statement buried deep in a news story about the arcane maneuverings that exposed the world’s largest investment companies to massive losses in what we now know as the subprime crisis. It came from a director of one of the world’s biggest bond rating services – the people who are supposed to keep everybody rooted in reality.

Every day, all over the country, real estate appraisers dutifully search county records for comps and write their reports, which directly or indirectly influence a whole range of decisions for buyers, sellers, lenders and even tax assessors.

But as developers turn increasingly to incentives to get their properties sold, we have to face up to the possibility that the entire appraisal system could become distorted.

Let’s say a developer sells a home or condominium for the nominal price of $200,000 after enticing the buyer with the offer of a free $30,000 car. The price goes in the county records as $200,000, but the real price is $170,000.