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27 Feb 08 - 12:32 PM (#2273826) Subject: BS: Want A New House? From: Rapparee LOS ANGELES (AP) - Want Michael Jackson's merry-go-round? How about his locomotive, or his curtains? Those items and more could hit the auction block next month as the pop star's Neverland Ranch will be put up for public sale unless he pays the more than $24 million he still owes on the property, according to a Tuesday court filing. Financial Title Co. filed the notice of trustee's sale with Santa Barbara County Superior Court, setting the auction date for March 19. |
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27 Feb 08 - 12:33 PM (#2273833) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Peace Only 24 million? Heck, I'll buy two. The dogs need a place to call their own. Likely the only people able to afford that price will be televangelists. |
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27 Feb 08 - 12:36 PM (#2273839) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: gnu Shoulda been called Never-Neverland Raunch. |
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27 Feb 08 - 12:46 PM (#2273851) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Bill D It doesn't say it'll cost you $24 million...it says 'auction'. Maybe get it for $199.99 and TV rights to Fox News to film the bedrooms at intervals. |
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27 Feb 08 - 01:29 PM (#2273905) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Peace OH. |
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27 Feb 08 - 06:02 PM (#2274135) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Stilly River Sage Will they take credit cards? |
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27 Feb 08 - 06:07 PM (#2274143) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Sorcha I do, but, please not THAT one. BAD vibes from that place. I'd never sleep. |
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27 Feb 08 - 06:12 PM (#2274152) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Rapparee Foreclosures are hitting everyone hard, I guess. Mortgage company shoulda been more careful with these subprime borrowers. |
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28 Feb 08 - 10:32 AM (#2274746) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: GUEST,leeneia I know this is supposed to be a humorous thread, but I have to respond to 'shoulda been more careful with these subprime borrowers.' The house next door to mine was mortgaged to a naive guy for $110,000. He rented it out. I have been in it. No way that house was worth $110,000. Water ran down the living room wall from the shower above, growing mold. The furnace was the gravity original, from about 1915. The gas company came out one day and refused to light it, saying it was too dangerous. The basement door didn't lock; anybody could walk in night or day. There was a one-inch gap at the bottom of the front door where cold air poured right into the return for the first floor. The wiring was in terrible shape; extension cords ran through the walls. The house should have sold for maybe $40,000 as a fixer-upper. And some mortgage company had the stupidity/greed to get involved in a $110,000 deal for that? They must never have looked at it. No real businessman would have gone for such a thing. They were just looking for somebody to screw, and I don't feel sorry for them. Last summer the place caught fire from the bad wiring. It is now a blackened wreck. |
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28 Feb 08 - 11:13 AM (#2274792) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Stilly River Sage They had the help of a corrupt appraiser to make it look right on paper. SRS |
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28 Feb 08 - 01:08 PM (#2274918) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Peace How do you know when it's bedtime at his house? Well, when the big hand is on the little hand . . . . |
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28 Feb 08 - 03:41 PM (#2275073) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Rapparee The house next to mine is up for foreclosure sale. The guy's an architect and the house IS worth a bundle. The sale was originally scheduled for January, then yesterday, and now March 27. The house is only about 7 years old and was built as a project by the Univesity's College of Technology. My wife was at a Continuing Ed class on taxation and the instructor mentioned the number of foreclosures. Someone said, "Well, that doesn't happen here!" and my wife said, "Read the Legals Section of the newspaper." Right now there are 42 houses in foreclosure, pre-foreclosure, or bankruptcy. Some of them are in very expensive neighborhoods. |
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28 Feb 08 - 04:05 PM (#2275089) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Sorcha So far, locally is doing ok. Lots of houses for sale and noboby can afford to buy them, but not too many actual foreclosres here yet. |
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28 Feb 08 - 04:13 PM (#2275102) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Becca72 Leenia, remember that the land the house sits on is included in that $110K value... And yes, it should never have passed inspection under those conditions. |
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28 Feb 08 - 08:29 PM (#2275320) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Q (Frank Staplin) Too bad some of those houses can't be moved to Alberta. Things still booming here, and houses in demand. |
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28 Feb 08 - 08:51 PM (#2275330) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Q (Frank Staplin) So much nonsense being written about the mortgage problem. Much of the crisis resulted when the regulators loosened the strings, and the banks, afraid of discrimination charges, loaned out the money to people who couldn't meet the payments. Not the sole cause, but the main one. In a discrimination-sensitive country, no one seems to want to talk about it. See this article in the New York Post. There are others with more details, but a start is here: Mortgage Scandal ...the Boston Fed, clearly speaking for the entire Fed, produced a manual for mortgage lenders stating that: "discrimination may be observed when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that clearly disqualify many urban or lower-income applicants." Sometimes discrimination is necessary! |
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28 Feb 08 - 09:17 PM (#2275345) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Charley Noble I'm flashing back to the late 1970's when neighborhood groups in inner city area were complaining about "mortgage redlining." Their claim was that the mortgage lenders were denying loans in their neighborhoods regardless of the credit worthiness of the applicants. Well, one of my jobs was devising a law to disclose what the pattern of mortgages was years by year, neighborhood by neighborhood, mortgage lender by morgage lender. In short I did that, the law was passed, and I actually got a National Science Foundation grant to independently monitor the law's implementation, and train neighborhood groups in how to determine how well they were faring. There was only one major problem. In 1979 mortgage interest rates rose to 19% and no one could afford mortgages. No one was very impressed with the results of my research. Thanks for reading this post! So you say there is a current mortgage problem? Cheerily, Charley Noble |
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29 Feb 08 - 01:57 AM (#2275432) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: The Fooles Troupe Who would want to mortgage currants anyway? |
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29 Feb 08 - 02:14 AM (#2275439) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Georgiansilver Definitely a 'current' mortgage problem in UK. Try to get a mortgage on a house that has suffered during the vast flooding recently...you can't. Try to sell such a house...guess you are stuck with it. |
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29 Feb 08 - 12:29 PM (#2275827) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Q (Frank Staplin) That high interest in the late 70s affected people in different ways. Before the rates went up, my mother sold her house and banked the money, in time to ride through 'on high' with the longest term certificates she could get. As the old song went, ye gods, how the money rolled in. Both that and the current default situation were the result of lack of Federal policies on loans and interest; the current one because the Fed threatened discrimination suits if lenders did not relax the rules. Lenders went along with the relaxation of the rules. |
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29 Feb 08 - 12:33 PM (#2275831) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Rapparee I wouldn't be so quick to blame the Feds and discount greed...I suspect it was a mixture of the two and bunch of other things as well. |
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29 Feb 08 - 04:23 PM (#2276052) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: MaineDog I have a house for sale in Massachusetts, its big and cheap. If anyone is interested, pm me. But there are several real good reasons why houses are not selling : 1) according to NPR today, more than one percent of American adults are in jail, mostly for trivial or drug related offenses. THATS ABOUT 2 MILLION potential home buyers, and we pay for their housing out of taxes 2) another 200,000 or so young adult potential home buyers are also being put up, at taxpayers expense, in very expensive digs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other exotic places around the world. 3) I don't know how many hich tech jobs have been outsourced overseas, but I'm sure that this practice prevents lots of good filks from being able to buy homes. Any other good ideas? MD |
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29 Feb 08 - 04:25 PM (#2276055) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Sorcha And a bunch more young people who can't afford housing have moved back home with Mom and Dad. Or they are tripling up on the rent somewhere. |
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29 Feb 08 - 06:09 PM (#2276117) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: GUEST,leeneia Very good points, MaineDog and Sorcha. I really doubt that relaxing rules to avoid the appearance of discrimination was an important factor in this mess. I think that the lack of ethics and skills on the part of greedy lenders is a greater factor. My newspaper had an article about the plight of people who have been renting places which are going into foreclosure. The lenders (mortgage companies) order them out, sometimes with ten days notice. Consider this. Here we have a tenant with a good record who is living in the property, and the mortgage company throws them out because 'we are not in the rental business.' The money is sitting right there, and they are too stupid/rigid to do business. These lenders are not businessmen, they are cheats, and their crooked deals are falling apart around them. ==== When the house next to me burned, I tried to talk to the company (1000 miles away) which held the mortgage. It did not have a phone number. It had an 800 number, and if I had a mortgage I could enter a code to activate their phones. But the company did not have a straightforward phone which somebody answers. Is that shady, or is that shady? |
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29 Feb 08 - 07:03 PM (#2276158) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Donuel Potomac Maryland is bristling with for sale signs. Potomac is the posh area above DC. |
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01 Mar 08 - 02:46 PM (#2276703) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Becca72 The rules were not created by the lenders they were created by the Fed. The lenders didn't have the ability to "relax the rules"....the Fed had to do it. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't money hungry lenders out there who don't give a damn how they close a loan, because there certainly are. But the reality is that too many people who could not afford to buy houses decided to do so, thought the ARM was the way to go (because the interest rate'll never go UP, right???) and financed 100% of what they couldn't handle in the first place. Leenia, unless you owned the house next door the mortgage company wouldn't have talked to you anyway...that would be a violation of privacy of the owner. And sadly, thousands of business have switched to the automated phone system, not just "shady" lenders. |
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01 Mar 08 - 03:12 PM (#2276726) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Q (Frank Staplin) No mortgage and loan company wants any part of renters. That's a sure guarantee of headaches and expense. |
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01 Mar 08 - 08:37 PM (#2277005) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Rapparee ARMs. Interest-only mortgages. And other things. ARMs can be okay IF you know that in x number of years you'll be making enough to pay the higher interest rate OR you'll be transferred out of the area and can dump the house. Interest-only mortgages were a ripoff from the start. |
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01 Mar 08 - 08:53 PM (#2277021) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: GUEST,pattyClink Q, the mortgage companies better learn to love renters, or any human beings who will inhabit a house and cut the grass. There are neighborhoods going to rack and ruin because of numerous foreclosures. Once the people are gone, they become dilapidated and even may serve as crackhouses, yes even in 'nice' neighborhoods. |
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01 Mar 08 - 09:05 PM (#2277027) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: TRUBRIT I'm a realtor (an honest one -- I know our reputation but truly am honest). I put the blame for this whole mess squarely on the shoulders of immoral lenders and appraisers. I had some clients who bought a house some years back for $130ish through me -- it was worth that and they loved it and everyone was happy. Two years later they called me to ask for an analysis on the home -- I went over there and told them it was worth about $160K so after paying fees they were $20K to the good. The woman told me they owed more than that on the house. I said - you can't - -I sat with you at the closing table -- I know what you borrowed. Long story short -- they had refinanced with an immoral mortgage company now out of business. These people had done a drive by mortgage and proclaimed the house worth $220K!!!!!!!!!!!!! They refinanced into an adjustable rate mortgage -- they are now bankrupt. How does the appraiser and the lender (how do, sorry) sleep nights????? |
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01 Mar 08 - 09:47 PM (#2277040) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Rapparee I'm not going to badmouth the family, but refinancing for a hundred thousand over the original mortgage seems a tad greedy on their part as well. I can say this: I am damned glad to have a conventional, fixed-rate mortgage. I am even happier to have enough in solid reserves to pay off the mortgage completely if I had to do so. A true story of commercial greed and punishment: There is a former mall here which is pretty much empty -- its parking lot is used by some truckers, sometimes a used car dealer will have "special sale" -- that sort of thing. But otherwise it is empty and simply deteriorating. There are also some asbestos problems -- nothing that can't be fixed, but asbestos none the less. A VERY major chain approached the owners to buy this property. "Eighteen million dollars," said the owners. "In POCATELLO, IDAHO?" shot back the potential buyers. "We don't pay that much for land in Las Vegas!" And they walked away. (They are building elsewhere and will probably open in the Fall.) But the owners then went to the County and asked for a reassessment. They felt that they were paying too much money for a deteriorating property. Now, property taxes in Idaho are based upon market value. And the Assessor's Office had a copy of the letter from the owners saying that the property was worth eighteen million dollars.... Yup. Tax hike, and a substantial one. And the property is still empty. Folks around here are still laughing about this.... |
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02 Mar 08 - 02:58 AM (#2277145) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Liz the Squeak Once the people are gone, they become dilapidated and even may serve as crackhouses, yes even in 'nice' neighborhoods. Yes, it happens. I considered this a 'nice' neighbourhood, 2 schools and a church in it, some shops, banks, lots of residential housing, no sink estates or problem areas - but in the last 4 years we've had a marijuana farm in the house opposite, the house next door was used as a crack house and for prostitution (tennants sub-let while they went travelling for the summer, came back to changed locks and all their stuff gone) and last year a young boy - who didn't even live here, was murdered 100 yards from my front door. It happens even in 'nice' areas. Both the houses were let legally, neither of them seemed to have any problems, no loud music, no fights outside, nothing to make neighbours think anything was going on. The first I knew about the crack house next door was when I was woken early one morning by the police and their 'universal doorkey' in action. As for the original post here... a new house would be very nice, but to pay $24m for something that most folks would prefer to see bulldozed.....? Even if I had the money, I'm not sure I could live there. I suspect it will go to some rabid Jackson fan who will turn it into a shrine to the memory of a truly warped and twisted man. LTS |
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02 Mar 08 - 09:56 PM (#2277902) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: TRUBRIT Rap -- my only comment would be that they are not greedy but totally naive...... |
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03 Mar 08 - 12:35 AM (#2277953) Subject: RE: BS: Want A New House? From: Q (Frank Staplin) Lizthe Squeak gives the reason no mortgage company ever considers rental. Much better to take the tax loss. There are companies that specialize in rentals but they have a staff to investigate and check references, credit, etc. Anyone renting a house on their own is asking for trouble. Call in a bonded specialist company to handle it and pay the commission. |