New fronts are opening in the foreclosure mess.
A lot of people have wondered why no one has gone to jail over what by commonsense standards is fraudulent activity. The possibility that the violations were indeed criminal is finally being investigated. From the Washington Post:
Federal law enforcement officials are investigating possible criminal violations in connection with the national foreclosure crisis, examining whether financial firms broke federal laws when they filed fraudulent court documents to seize people’s homes, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Obama administration’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is in the early stages of an investigation into whether banks and other companies that submitted flawed paperwork in state foreclosure proceedings may also have misled federal housing agencies, which now own or insure a majority of home loans, according to these sources.
The task force, which includes investigators from the Justice Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies, is also looking into whether the submission of flawed paperwork during the foreclosure process violated mail or wire fraud laws. Financial fraud cases often involve these statutes.
Yves here. On the one hand, I would not underestimate the ability of Team Obama to give the banking industry a free pass when tough action is warranted. On the other hand, there is a proud tradition of the Federal government rousing itself when measure by the states run the risk of showing it to have been complacent to the point of negligence (one well known example is when state securities law suits force the generally lapdog SEC to take swing into gear). So if state or even private lawsuits expose enough damaging material, it will be hard for this task force to sit on its hands.
On another front, the ACLU is starting to obtain information to determine whether foreclosures in Florida (the so called rocket docket) violated Constitutional “due process” requirements:
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Florida today filed public records requests with judicial officials in Florida to determine whether homeowners are having their constitutional rights violated during foreclosure proceedings and being unlawfully removed from their homes.
In Florida, where almost half a million foreclosure cases are pending, the state legislature recently spent over $9 million to create special foreclosure courts, staffed by retired judges, with the intent of speeding through the state’s backlog of such cases. But recent media reports in Florida and around the country, which reveal rampant error and fraud in the foreclosure process, have shown that courts should take particular care with foreclosure cases. Instead, in the rush to push foreclosure cases through the courts, Florida may be taking shortcuts and, in the process, forsaking constitutionally-required due process protections….
Filed with the Office of the State Court Administrator and the chief judges of all 20 of Florida’s circuit courts, the requests seek access to, among other things, all documents related to special court systems created to dispose of foreclosure cases and the rules and procedures in place that govern those systems…
Copies of the ACLU’s public records requests are available online at: www.aclu.org/racial-justice/aclu-seeks-information-about-constitutionality-florida-foreclosure-courts
Yves here. These initiatives are only in the early stages, but both show that the foreclosure crisis is moving from narrow legal issues to much bigger ones.
The foreclosure mess just will not go away. Neither will incomplete if not misleading explanations for the crisis, or partial if not ineffective policy proposals. More than 10 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure before the housing market "clears" according to Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, as with the subprime and predatory lending bubbles that led directly to the present crisis, fingers are pointed in several directions as all parties to the debate try to shift blame to their favorite individual and institutional targets. Lost in this discussion is how continuing racial segregation has fueled these developments.
The guilty parties in the foreclosure crisis are many: greedy homeowners, unscrupulous investors, lax underwriters, asleep-at-the-wheel regulators, sloppy mortgage servicers, and more. No doubt all share in the blame. But all these actors played their roles in a context of ongoing racial segregation that greatly facilitated the fraud, deceit, and exploitation that occurred at each stage of the lending process. Research by a variety of organizations ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Center for Community Change reveals that subprime loans were concentrated in, and specifically targeted to, low-income, minority neighborhoods. As a result, foreclosures have fallen heaviest on the most disadvantaged segments of society.
To illustrate, when subprime lending peaked in 2006, just 18% of white borrowers received subprime loans compared to 54% of African Americans. An unfortunate irony, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2007, is that over 60% of subprime borrowers had credit scores that qualified them for prime loans, underscoring the discriminatory nature of the marketing. Moreover, as reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association, subprime loans are approximately three times more likely to enter into default than conventional loans. As a result, between 2007 and 2009 approximately 8% of homes owned by black or Hispanic families went into foreclosure compared to 4.5% for whites. According a study by the Center for Responsible Lending, these disparities persisted even after taking household incomes into account.
Discriminatory lending patterns do not happen by chance. As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition has reported, in recent years racial minorities and minority communities were deliberately targeted by predatory lenders for subprime lending. The more segregated a metropolitan area is, of course, the easier it is to find exploitable clients. Segregation creates natural pockets of financially unsophisticated, historically underserved, poor minority homeowners who are ripe for exploitation.
It is no surprise to learn, therefore, that a recent study published in the American Sociological Review found that the level of black-white segregation was the single strongest predictor of the number and rate of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas -- more powerful than the overall level of subprime lending, the degree of overbuilding, the extent of home price inflation, the relative creditworthiness of borrowers, the degree of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, or the extent of local government regulation.
More than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, two thirds of all black urbanites continue to live under conditions of high segregation and nearly half live in metropolitan areas where the degree of racial isolation is so intense it conforms to the criteria for hypersegregation. If we had somehow been able to eliminate segregation between blacks and whites in the years since 1968, the average metropolitan area would have experienced a foreclosure rate 80% lower than that actually observed during 2006-2008. Segregation is the reason for the unusual severity of the foreclosure crisis in the United States.
Given the powerful role played by racial segregation causing the current crisis, policy proposals to enact a national moratorium on foreclosures, modify the terms of outstanding loans, make bankruptcy restructuring easier, or undertake other financial reforms largely miss the point. Although such steps might provide short-term relief for some homeowners, speculative housing bubbles will likely recur along racially unequal lines as long as hypersegregation persists as a basic feature of metropolitan America. It is long past time to address the nation's segregated living patterns directly, and several policy initiatives to do so are now on the table.
The Housing Fairness Act (HR 476) would substantially increase the funding of fair housing organizations for nationwide paired testing (where matched pairs of white and non-white auditors approach housing providers to determine if they are treated equally). Such testing would yield much stronger enforcement of fair housing laws.
The Community Reinvestment Modernization Act (HR 1749) would extend the Community Reinvestment Act (a federal ban on redlining) to virtually all mortgage lenders and explicitly require them to be responsive to the credit needs of minority communities. Currently the CRA only applies to depository institutions (which today originate less than half of all mortgage loans). Moreover, the law currently focuses on service to low-income communities without a specific racial or ethnic mandate. Extending the CRA to all mortgage lending would help curb the predatory lending that drove much of the current crisis.
Finally, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced plans to issue a regulation to "affirmatively further fair housing" clarifying the statutory obligation that all recipients of federal housing and community development funds have to use those dollars in a manner that identifies and eliminates discriminatory barriers to equal housing opportunity. The agency should do so sooner rather than later.
Changing the behavior of financial institutions, regulators, and consumers is an important policy objective. Unless the segregated context in which they operate is also altered, however, speculative financial bubbles will persist and their uneven effects will continue to fall on vulnerable communities of color who have long paid the high costs of hypersegregation in the United States, America's own brand of Apartheid.
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Gregory D. Squires is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University.
bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
bench craft company
New fronts are opening in the foreclosure mess.
A lot of people have wondered why no one has gone to jail over what by commonsense standards is fraudulent activity. The possibility that the violations were indeed criminal is finally being investigated. From the Washington Post:
Federal law enforcement officials are investigating possible criminal violations in connection with the national foreclosure crisis, examining whether financial firms broke federal laws when they filed fraudulent court documents to seize people’s homes, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Obama administration’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is in the early stages of an investigation into whether banks and other companies that submitted flawed paperwork in state foreclosure proceedings may also have misled federal housing agencies, which now own or insure a majority of home loans, according to these sources.
The task force, which includes investigators from the Justice Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies, is also looking into whether the submission of flawed paperwork during the foreclosure process violated mail or wire fraud laws. Financial fraud cases often involve these statutes.
Yves here. On the one hand, I would not underestimate the ability of Team Obama to give the banking industry a free pass when tough action is warranted. On the other hand, there is a proud tradition of the Federal government rousing itself when measure by the states run the risk of showing it to have been complacent to the point of negligence (one well known example is when state securities law suits force the generally lapdog SEC to take swing into gear). So if state or even private lawsuits expose enough damaging material, it will be hard for this task force to sit on its hands.
On another front, the ACLU is starting to obtain information to determine whether foreclosures in Florida (the so called rocket docket) violated Constitutional “due process” requirements:
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Florida today filed public records requests with judicial officials in Florida to determine whether homeowners are having their constitutional rights violated during foreclosure proceedings and being unlawfully removed from their homes.
In Florida, where almost half a million foreclosure cases are pending, the state legislature recently spent over $9 million to create special foreclosure courts, staffed by retired judges, with the intent of speeding through the state’s backlog of such cases. But recent media reports in Florida and around the country, which reveal rampant error and fraud in the foreclosure process, have shown that courts should take particular care with foreclosure cases. Instead, in the rush to push foreclosure cases through the courts, Florida may be taking shortcuts and, in the process, forsaking constitutionally-required due process protections….
Filed with the Office of the State Court Administrator and the chief judges of all 20 of Florida’s circuit courts, the requests seek access to, among other things, all documents related to special court systems created to dispose of foreclosure cases and the rules and procedures in place that govern those systems…
Copies of the ACLU’s public records requests are available online at: www.aclu.org/racial-justice/aclu-seeks-information-about-constitutionality-florida-foreclosure-courts
Yves here. These initiatives are only in the early stages, but both show that the foreclosure crisis is moving from narrow legal issues to much bigger ones.
The foreclosure mess just will not go away. Neither will incomplete if not misleading explanations for the crisis, or partial if not ineffective policy proposals. More than 10 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure before the housing market "clears" according to Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, as with the subprime and predatory lending bubbles that led directly to the present crisis, fingers are pointed in several directions as all parties to the debate try to shift blame to their favorite individual and institutional targets. Lost in this discussion is how continuing racial segregation has fueled these developments.
The guilty parties in the foreclosure crisis are many: greedy homeowners, unscrupulous investors, lax underwriters, asleep-at-the-wheel regulators, sloppy mortgage servicers, and more. No doubt all share in the blame. But all these actors played their roles in a context of ongoing racial segregation that greatly facilitated the fraud, deceit, and exploitation that occurred at each stage of the lending process. Research by a variety of organizations ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Center for Community Change reveals that subprime loans were concentrated in, and specifically targeted to, low-income, minority neighborhoods. As a result, foreclosures have fallen heaviest on the most disadvantaged segments of society.
To illustrate, when subprime lending peaked in 2006, just 18% of white borrowers received subprime loans compared to 54% of African Americans. An unfortunate irony, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2007, is that over 60% of subprime borrowers had credit scores that qualified them for prime loans, underscoring the discriminatory nature of the marketing. Moreover, as reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association, subprime loans are approximately three times more likely to enter into default than conventional loans. As a result, between 2007 and 2009 approximately 8% of homes owned by black or Hispanic families went into foreclosure compared to 4.5% for whites. According a study by the Center for Responsible Lending, these disparities persisted even after taking household incomes into account.
Discriminatory lending patterns do not happen by chance. As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition has reported, in recent years racial minorities and minority communities were deliberately targeted by predatory lenders for subprime lending. The more segregated a metropolitan area is, of course, the easier it is to find exploitable clients. Segregation creates natural pockets of financially unsophisticated, historically underserved, poor minority homeowners who are ripe for exploitation.
It is no surprise to learn, therefore, that a recent study published in the American Sociological Review found that the level of black-white segregation was the single strongest predictor of the number and rate of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas -- more powerful than the overall level of subprime lending, the degree of overbuilding, the extent of home price inflation, the relative creditworthiness of borrowers, the degree of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, or the extent of local government regulation.
More than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, two thirds of all black urbanites continue to live under conditions of high segregation and nearly half live in metropolitan areas where the degree of racial isolation is so intense it conforms to the criteria for hypersegregation. If we had somehow been able to eliminate segregation between blacks and whites in the years since 1968, the average metropolitan area would have experienced a foreclosure rate 80% lower than that actually observed during 2006-2008. Segregation is the reason for the unusual severity of the foreclosure crisis in the United States.
Given the powerful role played by racial segregation causing the current crisis, policy proposals to enact a national moratorium on foreclosures, modify the terms of outstanding loans, make bankruptcy restructuring easier, or undertake other financial reforms largely miss the point. Although such steps might provide short-term relief for some homeowners, speculative housing bubbles will likely recur along racially unequal lines as long as hypersegregation persists as a basic feature of metropolitan America. It is long past time to address the nation's segregated living patterns directly, and several policy initiatives to do so are now on the table.
The Housing Fairness Act (HR 476) would substantially increase the funding of fair housing organizations for nationwide paired testing (where matched pairs of white and non-white auditors approach housing providers to determine if they are treated equally). Such testing would yield much stronger enforcement of fair housing laws.
The Community Reinvestment Modernization Act (HR 1749) would extend the Community Reinvestment Act (a federal ban on redlining) to virtually all mortgage lenders and explicitly require them to be responsive to the credit needs of minority communities. Currently the CRA only applies to depository institutions (which today originate less than half of all mortgage loans). Moreover, the law currently focuses on service to low-income communities without a specific racial or ethnic mandate. Extending the CRA to all mortgage lending would help curb the predatory lending that drove much of the current crisis.
Finally, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced plans to issue a regulation to "affirmatively further fair housing" clarifying the statutory obligation that all recipients of federal housing and community development funds have to use those dollars in a manner that identifies and eliminates discriminatory barriers to equal housing opportunity. The agency should do so sooner rather than later.
Changing the behavior of financial institutions, regulators, and consumers is an important policy objective. Unless the segregated context in which they operate is also altered, however, speculative financial bubbles will persist and their uneven effects will continue to fall on vulnerable communities of color who have long paid the high costs of hypersegregation in the United States, America's own brand of Apartheid.
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Gregory D. Squires is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University.
bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
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bench craft company
bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
bench craft company
New fronts are opening in the foreclosure mess.
A lot of people have wondered why no one has gone to jail over what by commonsense standards is fraudulent activity. The possibility that the violations were indeed criminal is finally being investigated. From the Washington Post:
Federal law enforcement officials are investigating possible criminal violations in connection with the national foreclosure crisis, examining whether financial firms broke federal laws when they filed fraudulent court documents to seize people’s homes, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Obama administration’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is in the early stages of an investigation into whether banks and other companies that submitted flawed paperwork in state foreclosure proceedings may also have misled federal housing agencies, which now own or insure a majority of home loans, according to these sources.
The task force, which includes investigators from the Justice Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies, is also looking into whether the submission of flawed paperwork during the foreclosure process violated mail or wire fraud laws. Financial fraud cases often involve these statutes.
Yves here. On the one hand, I would not underestimate the ability of Team Obama to give the banking industry a free pass when tough action is warranted. On the other hand, there is a proud tradition of the Federal government rousing itself when measure by the states run the risk of showing it to have been complacent to the point of negligence (one well known example is when state securities law suits force the generally lapdog SEC to take swing into gear). So if state or even private lawsuits expose enough damaging material, it will be hard for this task force to sit on its hands.
On another front, the ACLU is starting to obtain information to determine whether foreclosures in Florida (the so called rocket docket) violated Constitutional “due process” requirements:
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Florida today filed public records requests with judicial officials in Florida to determine whether homeowners are having their constitutional rights violated during foreclosure proceedings and being unlawfully removed from their homes.
In Florida, where almost half a million foreclosure cases are pending, the state legislature recently spent over $9 million to create special foreclosure courts, staffed by retired judges, with the intent of speeding through the state’s backlog of such cases. But recent media reports in Florida and around the country, which reveal rampant error and fraud in the foreclosure process, have shown that courts should take particular care with foreclosure cases. Instead, in the rush to push foreclosure cases through the courts, Florida may be taking shortcuts and, in the process, forsaking constitutionally-required due process protections….
Filed with the Office of the State Court Administrator and the chief judges of all 20 of Florida’s circuit courts, the requests seek access to, among other things, all documents related to special court systems created to dispose of foreclosure cases and the rules and procedures in place that govern those systems…
Copies of the ACLU’s public records requests are available online at: www.aclu.org/racial-justice/aclu-seeks-information-about-constitutionality-florida-foreclosure-courts
Yves here. These initiatives are only in the early stages, but both show that the foreclosure crisis is moving from narrow legal issues to much bigger ones.
The foreclosure mess just will not go away. Neither will incomplete if not misleading explanations for the crisis, or partial if not ineffective policy proposals. More than 10 million families will lose their homes to foreclosure before the housing market "clears" according to Credit Suisse. Meanwhile, as with the subprime and predatory lending bubbles that led directly to the present crisis, fingers are pointed in several directions as all parties to the debate try to shift blame to their favorite individual and institutional targets. Lost in this discussion is how continuing racial segregation has fueled these developments.
The guilty parties in the foreclosure crisis are many: greedy homeowners, unscrupulous investors, lax underwriters, asleep-at-the-wheel regulators, sloppy mortgage servicers, and more. No doubt all share in the blame. But all these actors played their roles in a context of ongoing racial segregation that greatly facilitated the fraud, deceit, and exploitation that occurred at each stage of the lending process. Research by a variety of organizations ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Center for Community Change reveals that subprime loans were concentrated in, and specifically targeted to, low-income, minority neighborhoods. As a result, foreclosures have fallen heaviest on the most disadvantaged segments of society.
To illustrate, when subprime lending peaked in 2006, just 18% of white borrowers received subprime loans compared to 54% of African Americans. An unfortunate irony, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2007, is that over 60% of subprime borrowers had credit scores that qualified them for prime loans, underscoring the discriminatory nature of the marketing. Moreover, as reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association, subprime loans are approximately three times more likely to enter into default than conventional loans. As a result, between 2007 and 2009 approximately 8% of homes owned by black or Hispanic families went into foreclosure compared to 4.5% for whites. According a study by the Center for Responsible Lending, these disparities persisted even after taking household incomes into account.
Discriminatory lending patterns do not happen by chance. As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition has reported, in recent years racial minorities and minority communities were deliberately targeted by predatory lenders for subprime lending. The more segregated a metropolitan area is, of course, the easier it is to find exploitable clients. Segregation creates natural pockets of financially unsophisticated, historically underserved, poor minority homeowners who are ripe for exploitation.
It is no surprise to learn, therefore, that a recent study published in the American Sociological Review found that the level of black-white segregation was the single strongest predictor of the number and rate of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas -- more powerful than the overall level of subprime lending, the degree of overbuilding, the extent of home price inflation, the relative creditworthiness of borrowers, the degree of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, or the extent of local government regulation.
More than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, two thirds of all black urbanites continue to live under conditions of high segregation and nearly half live in metropolitan areas where the degree of racial isolation is so intense it conforms to the criteria for hypersegregation. If we had somehow been able to eliminate segregation between blacks and whites in the years since 1968, the average metropolitan area would have experienced a foreclosure rate 80% lower than that actually observed during 2006-2008. Segregation is the reason for the unusual severity of the foreclosure crisis in the United States.
Given the powerful role played by racial segregation causing the current crisis, policy proposals to enact a national moratorium on foreclosures, modify the terms of outstanding loans, make bankruptcy restructuring easier, or undertake other financial reforms largely miss the point. Although such steps might provide short-term relief for some homeowners, speculative housing bubbles will likely recur along racially unequal lines as long as hypersegregation persists as a basic feature of metropolitan America. It is long past time to address the nation's segregated living patterns directly, and several policy initiatives to do so are now on the table.
The Housing Fairness Act (HR 476) would substantially increase the funding of fair housing organizations for nationwide paired testing (where matched pairs of white and non-white auditors approach housing providers to determine if they are treated equally). Such testing would yield much stronger enforcement of fair housing laws.
The Community Reinvestment Modernization Act (HR 1749) would extend the Community Reinvestment Act (a federal ban on redlining) to virtually all mortgage lenders and explicitly require them to be responsive to the credit needs of minority communities. Currently the CRA only applies to depository institutions (which today originate less than half of all mortgage loans). Moreover, the law currently focuses on service to low-income communities without a specific racial or ethnic mandate. Extending the CRA to all mortgage lending would help curb the predatory lending that drove much of the current crisis.
Finally, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced plans to issue a regulation to "affirmatively further fair housing" clarifying the statutory obligation that all recipients of federal housing and community development funds have to use those dollars in a manner that identifies and eliminates discriminatory barriers to equal housing opportunity. The agency should do so sooner rather than later.
Changing the behavior of financial institutions, regulators, and consumers is an important policy objective. Unless the segregated context in which they operate is also altered, however, speculative financial bubbles will persist and their uneven effects will continue to fall on vulnerable communities of color who have long paid the high costs of hypersegregation in the United States, America's own brand of Apartheid.
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Gregory D. Squires is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University.
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bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
bench craft company
bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
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bench craft company
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bench craft company
Why Facebook Deals is Bad <b>News</b> for Foursquare - Techland - TIME.com
Foursquare just got Facebooked. And it's more than just a poking. It might be a body blow to one of the location-based service's killer features. When I first covered Foursquare for TIME in January, I gave the (then) pint-sized start-up ...
<b>News</b> Corp's Carey: MySpace's Ongoing Losses 'Not Acceptable Or <b>...</b>
Continued MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) declines pulled down News Corp.'s digital media group earnings again in its first quarter, meaning operating losses in the company's Other segment grew by $30 million from last year, to $156 million. ...
Breaking <b>News</b>: EMC-Isilon Deal Talks Are Fizzling - Deal Journal - WSJ
Storage giant EMC Corp. and Isilon Systems Inc. have put their takeover talks on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
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If you own a foreclosure cleanup company, you already know that pricing your services can be cumbersome and all over the place, because services can encompass so many things. In a foreclosure cleanup business, you can offer everything from simple trash-outs, to lawn maintenance, to gutter cleaning and pressure washing, painting, minor repairs, and so much more.
You can offer any of these services exclusively, or in combination with other services, which makes determining how to price effectively somewhat difficult.
According to a foreclosure cleanup company in the Atlanta area, "We get calls all the time from foreclosure cleanup start-up companies wanting to know how much to charge for debris removal, repairs, etc. They want a simple formula into which they can plug certain factors to come up with quick pricing. Unfortunately, there are no cookie-cutter answers because so many factors dictate effective pricing for especially the new, smaller foreclosure cleanup company."
In many scenarios, potential clients often call foreclosure cleanup companies and want an estimate over the phone, just "an idea" of what they can expect to pay foreclosure cleanup services. Often they are looking to buy a foreclosure and want to know what they're facing after closing to get the home in move-in condition, or a realtor will call because he or she has gotten a host of foreclosures from the bank to ready for the market. Many foreclosure companies tell them they have to see the properties before pricing.
As in most things, haste makes waste and that's certainly true in pricing foreclosure cleanup jobs. New foreclosure cleanup companies will almost always do themselves a disservice by giving a quick price over the phone to appease the caller. Several factors need to be taken into consideration before providing an estimate to make a profit in this industry.
There are several schools of thought on foreclosure cleanup pricing. Below are some soft factors that should be considered before doling out hard and fast numbers in foreclosure cleanup estimates.
1. What is someone in the subject county, city or zip code willing and able to pay for a foreclosure cleanup services? Clients in a metropolis like Chicago will expect to pay more than someone in a smaller city like Selma, Alabama. New companies should call other companies to see what they charge for services. New foreclosure cleanup companies may not be able to call existing foreclosure cleanup companies because they may be the only one in town. Foreclosure cleanup is a new, burgeoning business, per Entrepreneur Magazine, shows on Oprah, and several news outlets, but there's still room for new companies in a host of areas throughout the United States due to foreclosure rates being at record highs.
To help determine pricing, new companies should call existing companies that offer some of the services they plan to offer in their new business. For example, calling domestic and commercial cleaning companies, lawn companies, gutter cleaning companies, painters, etc., will help smaller start-ups come up with their own pricing structure based on their services and their area.
2. Who will be paying your foreclosure cleanup company? You need to know who will be writing the check to your company. This little slice of info will help you price effectively to make a profit. Here's why:
Realtors who specialize in listing REO (real estate owned) properties often come out-of-pocket financially for maintaining properties and wait to get reimbursed by banks for their expenses for lawn care, trash-outs, minor repairs, etc. If a realtor, in these times of lower and slower commissions, is paying you directly, you may need to lower your estimate a bit to secure the trash-out job so they can afford you - over and over again! Bulk from these realtors is how you will make your money.
On the other hand, if you tell that realtor you will do the trash-out and wait the 60+ days to get paid from the bank, your estimate should be higher. Why? Because you have to take into account you will be waiting to get paid; someone else will be holding those monies that should be in your bank account earning interest or keeping you in the black when it comes to your business's cash-flow.
If you decide to wait on the bank, you may have to factor that invoice to get your money immediately. If you "factor" that invoice (sell it to a company who will give you a percentage of the invoice's value in exchange for immediate payment), it will cost you a percentage of your profits. Naturally, you will pass that cost on to the bank by charging more.
3. In pricing foreclosure cleanup jobs, you should also consider the full scenario of the property. For example, does the realtor have bulk for you to handle or is this a 1-home trash-out? Again, bulk should lend to lower pricing. (Immediate bulk, NOT "promised" bulk.)
If a buyer is seeking a trash-out estimate themselves, weigh whether the buyer has already closed on the home, versus whether they are in the offer phase. If the buyer has already closed on the home, schedule an estimate meeting at the property and do a walk-thru to evaluate the contents. Why? Because if they've just bought the foreclosure, there are likely a host of other things they will need to have done.
Foreclosures are sold almost always "as-is," so the buyer will likely need a white-glove move-in clean, painting, gutters cleaned, pressure washing, minor repairs, or a combination thereof. Ask the buyer if you should add this or that to the estimate as you're doing the walk-thru, based on the services you've decided to offer in your foreclosure cleanup company. By the time it's said and done, the trash-out will likely be the least lucrative portion of your estimate.
If the buyer has not closed on the home, they may be seeking several estimates from several vendors so they can weigh which estimate to use as part of an offer contract in effort to get the seller to drop the price of the foreclosure based on the amount of the trash-out estimate ("seller concession"). In this scenario, you may NOT want to be the lowest bid.
4. Will you be a subcontractor on the job for which you are giving the estimate? Are you working for a larger vendor? Larger property preservation companies use smaller foreclosure cleanup companies all the time. Expect to bid lower on these jobs if you are a sub, because the primary vendor is often working within budget constraints dictated by hard and fast HUD-type guidelines. Larger vendors know they can't go over a certain amount to have a certain service completed on a foreclosure without approval. Try to find out what those pricing guidelines are for your vendor and price accordingly.
There are so many factors to consider when pricing foreclosure cleanup jobs. You really have to weigh everything, and, at bare minimum, the above soft factors, before giving out hard and fast numbers so your company can price effectively to make a profit in this fast-growing new opportunity.
by Cassandra Black, CEO, Foreclosure Cleanup, LLC and Author of Pricing Guide for Foreclosure Cleaning & Real-Estate Service Businesses: How to Price Jobs for Profit eBook
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