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Sunday, December 23, 2007
Compare your city's crime with other Orange County cities
Violent crime increased 1.3 percent nationwide while property crime fell by 2.9 percent in 2006, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program. The agency annually releases statistics on violent crimes such as murder, rape and robbery, and on property crimes such as burglary and vehicle theft.
Use the menus below to compare up to three cities for 2005 and 2006. You must select a year first and then select the cities.
You also can sort the list of all cities by clicking on the column names. To reset the list, select "Both years or all cities" from the first drop-down menu and hit the "Submit" button.
source: ocregister.com
Use the menus below to compare up to three cities for 2005 and 2006. You must select a year first and then select the cities.
You also can sort the list of all cities by clicking on the column names. To reset the list, select "Both years or all cities" from the first drop-down menu and hit the "Submit" button.
source: ocregister.com
O.C. third quarter home prices and sales
For the third quarter of 2007, sales for all types of Orange County home sales decreased 30 percent. The median sales price decreased 2.4 percent. The median is where half the homes sold for more and half for less. Types of homes selling, as well as home value changes, cause the median to change.
Take a look at the numbers from the each month:
* July
* August
* September
source: ocregister.com
Take a look at the numbers from the each month:
* July
* August
* September
source: ocregister.com
Tell us ‘What deals will renters see in ‘08?’
Fourth-quarter O.C. rent stats from Axiometrics show owners of big apartment complexes offering prospective tenants meager concessions: savings equal to about a week’s rent for a year’s lease. (Read more HERE.) How hard do you think landlords will have to work in 2008 to lure in new customers in a market where empty apartments are rare as renters wait out the housing storm.
Typical landlord specials in ‘08 will save tenants …
source: ocregister.com
Typical landlord specials in ‘08 will save tenants …
source: ocregister.com
Map of O.C. summer home sales
A midsummer credit crunch put a near halt to much of the OrangeCountyhouse buying in the third quarter, with 71 of 83 local ZIP codes showing year-to-year sales drops. This map breaks the county into four groups, by each ZIP code’s summer sales versus a year ago on a percentage-change basis: the 12 winners (in green) and three gradations of sales losers. To see a sortable list of cities, zip codes, median prices and changes in sales volume
From the editor: Many of you have expressed concerns about some of the harsh anonymous comments from readers. To remedy that, we are introducing new features. You can create your own blog, publish your news and share your photos with the community. Once you fill out a simple form and leave a verifiable e-mail address, you can set up your profile page. It will display all of your contributions and allow you to track issues and easily connect with others.
We want our site to be a place where people discuss and debate ideas that foster stronger communities. We built this for you. Please take care of it. Tolerate broad thinking, but take action against obscene or hateful material. Make it a credible and safe place worth preserving and sharing.
source: ocregister.com
From the editor: Many of you have expressed concerns about some of the harsh anonymous comments from readers. To remedy that, we are introducing new features. You can create your own blog, publish your news and share your photos with the community. Once you fill out a simple form and leave a verifiable e-mail address, you can set up your profile page. It will display all of your contributions and allow you to track issues and easily connect with others.
We want our site to be a place where people discuss and debate ideas that foster stronger communities. We built this for you. Please take care of it. Tolerate broad thinking, but take action against obscene or hateful material. Make it a credible and safe place worth preserving and sharing.
source: ocregister.com
Banks rethink relationships with mortgage brokers
As the housing market slowed in 2005, W. Bailey Smith needed help with his 40 residential loans.
Smith, a Laguna Beach resident, estate planning attorney, and part-time real estate investor in homes and related properties, wanted to refinance the loans to lower his monthly payments. It was getting harder to find tenants for some of his properties.
Yet he was wary of mortgage brokers because the last broker he worked with said he only needed a 15 percent down payment to buy a property and then changed it to 20 percent late in the deal.
Smith said he's found a loan officer at Wachovia, formerly World Savings, who never changes key terms at the last minute. He's refinanced 30 loans with Wachovia's Gregg Madsen and has five more deals in the works.
"He's fastidious," Smith said of Madsen. "I have dealt with a lot of flakes in the lending biz."
Smith may represent a shift in consumer sentiment against mortgage brokers.
As loan defaults and foreclosures rise, politicians and consumer groups have directed many of their attacks toward mortgage brokers. They say some brokers steered consumers into loans they couldn't afford to earn a bigger commission.
California's Department of Real Estate is encouraging consumers to report abusive practices by brokers, and at least two members of Congress have introduced separate bills that would expand broker regulation.
Brokers, meanwhile, are firing back and say an entire industry is being blamed for actions of a few bad apples. And banks, not brokers, bear the ultimate responsibility for every single home loan, brokers say.
It remains to be seen if most home buyers and homeowners seeking to refinance have been swayed by the criticism.
But some big banks are paying attention. They're cutting brokers out of some loan deals or applying greater scrutiny to brokers.
Bank of America on Thursday said it will close its lending division that works with brokers, affecting about 700 workers in Brea, Rancho Cordova, Dallas, and Richmond, Va. The workers can apply for other jobs with the lender, and less than 100 workers will ultimately be let go in Brea, according to the company.
Floyd Robinson, president of consumer real estate at the bank, said in a statement, the company will focus on its "more competitive" retail channels.
Wells Fargo, in summer, stopped making subprime loans via brokers but kept working with them at retail offices. In early October, Washington Mutual said brokers will have to prove they disclosed key loan terms to borrowers.
Other lenders, including Indymac Bancorp, while not abandoning brokers, have said they are expanding retail operations.
Brent King, senior vice president in the mortgage division of Wachovia, said while his firm works with and values brokers, loans touched by brokers historically go into default more often than retail loans. The reason may be fraud, he said.
"The more hands that touch the file, the greater opportunity for fraud," King said.
But the difference is small enough to warrant a continued relationship with brokers, he said.
In Orange County in July, 2.47 percent of outstanding loans made by brokers were delinquent or in foreclosure vs. 1.21 percent of retail loans, according to First American LoanPerformance, which tracks about 80 percent of the market. Statewide the difference is greater with 5.88 percent of broker loans gone sour vs. 2.2 percent of retail loans.
The differences are small but telling. In Orange County, broker loans account for just 35 percent of outstanding loans but in July made up about twice as many loans in foreclosure.
John Marcell, a broker in Upland and former president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers, said there is a fundamental flaw with the statistics and attacks against brokers – the term "broker" is too broad.
In California, for example, brokers who are licensed by the Department of Real Estate generally are working in the consumer's best interest, Marcell said. But brokerages set up as corporations and holding one state finance license can have unlicensed employees helping consumers get loans.
Those unlicensed folks are running amok and giving everyone else a bad name, Marcell said.
Everyone who deals with consumers on home loans, whether a broker or loan officer at a bank, should face a background check and be required to take some ongoing education, Marcell said.
He added that critics who charge brokers with leading people into harmful loans are missing the point.
"We only give out the products that we have been given by lenders," he said. "The lenders create the products and say here are the products you can sell. If we didn't have the products to sell, we wouldn't have sold them."
Jack Williams, head of brokerage Benefit Mutual Mortgage in Brea, said the bank is ultimately funding each loan brought by a broker and has a "fiduciary duty to make sure the broker has down his job."
Raphael Bostic, a professor of real estate and associate director with USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, said banks didn't carefully scrutinize brokers or their loans when most mortgages could be profitably sold.
That's all changed amid a housing downturn two years long and still going. Banks are looking for the causes of costly defaults and finding the "safety of broker loans is qualitatively different," Bostic said.
"Brokers are not going away, but I do think how they do business is going to change," Bostic said. "They will be subject to much more scrutiny then they have in this last little bit, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. The brokers to some extent have slipped through regulatory cracks."
Indeed, on Oct. 22, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill that would bar brokers and lenders from receiving incentive payments to sign up borrowers for overly expensive loans. And it would require brokers and bank loan officers to be licensed by state or federal authorities.
That follows a bill introduced Sept. 5 by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., that would give mortgage brokers a fiduciary responsibility to borrowers.
All this is in stark contrast to the last big shake-up in the lending industry, when the savings and loan associations collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Brokers grew to prominence in their wake, said Wachovia's King.
King said the lending industry pendulum now is swinging against brokers, but not entirely.
"I think it will end somewhere in the middle," he said. "It's just heading in the other direction right now."
source: ocregister.com
Smith, a Laguna Beach resident, estate planning attorney, and part-time real estate investor in homes and related properties, wanted to refinance the loans to lower his monthly payments. It was getting harder to find tenants for some of his properties.
Yet he was wary of mortgage brokers because the last broker he worked with said he only needed a 15 percent down payment to buy a property and then changed it to 20 percent late in the deal.
Smith said he's found a loan officer at Wachovia, formerly World Savings, who never changes key terms at the last minute. He's refinanced 30 loans with Wachovia's Gregg Madsen and has five more deals in the works.
"He's fastidious," Smith said of Madsen. "I have dealt with a lot of flakes in the lending biz."
Smith may represent a shift in consumer sentiment against mortgage brokers.
As loan defaults and foreclosures rise, politicians and consumer groups have directed many of their attacks toward mortgage brokers. They say some brokers steered consumers into loans they couldn't afford to earn a bigger commission.
California's Department of Real Estate is encouraging consumers to report abusive practices by brokers, and at least two members of Congress have introduced separate bills that would expand broker regulation.
Brokers, meanwhile, are firing back and say an entire industry is being blamed for actions of a few bad apples. And banks, not brokers, bear the ultimate responsibility for every single home loan, brokers say.
It remains to be seen if most home buyers and homeowners seeking to refinance have been swayed by the criticism.
But some big banks are paying attention. They're cutting brokers out of some loan deals or applying greater scrutiny to brokers.
Bank of America on Thursday said it will close its lending division that works with brokers, affecting about 700 workers in Brea, Rancho Cordova, Dallas, and Richmond, Va. The workers can apply for other jobs with the lender, and less than 100 workers will ultimately be let go in Brea, according to the company.
Floyd Robinson, president of consumer real estate at the bank, said in a statement, the company will focus on its "more competitive" retail channels.
Wells Fargo, in summer, stopped making subprime loans via brokers but kept working with them at retail offices. In early October, Washington Mutual said brokers will have to prove they disclosed key loan terms to borrowers.
Other lenders, including Indymac Bancorp, while not abandoning brokers, have said they are expanding retail operations.
Brent King, senior vice president in the mortgage division of Wachovia, said while his firm works with and values brokers, loans touched by brokers historically go into default more often than retail loans. The reason may be fraud, he said.
"The more hands that touch the file, the greater opportunity for fraud," King said.
But the difference is small enough to warrant a continued relationship with brokers, he said.
In Orange County in July, 2.47 percent of outstanding loans made by brokers were delinquent or in foreclosure vs. 1.21 percent of retail loans, according to First American LoanPerformance, which tracks about 80 percent of the market. Statewide the difference is greater with 5.88 percent of broker loans gone sour vs. 2.2 percent of retail loans.
The differences are small but telling. In Orange County, broker loans account for just 35 percent of outstanding loans but in July made up about twice as many loans in foreclosure.
John Marcell, a broker in Upland and former president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers, said there is a fundamental flaw with the statistics and attacks against brokers – the term "broker" is too broad.
In California, for example, brokers who are licensed by the Department of Real Estate generally are working in the consumer's best interest, Marcell said. But brokerages set up as corporations and holding one state finance license can have unlicensed employees helping consumers get loans.
Those unlicensed folks are running amok and giving everyone else a bad name, Marcell said.
Everyone who deals with consumers on home loans, whether a broker or loan officer at a bank, should face a background check and be required to take some ongoing education, Marcell said.
He added that critics who charge brokers with leading people into harmful loans are missing the point.
"We only give out the products that we have been given by lenders," he said. "The lenders create the products and say here are the products you can sell. If we didn't have the products to sell, we wouldn't have sold them."
Jack Williams, head of brokerage Benefit Mutual Mortgage in Brea, said the bank is ultimately funding each loan brought by a broker and has a "fiduciary duty to make sure the broker has down his job."
Raphael Bostic, a professor of real estate and associate director with USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, said banks didn't carefully scrutinize brokers or their loans when most mortgages could be profitably sold.
That's all changed amid a housing downturn two years long and still going. Banks are looking for the causes of costly defaults and finding the "safety of broker loans is qualitatively different," Bostic said.
"Brokers are not going away, but I do think how they do business is going to change," Bostic said. "They will be subject to much more scrutiny then they have in this last little bit, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. The brokers to some extent have slipped through regulatory cracks."
Indeed, on Oct. 22, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill that would bar brokers and lenders from receiving incentive payments to sign up borrowers for overly expensive loans. And it would require brokers and bank loan officers to be licensed by state or federal authorities.
That follows a bill introduced Sept. 5 by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., that would give mortgage brokers a fiduciary responsibility to borrowers.
All this is in stark contrast to the last big shake-up in the lending industry, when the savings and loan associations collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Brokers grew to prominence in their wake, said Wachovia's King.
King said the lending industry pendulum now is swinging against brokers, but not entirely.
"I think it will end somewhere in the middle," he said. "It's just heading in the other direction right now."
source: ocregister.com
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