Real estate news & trends
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Mortgages
Daniel Chookaszian, a Vice President of Perl Mortgage, specializes in working with veterans on VA loan financing. I recently connected up with Dan at a spectacular home, which the owner was kind enough to lend us as a venue for our meeting. We wandered down past the pool deck to the beach house, which overlooks ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on December 5, 2012
CityLIFT is a program sponsored by Wells Fargo Bank that provides up to $15,000 in down payment grant funds to qualified home buyers for the purchase of a home in selected suburbs and Chicago. The current round of the program is making $8 million available to buyers in households that earn no more than 120% ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on October 4, 2012
Thinking about strategically defaulting on your mortgage and seeing how long you can live in your home without paying? Think about what Heath Wolfe, a government official has to say in Lew Sichelman’s syndicated column in the Chicago Tribune. We are working with Fannie and Freddie to build a mechanism” to identify strategic defaulters, Wolfe ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 17, 2012
According to the latest CoreLogic statistics, 30.1% of all homeowners with a mortgage in the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville area owed more on their homes than they were worth, i.e. they were in “negative equity” territory. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there was a significant decrease in the number of local homeowners in negative ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 13, 2012
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured only 1 in every 50 new mortgage loans in Chicago in 2006. In 2009 the FHA insured one in every 5 new loans, and in 2010 one in every 7 was FHA-insured, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data reported by Crain’s. The availability of an FHA-backed mortgage is still ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 4, 2012
CoreLogic has just released its National Foreclosure Report for April (registration required). According to CoreLogic, Illinois (5.3%) ranked third among the five states with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes, trailing Florida (12.0%) and New Jersey (6.7%), and ahead of New York (5.0%) and Nevada (5.0%). Chicago, at 6.3%, had ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on May 31, 2012
In a surprise move, Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration, the largest sources of mortgage liquidity in the US housing market, announced Friday that they will no longer purchase or insure mortgage loans originated in Chicago’s Englewood and West Englewood neighborhoods. “Part of our core mission is to help struggling families and stabilize neighborhoods ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 1, 2012
VA-guaranteed loans may be the most misunderstood type of mortgage loan in the market today. Some time ago I met with Daniel Chookaszian, whose company since became a part of Baytree National Bank & Trust. Chookaszian specialized in VA loans, and volunteered with retired and disabled veterans. Terry Savage recently reminded us that VA loans ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on November 11, 2011
Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed lawsuits against a number of companies and individuals involved in fraudulent loan modification and mortgage rescue schemes. Nearly five years ago I called attention to the checkered past and annoying present of Joe Aldeguer. He was one of the defendants named in the lawsuits filed by the Attorney General. ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 28, 2011
In September of 2007 Afolarin Gbenga bought Unit 1N at the Michigan Manor Condo, 4343 S Michigan Ave for $315,000 with first and second mortgages totaling – you guessed it – $315,000. Sixteen months later the condo went into foreclosure. Unit 1N came back on the market two days ago at an asking price of ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on September 20, 2011
Mortgage fraud and appraisal fraud were, I’ve always suspected, rampant in Chicago’s South Side and West Side neighborhoods during the past decade. A recent study cited at Science Blog, took a closer look at the incidence of deals involving “cash back at closing:” How would these transactions work? In one case Ben-David found, the seller ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on July 12, 2011
An experienced attorney can make the process of proving ownership of a mortgage in a foreclosure a tedious, time-consuming and therefore expensive effort. That’s true even when the relevant documents have been executed and handled in the most professional manner. In the video, CBS 60 Minutes takes a look at how a large number of ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on April 5, 2011
The Columbia Journalism Review is not a typical starting point for a behind-the-scenes look at how banks are handling the mortgage modification process, but it was mine today. One striking mortgage borrower behavior pattern mystified the CJR writer and the author of this linked article: 64% of borrowers who are 30 to 59 days delinquent ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on March 23, 2011
“Not only are the banks protecting themselves, but they’re protecting the borrower. There’s a reason the bank doesn’t like that building.” – Russell Martin, a loan officer for Perl Mortgage, on lenders’ decisions not to offer mortgages for homes in “zombie buildings.” There is no master list of blackballed buildings, but the Tribune says many ...
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Posted by Joseph Askins on February 28, 2011
You might want to double-check the status of that FHA-approved condo you have your eye on. According to an article published in the Daily Herald earlier this month, “an estimated 2,200 condominium projects lost eligibility for unit sales or refinancings involving FHA mortgages because they had missed a key deadline for recertification set by the ...
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Posted by Joseph Askins on December 21, 2010
A post at Gary Lucido’s Getting Real blog includes an extensive list of condo developments that are on an unnamed lender’s “do-not-lend” list. Gary outlines some of the reasons why a project might be on the list, so we won’t repeat them. Most of the projects on the list are widely known to have experienced ...
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Posted by Joe Zekas on December 12, 2010
At an open house event in Winnetka, Joe Zekas met Diane Falk, a mortgage loan originator at Fifth Third Bank. Joe had been hearing stories of people paying cash for homes because they thought they couldn’t get a mortgage, so he asked Diane to talk about that topic and other trends she’s seeing on the ...
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Posted by Joseph Askins on November 24, 2010
Wells Fargo and Bank of America have tightened their standards for FHA-backed loans, says Bloomberg. Both banks now require applicants to have FICO scores of 640 or higher, instead of previously established minimum scores of 620. The move could exclude more than 6 million buyers who could qualify under earlier standards. As the story explains, ...
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Posted by Joseph Askins on November 17, 2010
Jeff Baird is a real estate valuation consultant based in Chicago. He founded Lakeshore Analytics to bring comprehensive, understandable housing data and analysis to Chicago-area readers. The site features a blog with free market news and charts, summary data on 20 top neighborhoods, and quarterly data subscriptions. FHA-insured loans are now a quarter of all ...
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Posted by Joseph Askins on November 12, 2010
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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Posted by Joe Zekas on October 8, 2010
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