Wednesday, June 4, 2008

We Made the Top Ten

Congrats to New Jersey Real Estate Report and all the other Bubble Blogs who entered the FHA Mortgage Center Real Estate Blog Contest. Good news is that one of the bubbles at least won one prize - but the people gave them no choice! Here is a snapshot from June 1 courtesy of NJRE -

It it obvious people are hungry for the truth and appreciate those that give it to them! Thanks to all that voted!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations!

I just found your blog and added it to my bookmarks.

I've only read a bit so far but the content is very good. I'll check out more later tonight.

I've been digging through some of the data on my site and it's pretty obvious that people who were in otherwise good shape got burned by taking equity out of their homes.

One of the houses in foreclosure is on the same block of someone I know and I was speaking to them about it. He was surprised to find that out because the owner had lived in that house for many years, back when prices were half what they are now. He even said the owner was even doing work to the home. I guess they borrowed against the equity to make improvements.

I don't have details on all the houses but by looking at the numbers it seems that others have gotten into the same situation. With so many in this situation you can't just blame it on bad judgement on the homeowner's part. People were really pushing these loans. You couldn't even go an hour watching TV without seeing someone telling you that you could cash out equity in your home and pay less than you're paying now.

The example you have of the Dover home reminds me of something that happened around here. There was a mortgage company that somehow managed to get up to 4 mortgages on a house without the other banks knowing there was already a mortgage on it. The Korean immigrants they had do this didn't know any better and are now in trouble. The company scammed about $100Mil from the banks this way before they skipped town. Unfortunately there was only the one story that I found and nothing since.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were more cases like this but not to this scale.

NJHH said...

Thanks Tom!

Do you focus on Bergen County? I have tried Bergen County Tax Board with no luck. Do you use a public source to get mortgage and HELOC records? I mostly feature Morris County since the records are readily available.

Everything on this blog is public info. I just do the digging and put the pieces together.

I do the local examples on the weekends - going through public records can be quite time consuming and I hit many dead ends. But they are really my favorite feature and focus of the blog.

Thanks again!

Anonymous said...

I don't get Mortgage and HELOC records. I get Tax Records which are publicly available.

My site focuses on foreclosures in Bergen county because I know where to get the information I need for that and I live in Bergen.

I kind of built parts of the site for myself hoping to invest in foreclosures but that may not happen for a while so I prettied things up and put it online.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of just crooks...

This conversation made me do some digging on an old mortgage fraud story in Bergen County and it looks like there was some progress.

I added an entry in my blog you might find interesting.

NJHH said...

Tom -

Your site has some great info. I will have to do more inquiries into what I can find for Bergen County. Thanks for the resource!

Checked out a couple of BC towns and there are probably some interesting stories - bought at the wrong time or took out to much equity or both.

You can also see some signs of the scams - like the one from Dover. Also you see some of the same names pop up over and over. Some are just unlucky investors but others are probably crooks.

NJHH said...

Tom,

Do you have a link between the map page and the blog page? Did you just start the blog part or the whole website?

Did you check out NJRE - they have some foreclosure investors over there. The comments is where all the action is. Pretty good buying tips as well. I know Grim said he would rather REO than buy a foreclosure - not kicking a family out instead buying a vacant house.

Anonymous said...

The site is only a couple weeks old, the blog only a couple of days.

What's NJRE?

I built the ability to leave comments on properties and I'm going to be putting up some forums as well at some point. This all just all kind of came together in a couple of weeks to see what happens. Haven't really been getting a lot of traffic yet. Google hasn't finished indexing the site and other searchengines haven't even started.

I have an ssh session open where I tail the log to see how people are using the site and if there are any problems since it's so new. Something weird was going on with what I believe were your requests.

A couple minutes after you made a request for a page that wasn't an image or a javascript file, there was a request from an IP address in Asia to the exact same page. You might want to run a virus and spyware check on your computer.

Anonymous said...

I searched my db and found a foreclosure listing that I believe belongs to one of the defendants in the case. There's a link in my blog entry.