By Erica Christoffer, Multimedia Web Producer, REALTOR® Magazine
You may have heard the buzz surrounding Facebook’s impending launch of the “timeline” profile. If not, get ready…it’s sure to take users to the next level in how we share information, make personal connections, and experience Facebook as a whole.
The timeline feature itself is described as an online scrapbook – “the story of your life” as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it during his company’s f8 conference in San Francisco Thursday. Facebook fills in milestone events it knows from the existing profile information, such as your high school and college graduations, the start of your current job, the date of your wedding anniversary, etc. But you can take the timeline back further and fill in all your life events starting from when you were born, your first job, places you’ve traveled, or even when you purchased your house.
“Now REALTORS® who are friends with clients can help them mark those events – add photos in front of their new home, mark the date on their timeline,” said Brian Copeland, REALTOR® at Village Real Estate Services in Nashville and the national YPN Advisory Board chair. Plus, the new timeline feature is quick to navigate; in just a few clicks you can look at statuses, photos, or events from years past in your archived Facebook content.
Curious? While Facebook is planning to roll out timelines over the next couple of months, according to Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor, those who want a jump start can add the new profile now by following these steps outlined by Mashable.
[As a side note, I just have to point out just how on fire Zuckerberg is: His net worth is now over $17.5 billion, up $10 billion from last year. And this week he landed 14th on the Forbes 400 list. ]
Yours truly downloaded the new profile today and my first impression was that it’s reminiscent of a WordPress blog template. A large “cover image” stretched the width of your profile header, which could easily serve as a branding tool for real estate pros, Copeland pointed out. Continue reading »
Time is running short for Congress to prevent FHA and conforming loan limits from reverting back to 2008 levels. The current limits expire Sept. 30 and will drop from 125 percent of the area media home price (and a top limit of $729,750) to 115 percent of area home price and a top limit of $625,500. If Congress fails to extend the limits and they drop, the real estate industry (which is united in opposing a drop) will certainly look for another opportunity later in the year to get them back up.
Regardless of what Congress decides to do, it’s clear there’s a lot of information on the issue in the media that’s simply not helpful. It’s not uncommon for current loan limits to be described as helping higher-cost housing, but as NAR has been trying to make clear for almost a year, a drop in the limits will be hard on middle-class buyers and sellers, because maximum conforming loan limits will drop in markets throughout the country. The issue is so often expressed as a Boston, New York, San Francisco issue, but in fact buyers and sellers will feel the impact at all price points in almost 670 markets in more than 40 states.
Allan (“Dutch”) Dechert of the New Jersey Association of REALTORS® captured this squarely when he testified earlier this week (see 44-second video above) before a panel in Congress that was looking at ways to improve the disposition of REO properties. Dechert, the president of NJAR, brought the impact home to the panel’s chairman, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), when he explained how the lower limits will hit the middle of the market as much as the higher-end market. In New Jersey’s Cumberland County, Dechert said, the drop would be more than $100,000, and Cumberland is a middle-income market.
How will dropping loan limits now help stabilize housing markets? It won’t, and that’s the message that everyone in the housing industry, including the home builders and the REALTORS®, are trying to get across. But time is running out.
By Robert Freedman, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
The pressure on home equity has been tough on everybody since the downturn but one segment of the population that’s been especially hard hit is the small business owner. Thanks to tight underwriting requirements by lenders, small business owners have been struggling to get capital just to keep their doors open. With lenders closed off to them, the only place left for them to go for capital is their own assets. That means tapping their savings or retirement accounts or their home equity, which is often their biggest source of wealth — or at least used to be. With home prices still struggling to recover in many markets, even that source of funds isn’t what it used to be. Yet many lenders won’t even consider giving business owners a loan without tying it to the equity they have in their homes.
“Much to my chagrin, I needed to put my home up as collateral for my lender to even approve my business line of credit,” says Karen Elkin, the owner of a small architectural glass company in Alexandria, Va.
Elkin, whose home is paid off, just took out a $150,000 line of credit to move her business to another location. Having to tie her business line of credit to her home equity wasn’t a deal-breaker for her because the appraisal on her home came in far enough above the loan amount that the lender was willing to provide the financing, but for other owners or for entrepreneurs who are hoping to start a business, the numbers might simply not add up. An entrepreneur whose home has fallen in value to, say, $175,000 is unlikely to secure a start-up line of credit for anything near that amount because of lenders’ concern over whether the home value will be there if the entrepreneur can’t pay back the credit.
NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun says the drop in home equity is one of the reasons business start-ups have fallen so significantly over the past several years. Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show start-ups falling from 550,000 to 400,000 between 2006 and 2009, the lowest level since at least 1980. Continue reading »
By Robert Freedman, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
President Obama signed into law today the most sweeping reforms to the U.S. patent system in decades, and it holds out hope for real estate. A number of REALTOR® associations and MLSs have been hit with patent infringement lawsuits in recent years, and this law aims to reduce the number and cost of these lawsuits.
The “America Invents Act” is divided into three parts. First, it aims to keep the U.S. patent system attractive to global companies by aligning its processes with other countries’ processes. Second, it tries to align funding for the U.S. Patent Office with its needs by modifying its fee system. And third, it aims to raise the bar on the quality of the patents so only the most appropriate patent infringement lawsuits are filed.
It’s this third part that’s of most interest to real estate. Right now, companies can obtain patents that are so broad that all sorts of applications fall under them. The new law aims to narrow the scope of patents so that just the truly innovative parts are protected. In doing that, the likelihood of broad-based patent lawsuits, like the CIVIX-DDI lawsuit that hit a number of REALTOR® associations and MLSs last year (and for which NAR negotiated a comprehensive settlement earlier this year), will be reduced.
It will be years before we know whether the patent changes will have their intended effect and no doubt the law will be tweaked in the years ahead, but what’s clear is that lawmakers understand that the U.S. system needed modernization. NAR will be monitoring its implementation to make sure real estate interests remain protected.
In this four-minute video, NAR Senior Legislative Analyst Melanie Wyne walks us though the law and how it might impact real estate.
By Todd Carpenter, Director of Digital Engagement, National Association of REALTORS®
Imagine a future home buyer choosing to do business with you because you both “like” the same coffee shop on Facebook, went to the same school, or because you did business with relatives they never talk to, but stay connected to via a social network. It’s the sort of promise that social media was supposed to deliver, but hasn’t for most. But real estate portals are looking to change that.
This summer, Trulia leveraged Facebook to “socialize” their new recommendations service. When consumers recommend an agent on Trulia, that recommendation can be easily shared on Facebook for the consumer’s friends to see. Then, they’re using these recommendations to socialize the search for an agent process on their site. When consumers “Search for a Pro”, they’re encouraged to cross search their Facebook friends list to see if a friend has recommended a local agent. The result is a list of agents ranked by how many recommendations they have, but superseded by agents that have recommendations from people the site visitor already knows through Facebook.
Implementing a social-search strategy might be a part of REALTOR.com’s future plans as well. Having acquired SocialBios.com earlier this summer, the possibilities for how they will use it point to the importance of making sure your Facebook and LinkedIn profile pages are as complete as possible. Continue reading »
By Robert Freedman, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
The $447 billion jobs initiative President Obama introduced last night, called “The American Jobs Act,” contains some pieces that aim to boost home mortgage refinancing, rehab homes, cut taxes for small businesses, boost road, bridges, and other public-works spending, in part through an infrastructure bank, and otherwise inject momentum into the stalled economic recovery. Many of the specifics are still to come. Here’s a thumbnail summary of the key provisions provided by the White House:
President Obama
1. Cut in half the taxes paid by businesses on their first $5 million in payroll, targeting the benefit to the 98 percent of firms that have payroll below this threshold.
2. Give a payroll tax holiday for adding workers or increasing wages. The benefit is capped at the first $50 million in payroll increases.
3. Extend 100-percent expensing into 2012.
4. Institute regulatory reforms to help entrepreneurs and small businesses access capital.
5. Offer tax credits from $5,600 to $9,600 to encourage the hiring of unemployed veterans.
6. Institute reforms to prevent up to 280,000 teacher layoffs and “to keep police and firefighters on the job.”
7. Modernize at least 35,000 public schools and supporting new science labs and Internet-ready classrooms.
8. Invest in infrastructure, in part through a National Infrastructure Bank.
9. Launch “Project Rebuild” for rehabilitating homes, in part by leveraging private capital, “scaling land banks,” and encouraging other public-private collaborations.
10. Expand access to high-speed wireless.
11. Institute reforms to prevent layoffs and give states greater flexibility to use unemployment insurance funds for work-sharing and other programs, including programs in which displaced workers take temporary, voluntary work or pursue on-the-job training.
12. Offer a $4,000 tax credit to employers for hiring long-term unemployed workers; prohibit employers from discriminating against unemployed workers in hiring and training programs.
13. Cut payroll taxes by 50 percent, for an average tax cut of $1,500 per worker.
14. Increase home mortgage refinancing.
By Katherine Tarbox, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
While I was at the offices of the Greater Capital Area Association of REALTORS® in Rockville, Md., for the Homeownership Matters Bus Tour, I was taken aback when I saw all of these signs available for real estate practitioners to purchase… mostly because they’re a bit of a twist on the usual “For Sale,” billboard. Check out the sign that says, “I’m Gorgeous Inside,” or the “Honey… Stop the Car” sign.
Do you have a unique sign that works for you? If so, what does it say?
By Robert Freedman, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
You can’t expect much from a single letter but a recent communication from NAR to federal regulators could help shine a light on an appraisal issue that that needs as much light on it as possible. The issue concerns appraisal management companies (AMCs), the middlemen between appraisers and the lenders that hire them. Earlier this year AMCs began rolling out changes to the contracts between them and their appraisers that offload the legal liability over loans gone bad to the appraiser. That means the appraiser who earns about $200 for an appraisal (after the AMC has taken its 45 percent cut of the fee) also has to shoulder the burden if a consumer or the lender or some other party decides to sue.
Appraisers already assume a certain amount of liability over valuation issues, of course. Any time they release a valuation they certify to its integrity, so they already shoulder liability if someone thinks the numbers are misleading. Continue reading »
By Robert Freedman, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
If you’re thinking about working with a financially distressed seller and the house he wants to sell is trashed, take the extra time to be sure he didn’t trash it himself. One of the types of short sale fraud that Fannie Mae is seeing these days is “reverse staged” houses. In these cases, owners trash their house to knock down the property value. A buyer with whom the owner is colluding then comes in with a low-ball offer, buys it and fixes it back up, then flips it for its real market value. That seems like a brazen scheme, but mortgage fraud by its nature is a brazen activity.
Kim Ellison
To learn more about this and other types of short-sale fraud, we spoke with Kim Ellison, Fannie Mae senior industry relations manager for the mortgage fraud program.
REALTOR® Magazine: What kinds of short-sale fraud are you seeing?
Kim Ellison: Illegal flipping and non-arm’s-length transactions. The non-arm’s-length space is a smaller percentage, roughly 9 percent. Usually the delinquent home owner is selling the property to a family member or a business partner without disclosing the relationship. It’s really an effort for the owner to stay in the home. Instead of making payments to the mortgage company they’re making payments to the family member, as rent. They’re hoping to clean up their credit and reapply for a mortgage down the road. Continue reading »
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