Foreclourses has become the new real estate Four-letter word.

In March one in every 538 households in the U.S. received a foreclosure notice with Nevada (1 in 139 homes) leading the pack, followed by California (1 in 204 homes), Florida (1 in 282 homes) and Arizona (1 in 283 homes).

And the bad news is just everywhere...CNN, Fox News, USA Today, the Web, etc. etc.

To assist homeowners Real Estate Wiki (see previous entry on launch of the new wiki in real estate) has added a bunch of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) covering questions such as:

First American CoreLogic, a member of The First American Corporation family of companies and America's largest provider of advanced property and ownership information, analytics and services, announced this week the release of REiSource, a new Web-based real estate information gateway to the most complete and accurate suite of property profiles, new homeowner and refinance lists, resale trends, mortgage leads and custom reports for title insurance companies.

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.

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.

Syndication is all the buzz but what really happens when you place your listing data on sites other than your local mls and your own corporate or broker websites? What are you giving them permission to do with your seller's listing data? Are they reconfiguring it? Manipulating it for sales of leads back to the agent population? Find out.

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>

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.

Every year the RealSure team surveys the residential industry, seeks out any changes, analyzes new business models, interview hundreds of industry leaders, researches and reads thousands of articles and send out tens of surveys. Well the survey is currently underway and your opinions and comments will help provide a more accurate assessment of certain paradigm shifts that are currently occurring in the real estate industry.

Click Here to participate.

RealSure, Inc., publishers of the Swanepoel TRENDS Report is offering a bonus 10% savings as a thank you for participating in the quick 6- 10 question survey, depending on whether you are a broker or an agent. This is over and above the currently available 20% pre-publication discount for early purchasers.

J. Peters asked, in response to my last post: "How real is a big tsunami threat for California or Hawaii?"

Great question. Thanks for asking. As this is of regional importance, I'll reply here.

In terms of a 30-year mortgage, the short answer is...