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Showing posts from February 14, 2008

A Mortgage Appraiser's View of the "Mortgage Crisis"

The news media is rife with reports of significant declines in home sales and high foreclosure rates. At this point, this is pretty old news. Just ask any realtor, real estate attorney, or title company employee. We know this from our own levels of activity, or lack thereof. So what do we do when we run out of work? We try to figure out who's to blame! There is much finger pointing and hand wringing over the causes; lax loan underwriting; irresponsible buyers/borrowers; greedy institutional investors; poor governmental overshight; mortgage scammers. Chose your favorite. All share responsibility to some degree. Myself, I have always looked first to unscrupulous, opportunistic loan originators. Not ALL loan originators, lets be very clear about this. The ones who over-promised, over-sold, and under-delivered. I have equally dim views of some insurance/annuity salesmen, car finance guys, and boiler room stock brokers. A common denominator among them all is that they are all commis