Alt-A was just Alternative A paper. Borrowers typically had to have better credit and were probably lacking in income or assets (which is why the they were the stated, no-income verified and no-ratio loans).

One other question for you: is all Alt-A lending of a stated income, NIV, or “no-doc” variety? Is there no such thing as an income verified, fully documented, Alt-A loan (e.g. someone who’s income is fully documented, but has a credit score that doesn’t quite meet Prime categories)?

Are you implying that you don’t think this week’s decision by Fannie Mae’s to stop Alt-A lending will have any appreciable impact then (i.e. since Alt-A lending has already ceased)?

“As of 2003, nearly 60% of all Alt-A production was securitized by, or credit enhanced by, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, according to a market report recently issued by Milestone Advisors, a financial advisor in Washington, D.C.”

Do you have any idea what the implications of Fannie Mae’s decision to stop making Alt-A loans is? Are there particular types of products that would be impacted? To my knowledge Fannie Mae doesn’t accept “no-doc” loans, so what else could they be talking about?

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/08/fannie-mae-push-back.html

Do you have any idea what the significance of Fannie Mae’s decision to pull out of the Alt-A market will be?

Does this mean we should expect to see additional loan products disappear? Which kinds of loans will this impact?

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/08/fannie-mae-push-back.html

Also, some of the high end stuff has never been sold–it was owner built–so all they have to go on is the assessor stats.

Bill’s right; we do see far bigger variances on the high end … but then again those are list prices so we’re going to have to wait and see … According to a study we released today, it’s clear that most homeowners still have unrealistic expectations of their house’ value (http://www.zillowblog.com/every-houses-value-is-dropping-except-mine/2008/08/) Remember that Zestimates are estimates and errors in the public records will throw them off.

The only homes that should not have Zestimates would be a very small percentage of the homes on Zillow that were added by their owners (i.e. are not in our public records data feed.) You shoulld not be seeing many of those around Seattle – if you want me to look into any of these just ping me [davidg AT zillow DOTCOM]

I wonder if Zillow is working on some kind of model to address these homes.

Where’s David G when we need him…