Best priced homes in all of Tracy!!
0 Comments Published by Brian W. Barringer on Monday, November 05, 2007 at 1:47 PM.
Under $300,000
$249,900
3bd/2ba, 1669 sq.ft, 0.150 ac. lot, built in 1954
One of the best valued homes in Tracy. The home is halfway remodled. It is a Fixer. But thats where you are going to find the best deals in this market. This house is located in an establish neighborhood, could be a really nice home, previous owner was in the process of remodeling this property, check with the city regarding status of permits if any, newer roof, newer central heat & air unit, some newer electric and pluming, lots of potential.
Under $400,000
$374,900
5 bed, 3 bath, 2448 sq.ft, 0.110 ac lot, built in 2003
Has a guest quarters downstairs front bedroom with adjacent bathroom. Side yard patio, open spacious kitchen over-looking family room. Master suite has large walk in closet, double sinks, tub and shower. Convenient upstairs laundry room. Very attractive front elevation, a perfect home for a growing family.
Call me for a showing......
Quoted in the press, "When the ship starts sinking, the rats bail."
0 Comments Published by Brian W. Barringer on at 10:09 AM.
From http://www.tracypress.com/
Mortgage meltdown
Jennifer Wadsworth / Tracy Press / Saturday, 03
November 2007
While subprime loans steal the national spotlight,
shady borrowing practices are adding fuel to the foreclosure fire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subprime loans bear the brunt of the blame for soaring foreclosure rates in one of the worst housing markets in decades. But some Tracy lenders find themselves paying the price for more than just bad loans; they’ve fallen prey to outright fraud.
Middlemen who sneaked in addendums or conditional clauses in loan contracts behind the backs of banks in recent years diverted as much as $100,000 per home buyer in commissions and closing costs from falsely inflated home values, which they either pocketed themselves or split with the buyer, according to FBI and California Department of Real Estate investigators.
Cash-back loans are legal, but they become a federal offense when the lender is left in the dark about any amount above the home’s market value.
"It is illegal to misrepresent the value of a home to a lender," said Bill Barringer, a Tracy real estate agent. "Even if the value is inflated, it could be OK theoretically, but the lender has to know about it."
Problem was, a lot of lenders had no clue that the home value was misrepresented — until the market crashed.
These cash-back-on-closing deals lured buyers who wanted the extra money to make home improvements, do landscaping or wipe out credit card debt. And they gave lenders the chance to earn more than the 3 percent to 6 percent seller commissions commonly associated with home loans.
It seemed like easy money, and, because of loose lending standards, it became accepted as normal business practice, Barringer said.
In fact, it became so common that it left entire neighborhoods with inflated market values, undermining any frame of reference for real estate appraisers.
The burgeoning number of local real estate fraud cases prompted the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office to create a separate Real Estate Fraud Unit earlier this year to handle them, said Leilani Rebultan, a department staffer. Previously, all investigations were handled by the district attorney’s consumer fraud division.
"The money would either go into the buyer’s or the broker’s pockets," Barringer said.
Four months ago, Barringer referred a case of cash-back fraud involving a Brentwood real estate agent to the Department of Real Estate for investigation. It was then turned over to the FBI.
"To me, it’s just plain fraud, and I wouldn’t deal with any case like that where you have an obvious inflation of credit and where anything is done outside of escrow," Barringer said.
At times, after a deal closed either in contract or illegally outside escrow, a broker would declare bankruptcy and leave town with the money.
"When the ship starts sinking, the rats bail," Barringer said.
To get appraisers to inflate a home’s value, agents and brokers would open the offer to five or six appraisers, who are legally obligated to remain neutral, saying they’d award it to the one who returned the highest value.
There’s no official estimate of how common cash-back loan fraud was, said Tom Pool, spokesman for the California Department of Real Estate, because few people called attention to the problem earlier than eight months ago.
"But I can easily say it was common to the point where it came to be considered normal," Pool said.
Barringer was less polite.
"They were basically criminals, committing fraud against the consumer,"
Barringer said, "and while I would say most of them didn’t know that, a lot of them did."
As accomplices to the broker, buyers involved in shady cash-back deals without lender approval could face criminal charges, too.
"If there’s anything anybody asks you to do (a deal) outside of escrow, it means they’re hiding something from the lender," Barringer explained. "There’s no lender in their right mind who would allow tens of thousands of dollars in seller credit.
"Six months to eight months ago, we were getting offers left and right from agents who were trying this."
Barringer cited a specific case in which the asking price on a home was $360,000, its market value, but an agent offered him $420,000 with a credit backing of $50,000 for "repairs."
"I said no; I just won’t do deals like that," he said.
Agents making deals outside escrow could have their licenses revoked or be imprisoned, depending on the degree of fraud, according to Pool. Today, the state mandates that at least two appraisers assess the property before the deal closes.
Six Sacramento brokers from Freedom Capital Mortgage Inc. were indicted a few months ago on suspicion of creating illicit contracts involving cash-back deals made without lender approval.
"Many of these seller credits were written on separate addendum's or pages that the end funding companies never saw," said Tracy real estate agent Betsy Moreno.
Wholesale lenders and homeowners are the folks left holding the bag, she added.
"We see many of those big lenders that funded those loans at the end going bankrupt now," she said.
New Century, for example, filed for Chapter 11 in April, and Countrywide Realty teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
"Everything fell down like a house of cards," Moreno said, "and now we have lenders trying to help people avoid foreclosure. But the damage is already done now."
But that new wave in lending gives brokers who cheated before a chance to meddle with clients again, opening up the possibility that customers might be taken advantage of — possibly by the same people who led them astray with their original loans, Barringer said.
Incidents of fraud that occurred more than a year or two ago are just now starting to crop up, said Sacramento FBI spokesman John Cauthen, who has dealt with mortgage fraud for more than a decade. He said there are more cases than ever, now that people "are wising up to what happened."
"In the current economic climate, mortgage fraud investigations have been exploding," Cauthen said. "We have been doing more cases than I can remember. I honestly say that the reported excesses of the past few years have been astronomical."
Five signs of a "cash back at closing" scam:
1)The buyer places an offer on the property that's significantly more than the asking price on the condition that the seller kicks back all or some of the extra money.
2)The appraisal is obviously inflated.
3)Neither the buyer nor the buyer's agent has ever seen the property.
4)The buyer wants to use a different title company than the one that the seller's agent has chosen.
5)The buyer or buyer's agent claims that the extra money will be used for home repairs or renovations or paid to a contracting company to handle the repairs or renovations.
An even simpler rule: Whenever the lender is not informed, in writing, of the true nature of the transaction, the transaction is illegal. Hint the lender is not the broker of the loan.
Related articles:
Ten More Sentenced in Oklahoma Mortgage Fraud Case by Flipping Frenzy.com
Anatomy of a real estate fraud from MortgageFraudQC.com
Convicted mortgage broker sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison from SFgate.com
