Thomas Lipscomb on T~Mobile Scam:

Will More Realtors Pull MLS Listings from Trulia and Zillow?

• the aggregators' business model includes not only selling advertising to other agents but also "capturing" buyers and selling the leads back to the listing firm. So, your buyer client may choose to use the agent who has paid to have his or her advertising automatically appear on the page with the listing (and the aggregator's only qualification to appear is that the check cleared) or the buyer may be "referred" (for a fee to the data aggregator) back to the listing firm. There is a legal question as to whether the data aggregators are engaging in the real estate brokerage business without licenses when they charge a fee for the "referral";
• listing brokers often have little or no control over where listings are re-syndicated but they do get blamed by sellers for incorrect information about the listing that may appear on a site that the listing broker did not know had the listing information. Incorrect information corrected on the main site may continue to be incorrect on other syndicated sites;
• privacy issues are a growing concern. A site that Move, Inc. (which is licensed to use "Realtor.com") re-syndicates listings to will combine that listing information along with other information about the seller gathered over the Internet and issue a phony "press release" concerning the listing and the seller. The seller does not know or give permission for this "press release." Buyers have complained about interior photos of their home accessible on the Internet months after they completed the purchase. Some of those interior photos show children's names, expensive collections and furnishings and other information that those with evil intent would find useful;
• some sites permit uncontrolled and unedited "reviews" and comment on the listing information. Some sellers do not find these features helpful in selling their home.
• scam artists have "scraped" listing information off sites and used that information to defraud consumers (by placing a phony add for rent on other sites) or real estate agents (through check deposit scams).

State Recordation Fees/MERS and More Tax Evasion

Over the past several years, the real estate industry in the United States has undergone a near collapse. House prices have been reduced so far by 25% nationwide due to the bursting of real estate bubble. The only vibrant part of the real estate market in the present economic recovery is the millions of foreclosed homes being sold to bargain hunters.

Some smaller States, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Alaska, have managed to avoid a big downturn in prices and hope to continue to do so. The big States most affected by the real estate disaster though, California, Michigan, Nevada, Florida, have lost more than one-half on home values in many major cities.

The History

The Wall Street investment banks, beginning in the late 1980s, initiated and bought millions of home mortgage loans to be repackaged as Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and sold to investors across the country and the world. In order to have their investment offerings certified as safe by the investment ratings agencies, the Wall Street banks used almost exclusively Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac qualified mortgages on the assumption such loans have already undergone a serious scrutiny under federal regulations. In reality though the two quasi-government agencies did little to oversee the quality of the of the mortgage loans they were certifying, buying and selling.

The MBS marketing effort worked. The ratings agencies, paid huge fees solely by the investment banks, certified the Wall Street MBS offerings as mostly prime-grade investments. Congress, Fannie Mae and the Security and Exchange Commission greatly encouraged the MBS trade. Now, millions upon millions of these same mortgage loans are delinquent, some for longer than two years. Millions upon millions more American households still paying their mortgage have a property that is worth far less now than the mortgage loan balance.

It has been discovered that most of the loans in the Wall Street MBS packages and those held by Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, in fact, did not meet federal regulatory standards, not even close. Just about every player in the real estate industry had a large hand in this fraud: mortgage lenders, banks, sellers, buyers, brokers, appraisers, lawyers, middlemen, federal and state agencies, Congress and last five Presidents. The result is a home foreclosure rate that is unheard of already and looking likely to accelerate.

But the same Wall Street banks that bought off the ratings agencies and the government in order to cheat their customers and got away with it could not stop themselves from also committing massive tax evasion and the blatant violation of state laws across the nation with almost all of their MBS offerings. This is the fraud that might place the majority of US home ownership titles into serious question.

Mortgage servicers must provide documentation that their foreclosure processes are in compliance with foreclosure laws

Standard & Poor's Announces Servicers Must Prove Compliance - 12/10/2010 By: Joy Leopold
http://www.dsnews.com/articles/standard-poors-announces-servicers-must-prove-compliance-2010-12-10

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s says mortgage servicers must provide documentation that their foreclosure processes are in compliance with foreclosure laws, or risk receiving a revised outlook or rating from the company.

Many mortgage servicers have been under scrutiny recently because of reports of “robo-signing.” Some of the largest servicers including Bank of America, GMAC, and JP Morgan Chase suspended foreclosures across the country to perform internal audits.

Bank of America recently announced it was resuming foreclosures in the 23 judicial states. After maintaining for months that no foreclosure suspension was necessary because its internal processes were sound, Citigroup announced in late November that it had found an estimated 14,000 affidavits that will need to be re-filed.

The New York-based research firm said it will not take ranking actions based solely on an announcement that a
servicer is reviewing its foreclosure processes, but expects all residential servicers in its Select Servicer program to provide certain documentation to prove their compliance with proper foreclosure affidavit rules and attestation of their procedures.

By the end of first quarter of 2011, servicers must provide:

• Written verification from an independent source that the servicer’s foreclosure affidavit preparation and attestation processes are sound and are designed to be in compliance with individual state laws governing the relevant processes.

• Written documentation, where applicable, of the servicer’s identification of process, workflow, and/or organizational deficiencies in its existing foreclosure affidavit preparation and attestation process. This documentation should also provide data on the extent of deficient documents identified and outstanding.

• Written verification, where applicable, of all relevant changes to internal policy documents that describe procedural changes, process improvements, workflow and organizational restructuring, etc., that are specifically relevant to and designed to remediate and support ongoing statutory compliance with the preparation of foreclosure affidavits and attestation.

Standard & Poor’s said in a statement to the press, “If we determine that, in our view, a servicer’s processes are inconsistent with the aforementioned requirements, we will monitor its efforts to remedy the issues and revise our outlook and/or rankings on the servicer as we deem appropriate.”

This is the first in a series of how to deal with an insurance company that will not pay a bill for damages its insured Car caused when it rolled off a tow truck and into your building.

This will be updated as the insurance carrier responds to inquires we make regarding the claim.

We have forwarded a memo from the claimant to the carrier and are awaiting the carrier's response and will post it when one is received.  We set a deadline for 12/29/2010 for that response at which time we will post what has been sent to the insurance carrier and any response they have made.