When it was a “Mid-Century Modern” bank, Washington Mutual served my clients well.

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Jerry Gropp Architect AIA

It provided market rate mortgages which it held in the branch’s own portfolio. (WaMu advertised that its “WM Mortgage Loans” were never sold). Your home is a place to live, raise your family- not an investment.

Whether it’s a MCM (Mid-Century Modern) or other, that’s the way it should be regarded, loved and cherished. And a good home mortgage, preferably locally held and serviced made all this possible for me and my clients. As did many other Seattle natives, I started with “School Savings” pictured as a mural on the wall of a branch.
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WaMu and many other of the troubled banks and mortgage lenders got off on the wrong foot when they went after the derivative bundled mortgages that were in demand by big operative builders like Toll Brothers as covered in this very inclusive 10/16/05 NYT Magazine article- Chasing Ground.

Seattle Sounders and the Space Needle

Posted on March 20, 2009 by ARDELL

seattle-sounders When I first saw the pictures below taken by Damon Cortesi who I know as @dacort on Twitter, it was St. Patrick’s Day. I thought the green “hat” on the space needle was a Lepruchan’s hat 🙂 I didn’t know why it wasn’t all green.

Kim told me that the blue and green colors on the Space Needle are for the Seattle Sounders Football Club. Tickets for their inaugural game were sold out well ahead of time, and they WON!

But this is a post about the fabulous night shots taken by Damon, and I appreciate his permission to post them here for everyone’s enjoyment. Thanks @dacort ! spotlight-on-seattle-space-needle1

space-needle-sounders downtown-seattle-at-night

Distressed Property Law Changes Pass the Legislature

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Jillayne Schlicke

Proposed changes to the Distressed Property Law have passed both branches of the Washington State Legislature and the bill is headed to Governor Gregoire’s desk for her signature. You can read the changes here. Real estate agents and Realtors are now exempt “from the definition of “distressed home consultant” when the broker or salesperson is providing services governed under the real estate brokerage laws and the services do not result in a distressed home conveyance.”

I have mixed feelings about the passage of the exemption. Real estate agents and Realtors were raging mad last summer when their liability increased under the original Distressed Property Law. All through the summer and fall of 2008, agents swore up and down that they were going to avoid listing or selling short sales in order to limit their liability. In a way, the Distressed Property Law had some good consequences: Only experienced agents were allowed to take short sale listings at some firms, and it became extremely important to make sure the homeowner was referred to legal counsel. Short selling homeowners are often better served when their listing agent knows what they’re doing. The home buyer is also better served when the seller’s listing agent is short sale-competent. The Distressed Property Law brought this to everyone’s attention. There were many agents who were very, very worried about increased liability. So far, I haven’t heard about any lawsuits.

Something interesting started happening toward the end of fall, 2008. November and December of 08 saw a remarkable increase in the number of real estate agents attending the Short Sale class. Attendance went from, say, 15-25 agents all summer to 50-70 by December of 2008. When I asked why they were in class, agents all agreed: “Short sales are becoming more and more of the percentage of available inventory. We don’t have a choice anymore; we HAVE TO take these listings, even with the added liability. We need to pay our own mortgage and we also like to eat, Jillayne.”

So now real estate agents are exempt from the DPL (provided they’re not going to engage in a distressed home conveyance.) This means we will see an increase in agents listing short sales left and right, whether or not they are short-sale competent.

KLK and other agents have said that foreclosures would increase because of the Distressed Property Law. I argued that it’s not the DPL that will result in more foreclosures but the normal unwinding of mortgage lending gone wild and that higher foreclosure rates will be with us for some time as homeowners who cannot afford their home loans sell or default and return to the housing market as renters. As time moves forward through the rest of 2009, it will be interesting to see if, in fact, foreclosure rates decline.

4 Years Later, RCG is still Rock’n the Real Estate World

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Dustin Luther

Today is Rain City Guide’s 4th Birthday!

When I hit submit on our Hello World post 4 years ago, I had no idea what I was embarking on… but what a fun journey it’s been. You’ll have given me so many chance to test out different tools, meet so many interesting people and take part in so many fabulous discussions. Thank you!

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By the time we were 1 year old, I was savvy enough in the ways of linking to get the site ranked for having the sexiest real estate agents. Since then, I’ve tried to remain thankful to the RCG community and my family…

This year, I want to continue the tradition by saying thanks to all of you that make RCG possible! You’all rock! 😉

And just to give you an idea of how RCG continues to rock the real estate world, I’ll end this post with a chart showing RCG’s growth since Feb ’06 (when I first started using Google Analytics). While the growth is no longer “exponential”, I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb when I say there is no other local blog written by real estate professionals that generates nearly this much traffic! Interesting, traffic to the site continues to grow and last month we broke the broke the 100K PV benchmark for the first time! Obviously, none of this would be possible without so many awesome contributors and such an active real estate community in Seattle!

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Thank you all!

FOMC leaves rates unchanged

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Rhonda Porter

There’s really nowhere to go but up with the target Fed Funds rate. From the Press release:

“To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion.”

As of the time of writing this post, I have yet to see lenders issue new rate sheets for the better in spite of significant improvements with mortgage backed securities. We should be seeing improved rates soon.

If you are in the market for a mortgage, whether you are buying a home or refinancing, be sure to provide your Mortgage Professional with all the required documentation needed. We are all ready in the midst of a “refi boom” and this will compound the delays.

Real Estate Agents: I highly recommend that you make sure the mortgage companies you have transactions with prioritize purchases over refinance business.

Homeowners who are considering refinancing: watch out for mortgage originators who are promising quick closings. Every aspect of the refinance transaction will become clogged.

Everyone needs to be patient.

Nice Caller Wants to Modify My Mortgage

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Rhonda Porter

I just received a very official sounding recorded message informing me that President Obama has a new program to help save my home–it’s NOT a refinance. If my rate is over 7% or if I’m falling behind on my mortgage, I can be helped. If I press 1, I’ll be connected immediately to a Restructure Specialist. I’m feeling feisty…so I press 1.

Immediately a polite gentleman boldly answered my questions.

Are you or do you represent my mortgage company?

No. We’re a loan modification company.

If I understand Obama’s plan correctly, shouldn’t I call who I make my mortgage payments to for a modification?

Well you can, but the clients help receive better results.

Great! Do you do this service for free?

No. We don’t.

Why would I pay you for this when I can call my mortgage servicer and do this for free?

Because you charge for our expertise.

How much does your expertise cost?

We have two convenient mortgage plans. You can either pay $1899 or three installments at $699 each.

How did you get my phone number? I’m on the do-not-call list.

Our marketing department is calling everyone across the country with mortgages.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I let him know that I was a Mortgage Originator who is versed on The Affordable Home programs and that I don’t condone this type of soliciting. He told me he’s a mortgage originator too and then slammed the phone down in my ear.

There must be significant money in this industry to allow these companies to employ these solicitors. I hope our State is agressive in regulating the loan mod industry to protect home owners from predatory actions.

The recorded message on this phone call sounded so legitimate, I believe that people who are in desperate need of help would think it was coming from the Government. If I didn’t have my background, and would not have known what to ask the gentleman on the phone, I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything to change that image.

A Little Beauty

Posted on March 17, 2009 by ARDELL

Savannah Jane

This one was a born thinker 🙂 My Grandaughter. I had the privelege of holding her minutes after she was born, and I could see the wheels turning. Wouldn’t you love to know what she’s thinking about?

ING Bank suing under RICO statutes to recover losses by alleged local real estate fraud ring.

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Tim

Here is the article from the Seattle Times.

Excerpt:

In one deal, the bank loaned a borrower $935,000 to buy a Tacoma house for $1.35 million — a house that, according to the real-estate Web site Zillow, is valued higher than 99 percent of homes in its ZIP code. Nationwide Home Lending was paid nearly $30,000 in fees on that loan.

I’ve just dropped an entire commentary I wrote within this post regarding the fantasy idea some people believe that our local area is somewhat insulated from the garbage and degenerates destroying our markets and economy due to greed and fraud.

In essence, my post can be wrapped up in these questions:

Ethically, is this industry too far gone to recover any resemblance of credibility, trust and moral foundation?
How will the real estate brokers weed out the bad actors? We know DFI is going after loan officers and others.

Fortunately, I know and work with quite a few agents and loan officers who genuinely try to do their very best for their customers. Unfortunately, many of them and others who work in real estate are caught in the enormous wake of the problems the fraudsters have created.

Sunday Night Stats – Prices Improving?

Posted on March 15, 2009 by ARDELL

We all know that prices can’t go up in large leaps the same way that they can drop significantly in a short time. It takes a lot longer to go up than down, due to appraisal issues.

It will take many weeks to build up enough data post Obama $8,000 Stimulus Credit to form any conclusions. But you have to start somewhere 🙂 Stats prior to the credit are somewhat irrelevant at the moment except to later see if in hindsight pre-credit was “bottom”. We won’t know that until next 4th Quarter and January of 2010. Until then, we’ll track week to week until we build up enough data to do larger market segments.

I am using MPPSF Pending Inspection King County SFH, as these are the most recent “went under contract” homes. The green columns are properties that went under contract pending inspection Monday March 2nd through Sunday the 8th. The purple columns went under contract pending inspection Monday the 9th through Sunday the 15th.

I broke the stats down into under $500,000 (2 columns on the left) and $500,000 to $1M (2 columns on the right). The lower priced segment is doing better, but both show slight improvements. These are asking prices, so all this is telling us at the moment is that buyers seem to be making offers on houses that are not priced quite as low on a median price per square foot basis, as they were pre-homebuyer credit. We won’t know if actual prices close higher until we get at least 45 to 60 days in front of the credit passing.

Data is not compiled or posted by NWMLS (required disclosure)

King County Home Prices inching Upward?

The “White Trim Syndrome”all over Rain City- There’s a whole lot more to designing homes

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Jerry Gropp Architect AIA

Mercer Island and a lot of other nice places are being overrun by “Spec Builders” madly producing these oversize boxes with their wide white trim. Other tell-tale touches of their indifferent computer-driven drafting (don’t call it “design”) are the tapered posts with pasted on faux river rock.

While fronts are abundantly and ineptly adorned, both sides and the back are usually left plain- except for perhaps some lumber yard non-wood wide white trim. Here are some examples:

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