By The Tim on January 11, 2013
I like to keep tabs on what’s going on in my neighborhood, and when a little house a block away was listed for rent on Craigslist (screenshot) this week, I remembered seeing it as a foreclosure on the market for sale last year. I got a little curious to know some more about this home’s [...]
Posted in Features | Tagged banks, foreclosures, lending, mortgages
By The Tim on August 16, 2012
Jillayne pointed me toward an interesting Washington State Supreme Court ruling that was just filed today. It seems that according to the Supreme Court, Mortgage Electronic Registration System Inc. (MERS)—the popular service used by many banks to consolodate their mortgage filings—doesn’t have the standing to proceed with foreclosures in Washington unless they actually hold the [...]
Posted in Local, News | Tagged banks, foreclosures, MERS
By The Tim on January 10, 2012
Full disclosure: The Tim is employed by Redfin. We’ve been digging into a lot of different data at Redfin lately, and I found this particular set to be quite interesting. What I’ve done here is take all the bank-owned (REO) sales over 2011 and group them by the bank that was selling the home. The [...]
Posted in Counties, Statistics | Tagged banks, REO, top-20
By The Tim on October 4, 2011
Full disclosure: The Tim is employed by Redfin. Yesterday over on the Redfin blog, I dug a little deeper into the conforming loan limit changes, pulling detailed sales data from all around the country by zip code to see which areas would be most affected by the change. The result was another Google FusionTables zip [...]
Posted in Local, National, News | Tagged banks, conforming-limits, heat map, mortgages, Redfin
By The Tim on September 23, 2011
There’s been a bit of talk in some circles about how new, lower “high balance conforming loan limits” that go into effect on October 1st going to somehow dramatically affect the local housing market (presumably in a bad way). In order to get a sense of scope on how many sales might be affected by [...]
Posted in Local, National, News | Tagged banks, conforming-limits, mortgages
By The Tim on September 19, 2011
A reader emailed me with an interesting question about refinancing an underwater mortgage: Do you think I can convince my lender to refinance my underwater 30-year mortgage to an underwater 15-year mortgage? Obviously another lender would have no motivation to take over a bad investment. But arguably it could be advantageous to my lender. They’re [...]
Posted in Features | Tagged banks, reader_question, refinancing, underwater
