Cinderella Story For Former Seattle Gal ----- Not!
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Maid-Turned-Realtor Ran Vegas Mortgage Scam, Prosecutors Say
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Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Eve Mazzarella was a Las Vegas success story. The high-school dropout and former housemaid moved to the Nevada city in 2000 from Seattle, got a certificate from the ABC Real Estate School and started selling houses in what would become the hottest market in the country.
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In 2006, Mazzarella recorded sales of $13.8 million and made the National Association of Realtors' ``30 Under 30'' list, which names the best young agents in the nation. Mazzarella started her own company, Distinctive Real Estate & Investments Inc., in December 2003. She whipped around town in a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle. She planned to build a three-story office building in Vegas's shabby downtown north of the Strip and preserve a historic house on the site by lifting it onto the roof.
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Her competitors were impressed. ``She was an up and comer with a brilliant future,'' says Forrest Barbee, a broker at Prudential Americana Group, a Las Vegas agency where Mazzarella once worked.
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The dream ended at about 5 a.m. on March 13, when federal agents smashed through the door of a stucco home on a quiet, grassy cul-de-sac looking for Mazzarella, 31, and her husband, Steven Grimm, 45, an erstwhile mortgage broker......
.
Maid-Turned-Realtor Ran Vegas Mortgage Scam, Prosecutors Say
.
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Eve Mazzarella was a Las Vegas success story. The high-school dropout and former housemaid moved to the Nevada city in 2000 from Seattle, got a certificate from the ABC Real Estate School and started selling houses in what would become the hottest market in the country.
.
In 2006, Mazzarella recorded sales of $13.8 million and made the National Association of Realtors' ``30 Under 30'' list, which names the best young agents in the nation. Mazzarella started her own company, Distinctive Real Estate & Investments Inc., in December 2003. She whipped around town in a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle. She planned to build a three-story office building in Vegas's shabby downtown north of the Strip and preserve a historic house on the site by lifting it onto the roof.
.
Her competitors were impressed. ``She was an up and comer with a brilliant future,'' says Forrest Barbee, a broker at Prudential Americana Group, a Las Vegas agency where Mazzarella once worked.
.
The dream ended at about 5 a.m. on March 13, when federal agents smashed through the door of a stucco home on a quiet, grassy cul-de-sac looking for Mazzarella, 31, and her husband, Steven Grimm, 45, an erstwhile mortgage broker......
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Comments
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008 ... wners.html
48% of Nevada mortgages are underwater.
Wow! WOW! So...back of the envelope math here, that probably means something like 60% of Las Vegas mortgages are underwater and not too many in the rest of the state. Over half the city could (should) just vacate their homes.
Actually, even here in Washington the numbers look a little dire. It says 10% have no or negative equity. It's one of the lowest rates in the nation, but still that means one out of every ten houses has an elevated risk of foreclosure. Even if the owner can afford the payments, they have reason to reconsider it...and we're still not down in prices all that much yet.
I have noticed a lot of the overpriced homes on Redfin seem to be because the owner has no equity cushion. You can usually tell these homes because they are the ones that have been on the market 100 days, are at least 10% above comparables (near market peak prices), and have not dropped the price (or have dropped it less than 1%).
Add a dash of "lack of ethics" and I would agree the story could be accurately thusly summarized.
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What, you mean like buying a house, polishing it a bit, and selling it for a 10% markup 3 months later?
At every level in the RE chain (from field appraisers to Wallstreet suits packaging up bad loans and selling them with an "AAA" rating) is a picture of unprecedented corruption, greed, and fraud at all levels. Any questions why this time is "different"?
Retire by 30 without doing any real work...."as seen on TV!" :twisted:
I thought the two went hand in hand.