From the category archives:

Shenanigans

Will a Minnesota Government Shutdown Impact Your Loan Approval?

by Alex Stenback 06.17.2011

With a government shutdown looming ongoing in Minnesota, and looking more and more likely every day, we are fielding lots of calls and emails about whether this will negatively impact real estate closings, and especially, loan approvals for those who have been laid off as a result of the shutdown. Here’s the deal: Our position [...]

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Why You Should Always Read Your Loan Application Before you Sign it, Then Read it Again at Closing

by Alex Stenback 03.29.2011

This recent story from the NYT is getting passed around everywhere as a textbook case of misapplied justice. “Charlie Engle wasn’t a seller of bad mortgages. He was a borrower. And the “mortgage fraud” for which he was prosecuted was something that literally millions of Americans did during the subprime bubble. Supposedly, he lied on two [...]

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Reason #8 Shanghai Real Estate is the Most Obvious Bubble Ever

by Alex Stenback 01.19.2010

Whether you are still smarting from the after-effects of the middle 2000′s real estate binge or you saw The Bubble coming from a mile away but did not get your once-in-a-lifetime billion-dollar short-bet down in time, take heart. There is still Shanghai.  Which has such an obviously nutty real estate bubble going that people are literally burning themselves (!!) (!!!!) [...]

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Rule #1: Do not Transact Business with Someone Who Tries to Trick You

by Alex Stenback 11.11.2009

Over the years, much ink, and many, many pixels have been annihilated advising mortgage shoppers how to best select a lender. I won’t get into that, but letters like the one below make it easy to eliminate at least one lender under the “don’t ever transact business with someone who is trying to trick you [...]

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Will Uncle Sam Soon be the Biggest Landlord?

by Alex Stenback 11.05.2009

About a year ago, we had a running semi-serious joke around the office that the government should just buy up every foreclosure for the value of the loan and rent the home back to the owners – back of the napkin math suggested it would just be cheaper in the long run than all of the banking bailouts and [...]

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Chump Change: 100,000 Potential Bogus Tax Credit Filings?

by Alex Stenback 10.20.2009

It should come as little suprise that the lure of an $8,000 check from the Federal Government – especially one you can get by re-filing taxes outside of the real estate closing - is tempting bait for scam artists: “The Internal Revenue Service is examining more than 100,000 suspicious claims for the first-time home-buyer tax break, [...]

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Only 93,000 Homes Made Affordable

by Alex Stenback 09.30.2009

The Washington Post with an update on the Making Home Affordable Refinance program: “A federal program to allow borrowers with little or no equity in their homes to refinance is struggling to gain traction, according to government data released Tuesday, showing that only 93,070 borrowers have been helped since the effort was launched in April. [...]

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Wells Fargo: Executive May or May not be Squatting in a $12 Million Dollar Beach House

by Alex Stenback 09.11.2009

Update: Fired. In a story so perfecly composed of elements sure to enrage that it almost has to be a hoax, the LA Times Reports that a senior Wells Fargo Executive in charge of foreclosures has been squatting in a 12 Million dollar California beach house that - get this – was surrendered to Wells Fargo by [...]

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Loan Modification Schemes: Mostly Scams

by Alex Stenback 07.20.2009

If you’ve been following along here, you’ll know that many if not all supposed “loan modification” services out there are essentially advance fee fraud scams. But in case you’ve forgotten the NYT has up a very good piece which establishes in fact that a very large number of these loan modification companies are simply former sub-prime mortgage outfits manned by the [...]

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