LPS to review three years of mortgage documents

$120.6M settlement resolves 'robo-signing' allegations by 46 states

BY INMAN NEWS, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2013.

Inman News®

Robotic hand image via Shutterstock.

Lender Processing Services Inc. has agreed to pay more than $120 million and review three years of documents to settle allegations that the company "robo-signed" and otherwise improperly handled mortgage documents that LPS and its subsidiaries handled for loan servicers in foreclosure proceedings.

The $120.6 million settlement with attorneys general of 46 states and Washington, D.C. requires that LPS review documents executed between Jan. 1, 2008 and Dec. 31, 2010 to determine whether any need to be re-executed or corrected. For the next three years, LPS will be required to provide the attorneys general with quarterly reports of the company's remediation efforts.

"Today we've taken another step forward to hold accountable the many players in the marketplace who contributed to the foreclosure crisis," said Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan in a statement Thursday. "LPS and its subsidiaries became a sort of document factory, literally rubber stamping thousands of foreclosures with no regard for fairness and accuracy in the process."

Builders hope Realtors will help them win back buyers

National ad campaign aimed at restoring market share of new-home sales

BY INMAN NEWS, MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 2013.

Inman News®

Vintage advertising campaign for new homesimage via Shutterstock.

By LEW SICHELMAN

Builders are going after real estate agents' bread and butter, and they'll be asking for agents' help to do it.

Starting in March, builders will finally launch a long-awaited multimillion-dollar ad campaign aimed at persuading would-be buyers that brand-new homes are a better choice than the scratch-and-dent houses they'll find in the resale sector. But the largely digital campaign is primed to win over the hearts of real estate professionals, too.

Why? Because agents and brokers absolutely control the housing market. According to a study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, the Boston-based consumer research company, 84 percent of 1,000 people identified as likely buyers in the next year are either already locked up with an agent or expect to connect with one when they actively begin their search.

Educate your clients before they buy or sell land

3 places to look for hidden deal breakers

BY ALISHA ALWAY BRAATZ, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2013.

Inman News®

Developer image via Shutterstock.

Acquiring land and building houses, barns and businesses used to be a lot easier. Take the land runs of the 1890s. All a person really needed was a fast horse and hammer.

Nowadays, there are endless hoops to jump through, it takes a lot of money, and there are 12,862 rules. Helping a client buy or sell vacant land isn't as easy as you might think. And you better think.

Buying land and building on it isn't straightforward. Neither is selling bare land (simple as it may sound).
Thus, "Buyer beware!" is a phrase lazy Realtors repeat in their minds as they overlook three essential and elemental areas in which to educate their client: covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&Rs);
architectural review committees (ARCs); and development costs.

What will we do to get the economy going?

Commentary: Listlessness in markets corresponds to White House policy vacuum

BY LOU BARNES, FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2013.

Inman News®

Maze image via Shutterstock.

This week brought lots of minor reports but nothing to change the outlook.

A 12 percent spike in December housing starts got more attention than it deserved -- a dead-of-winter month is not a good indicator -- and pushed interest rates up a hair. But inflation remains completely under control, core CPI up only 1.7 percent in the whole of 2012.

Three long-runners contribute to frozen markets: first, misinformation and scare-mongering about the Fed's "quantitative easing" (QE); second, the European gap between wishful public pronouncement and weakening data; and third, the prospect of Japan trying to print its way out of deflation -- not contained QE, but a true, inflation-inducing print job.

The core hazard facing us all: how to get right the timing and magnitude of fiscal austerity before the Fed has to stop buying our debt. We may be making more accidental, near-term progress than we know.

The newest estimates of deficits since the Fiscal Anthill deal suggest we may already be trying to reduce the deficit too fast. Going from $1 trillion to $750 billion in 2013 alone is about all the reduction the economy can take.

New group proposes 'syndication bill of rights' for listings

NAREP accepting comments through Feb. 15

BY INMAN NEWS, THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2013.

Inman News®

"Don't tread on me" image via Shutterstock.

NEW YORK -- The National Association of Real Estate Professionals, a Dallas-based nonprofit, has released a syndication bill of rights meant to establish industry standards for the display of listings on national real estate search portals.

Longtime real estate agent Ben Caballero founded NAREP in September 2012, initially proposing that brokers band together to build a national multiple listing service to bypass publishers like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com. Caballero said he was motivated by frustration with the listing inaccuracies and misleading price estimates found in some publishers' listing databases.

Caballero, who serves on the board of directors of Dallas metro area Greater Metro MLS, is at Real Estate Connect New York City to drum up support for the bill of rights and get comments that he'll incorporate into a revised version. After the comment period ends on Feb. 15, the revised bill of rights will be sent out for accreditation by members.

Caballero will be in the Chrysler Board Room at the Grand Hyatt New York today between 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. to discuss NAREP's bill of rights draft. Download a copy of the draft here.

The current bill of rights was inspired by meetings Caballero had at the National Association of Realtors national meeting in Orlando in November, and was based in part on Clareity Security's Real Estate Syndication Bill of Rightsreleased in 2011.

Real Estate in Rockford Illinois. Key Realty, Inc

Foreclosure Northern Illinois. Foreclosureni.com

Zillow co-founder to discuss 'the Next Big Thing'

Real Estate Connect Speaker Q&A: Rich Barton

BY PAUL HAGEY, TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2013.

Inman News®

Looking ahead image via Shutterstock.

Innovation is sometimes difficult to see coming. Ask newspaper executives about what happened to revenue from real estate classifieds when Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia came along.

Or maybe entrepreneur Rich Barton -- co-founder and executive chairman of Zillow and current partner at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Benchmark Capital -- would be the better one to ask. Barton has been on the front edge of innovation in real estate, travel and employment for the last two decades.

He'll share what he sees coming at Real Estate Connect New York City opening day from the main stage in a presentation titled "What is the Next Big Thing?"

Rich Barton

Before starting Zillow in 2005 (where he served as CEO until 2010, when Spencer Rascoff took over), Barton founded Expedia, now the world's largest travel site, serving as president and CEO until 2003.

Barton is also co-founder and chairman of Glassdoor.com, a site where employees rate and review companies, see how salaries stack up, search for jobs and see where people work in their extended Facebook network.

Real estate industry already embracing 'open source'

3 Linux products to watch for

BY TOM FLANAGAN, TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2013.

Inman News®

An Ubuntu phone docked to a keyboard and monitor. 

Image via Ubuntu.com.

What does Linux or any other open source application have to do with real estate? Probably more than you think.

Open source products power our websites, blogs, Intranets and more. In fact, WordPress, which is widely embraced by the real estate industry, is one of the most popular open source publishing platforms in the world.

Open source software is computer software that is available to use and typically distributed without a license fee. Linux is an open source operating system. There are many different flavors of Linux that are utilized in a variety of scenarios.

As the Web and software development continues to gravitate towards open standards, Linux and other platforms continue to grow in popularity. I don't expect Realtors to start building media centers or developing LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) configurations. However, there's nothing wrong with getting a little geeky in a tech column.

Coldwell Banker has new mobile app for Android, iOS

 

Features include Yelp integration, one-touch agent contact, interactive map search

BY INMAN NEWS, FRIDAY, JANUARY 4, 2013.

Inman News®

Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC has released a new, free mobile app for iOS and Android platforms that allows consumers to search for homes using an interactive map, contact an agent with one touch, and discover nearby amenities with Yelp integration. The app features Facebook, Twitter and email integration and a "save-to-favorites" function. Users have access to a database of 1.5 million U.S. and international homes, and the ability to notify a Coldwell Banker agent directly about their interest in a property. The new app also allows users to delineate a geographic area for home search by drawing a shape in the app's map view on their mobile devices' touch screens and then see the homes for sale pop up within that area. Users can also use their mobile devices' geolocation ability to search for homes and open houses, and get driving directions using the app and access video content from Coldwell Banker Real Estate's video library.

Your relationship with Instagram needn't be exclusive

 

Realtor Notebook

BY TERESA BOARDMAN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2013.

Inman News®

The honeymoon is over image via Shutterstock.

I followed with interest the confusing changes to Instagram's terms of service that, for a while at least, seemed to indicate that parent company Facebook was claiming the right to license all public Instagram photos for commercial uses, including advertising.

The resulting outcry led Instagram to issue an apology and announce that it was going back to the original terms of use that they have had since they started up in 2010.

Over the years there have been rumors about Google+ owning my content, and Facebook owning it, and then Pinterest came along and staked a claim to it as well. 

I will admit that on those rare occasions when I do read terms of service, I rarely understand them completely. They are usually huge and complicated, but I am told that I have to agree to them before I get to use something that I want to use.