patrick.net

This one pissed me off when I saw it.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/15733-SE-Powell-Blvd-Portland-OR-97236/2146092690_zpid/

I considered it as a potential investment property, but noted that it was a HUD home and may have some funky title stuff going on. As best I can tell this is how it went down:

03/09 - Juan buys brand new home for $217,950
11/12 - Juan defaults, outstanding loan balance: $233,613
01/13 - HUD buys property from bank for: $207,524
2/13 - HUD puts property up for sale for $138,000

You have got to be fucking kidding me HUD! Chase bank is sitting pretty when they should have lost their shorts for making an utterly stupid loan to Mr. Zapata. There was no way this house was worth $217k back in 09 let alone letting him refi for $233k shortly thereafter. HUD should have paid at most $150k to Chase for this, and Chase should have been glad to take it because its above true market value.

Who the hell is running HUD and how to we get someone in there that has a brain?

gbenson says

Who the hell is running HUD and how to we get someone in there that has a brain?

Cross bread a helper monkey with a bingo player.

KarlRoveIsScum says

Juan is a moron

Not if Juan lived there for close to a year without paying a cent in mortgage and pocketed the $15,663 refi money. HUD is the moron for paying Chases debts off at our expense.

What makes Blackstone think the current occupant(s) would pay rent if they weren't even paying mortgage. How much more successful would Blackstone be in evicting them if the bank couldn't foreclose and evict them?

That's probably why nobody bid higher than the $90k that Blackstone did.

IIRC, there's a FED program out there buying mortgage backed securities that would make the lender 90-95% whole but the lender has to foreclose first so as not to have under-the-table dealings letting banks give houses away and get money from the FED. It's hard to get a market price without putting the house on the market. It's a tough situation.

Also, if the feds really start slashing mortgage by 60+% on those houses, I wonder how some of the long term renters around here would feel.

robertoaribas says

Sorry, but that is actually going to be positive for home prices.

And therefore positive for everyone that actually works a job that does this weird thing involving productivity?

I don't see how anyone can spin Wall Street buying-up swaths of residential properties as a positive thing. You have said repeatedly that you don't care what the paper-value of your rental empire is, so surely you aren't rooting for valuation increases. These are the same Wall Street psychopaths that held a gun to the collective heads of all pensioners in the US in order to get the US taxpayer to pay for their gambling tab a few short years ago. These psychopathic entities should have been burned to the damn ground, not paid to receive a hand-job from the taxpayers then then handed the keys to become those same taxpayers' landlord.

All I hope is that we manage to get another FDR at the helm to gut these vampiric entities. If we don't, it'll be pitchforks and AR15's from people that have had enough, but I don't want to see that. It's too bad that the mentally unstable folks with guns are running around shooting up schools. If they directed their ire at board rooms on Wall Street, we'd be naming national holidays after them someday.

Title insurance is not possible with occupant in the house when closing.

bmwman91 says

These are the same Wall Street psychopaths that held a gun to the collective heads of all pensioners in the US in order to get the US taxpayer to pay for their gambling tab a few short years ago. These psychopathic entities should have been burned to the damn ground, not paid to receive a hand-job from the taxpayers then then ha

What's really insane is that the wording of your post is not hyperbolic. In more normal times, it would be, but in fact, it's just a dry analysis of things.

bmwman91 says

All I hope is that we manage to get another FDR at the helm to gut these vampiric entities. If we don't, it'll be pitchforks and AR15's from people that have had enough, but I don't want to see that. It's too bad that the mentally unstable folks with guns are running around shooting up schools. If they directed their ire at board rooms on Wall Street, we'd be naming national holidays after them someday.

You're not the only one who's thought "what a waste of a perfectly good madness."

bmwman91 says

All I hope is that we manage to get another FDR at the helm to gut these
vampiric entities. If we don't, it'll be pitchforks and AR15's from people that
have had enough, but I don't want to see that. It's too bad that the mentally
unstable folks with guns are running around shooting up schools. If they
directed their ire at board rooms on Wall Street, we'd be naming national
holidays after them someday.

Yeah. Obama had the perfect opportunity, but he seems to be on the right of Reagan in many areas.

gbenson says

This one pissed me off when I saw it.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/15733-SE-Powell-Blvd-Portland-OR-97236/2146092690_zpid/

I considered it as a potential investment property, but noted that it was a HUD home and may have some funky title stuff going on. As best I can tell this is how it went down:

You are upset that someone else bought it as investment property and not you. Isn't that just another way of saying, it's only wrong if someone else gets what I want?

Integrity is when you see something going wrong and try to fight against the corruption and fraud. It is not integrity if you are whining because you failed to profit from the transaction.

bmwman91 says

Robert don't see how anyone can spin Wall Street buying-up swaths of residential properties as a positive thing. You have said repeatedly that you don't care what the paper-value of your rental empire is, so surely you aren't rooting for valuation increases.

Rob lives a life of vanity as a Scrooge. His view of life is a little different than normal folk, he worships idols.

robertoaribas says

you'd have to kick them out when you bought the house anyways, so it is no different.

These are people you know. Man of the people.

robertoaribas says

any time you guys want to come out of fantasy land and join reality, you'll find it makes your life decisions so much better!

Ever see what happens when animals get cornered? Reality is when the class of abusive landed gentry and the banking cabal makes living in a contracting economy miserable. Youll eventually get pushback. Then you will run to the police state to save your neck.

bmwman91 says

it'll be pitchforks and AR15's from people that have had enough

Will never happen. Americans are afraid of the police, respect authority, are brainwashed, pussy whipped and suffering from low testosterone.

ELC says

Americans are afraid of the police and respect authority and are pretty well brainwashed.

That's not what I was told to think.

Moderate Infidel says

That's not what I was told to think.

LOL! I was told to think they are brave patriots. Haven't seen the slightest sign of that. Lots of beer swilling, sports watching and masturbating to interacial porn.

FortWayne says

You are upset that someone else bought it as investment property and not you.

How on earth did you take away that from my statement? My entire point, along with a restatement of this point in a 2nd post, was that HUD is utterly incompetent and the banks are making out like bandits.

robertoaribas says

Reality says

Title insurance is not possible with occupant in the house when closing.

you are a joke. do you always make crap up in areas that you know nothing about?

My lawyer made that quite clear to me at the most recent closing, which took place a couple weeks go. He explicitly made sure there's nobody living there before issuing title insurance. The property was a (post-)foreclosure REO, which is the type of property that we are discussing here.

Mick Russom says

robertoaribas says

any time you guys want to come out of fantasy land and join reality, you'll find it makes your life decisions so much better!

Ever see what happens when animals get cornered? Reality is when the class of abusive landed gentry and the banking cabal makes living in a contracting economy miserable. Youll eventually get pushback. Then you will run to the police state to save your neck.

I have no idea what Roberto's business model is, so my comment here is not meant to refute what you wrote. Just want to make it clear that not every housing service provider is a scum of the earth. I'm in the process of accumulating a portfolio. The goal is to rescue a bunch of starter homes that would otherwise rot . . . fix them up and make them available to the rental market to help keeping the rents affordable, and eventually let some of the future tenants to buy them if they are interested in a high interest rate environment via seller financing when the government subsidy programs are gone. Some of the houses are priced so low due to neglect and repair work needed there indeed can be room for win-win plays if someone is willing to stump up all-cash purchase and fix them up.

ELC says

bmwman91 says

it'll be pitchforks and AR15's from people that have had enough

Will never happen. Americans are afraid of the police, respect authority, are brainwashed, pussy whipped and suffering from low testosterone.

People are sheep. All it will take is a few individuals with the balls to kick things off and feed on the masses' various angers and something will get a'going. I'm not saying that it will be a good thing, but bad things are bound to happen when the oligarchy blindly squeezes the general populace for its own gains. People like Roberto are not the problem, but most people are too dumb to tell the difference between people like him and the psychopaths that are driving this mess. Bank tellers and landlords will be the first to be strung-up (wrongfully) in a froth of populist anger if things melt down. Eventually the government will see that they need to neuter the oligarchs if they want to keep ANY of their power and they will pay the oligarchs some concessions to go off and learn to live with their piles of riches for a while. It'll all repeat again thereafter, but things will be OK again for a while.

My hope is that we are able to get political momentum going early enough that the oligarchs can be paid-off into temporary obscurity by the government, without the whole "murdering bank tellers and landlords" thing taking place first. People like Matt Taibi and Dylan Ratigan are making some headway into the popular mind, and many people are receptive to their messages. That's one spot of light as far as I can tell.

JodyChunder says

What's really insane is that the wording of your post is not hyperbolic. In more normal times, it would be, but in fact, it's just a dry analysis of things.

Dude, tell me about it. When I read Griftopia, I started out in disbelief of what I was reading. The only way I was able to get through that book was by reading it on a nice comfy park bench on a nearby trail so that I could take periodic walks to cool off. When I tell people about what was really going on behind the financial melt-down, they think I am a nut. What is even MORE nuts is that there were NO changes to any regulatory policy after the bail-outs and it is only a (short) matter of time before Wall Street does the exact same shit all over again. Wall Street not only got bailed-out, but they also got a free ticket to ride again. It's already happening.

CaptainShuddup says

gbenson says

Who the hell is running HUD and how to we get someone in there that has a brain?

Cross bread a helper monkey with a bingo player.

Please leave my parents out of this discussion.LOL

bmwman91 says

People are sheep.

And sheep need fleecing.

ELC says

LOL! I was told to think they are brave patriots. Haven't seen the slightest sign of that. Lots of beer swilling, sports watching and masturbating to interacial porn.

Ok, Alex Jones.

(Why specifically qualify the porn as interracial, by the way? I bet you're more an inter-taxonomical kinda guy!)

bmwman91 says

People are sheep. All it will take is a few individuals with the balls to kick things off and feed on the masses' various angers and something will get a'going.

Maybe. Or it may be that a lot of people are too exhausted from day-to-day hustling. Depending on your station in life, the daze of self-preservation can crowd out your more philosophical instincts. Having quality time to consider and reflect is a privilege not all of us can readily afford. Try long-haul trucking or electroplating radiators in 110 degree heat 9 hours a day, and see how much energy you have for contemplating the nature of anything outside of base human instinct.

As for a change in the weather...it better be able to compete with the litany of distractions on offer. The boredom relief industry, and technology in specific, is considerably huger today than it's ever been during any other time of uprising in history. It's helped to sustain a steady line of interference from the introspection and ennui needed to get the masses in a snarl.

This is true. The bread and circuses of late Roman vintage are nothing compared to Reality TV and the EBT system. Perhaps you are right...placating the base physical and mental needs of the population has been perfected and we'll continue further and further into an Orwellian nightmare.

That'll keep up until some other country, that isn't grinding its people into mindless cattle, decides that it wants America's resources and starts a big old war. Assuming that it does not go thermonuclear and wipe out most mammalian life on the surface, that ought to wake someone up and cull the herd quite a bit (assuming we "win").

The thing that really kills me is what you are saying though. Most people just can't muster the energy to really THINK about life and the world around them. I am glad that I have the luxury to do exactly that. A BIG part of it is not owning a TV, which induces boredom, which drives me to go source my own mental stimulation. I don't want to go off on some elitist tangent because I know plenty of smart, in-touch people that have TVs. I guess that it all comes down to how much you use it. Anyway, it has been a long time since I had to work a shit job for minimum wage or thereabout. Even when I had to support myself on $12.50 an hour in Stockton (and it actually paid all of the bills in 2005 although I had a lot of cheese & mustard sandwiches for dinner), I was fortunate enough to have a highly intelligent roommate that loved having philosophical conversations over various alcoholic beverages. I can see how working long hours at a job that isn't entirely stimulating can very easily leave one in a condition where they want to go home and veg out, eat some sort of crap pre-packaged dinner and pass out. It takes discipline and a solid support network to avoid the trap where you waste away into nothing and vote along party lines in the ever-present battle against "the other side." I count myself as lucky, as frustrating as "seeing" the world for what it is can be.

Next time I am down in J-Tree to climb, I'll drop you a line & buy you a beer if you like.

bmwman91 says

The thing that really kills me is what you are saying though. Most people just can't muster the energy to really THINK about life and the world around them.

Don't get me wrong -- there are definitely those who seem aggressively incurious. It's like they've got muscle memory for the over-the-barrel position. What can I say...I do not understand this creature.

For the most part, though, the people I meet who at first seem like oblivious assholes (sheeple) are really just fatigued and dazed, often from dealing with the very tensions that are a byproduct of the claw backs in American living standards to which they should be paying attention, and getting informed about, and then pissed off about. Instead, they're trying to hold their marriages together, and trying to keep their bosses off their backs, and dealing with other liabilities. These concerns crowd the portals of their better senses to where everything outside of their immediate sphere of concern is shop talk, and treated as an incursion.

You're fortunate that you have a brain, and thoughtful friends around you. I see thinking in general as one of the greatest pleasures available to any man.

Gimme a holler next time you're desert-bound. I was just in Joshua Tree! I discovered a shockingly great little Indian restaurant there. It's in a filling station. I'll buy the suds.

Jody"PuffyTits"Chunder says

(sheeple)

Hmmm

bmwman91 says

that ought to wake someone up and cull the herd quite a bit (assuming we "win").

Government is well aware of our weakness. That's why they throw so much money at the military. Deep down the people know it too which is why there's little objection when their health care is unaffordable while the Pentagon gets a raise. I'm assuming the military has learned how to deprogram these kids so they're not pantywaists.

JodyChunder says

Or it may be that a lot of people are too exhausted from day-to-day hustling.

It's the exact opposite. They're soft from living the easy life. You must have Americans confused with illegal alians.

Moderate Infidel says

And sheep need fleecing.

Great point!

bmwman91 says

People are sheep. All it will take is a few individuals with the balls to kick things off and feed on the masses' various angers and something will get a'going.

Wasn't that what Occupy Wallstreet was about? Instead the press successfully made them look like a bunch of idiots. Sheep follow other sheep to safety. They don't follow individuals into danger.

bmwman91 says

My hope is that we are able to get political momentum going early enough that the oligarchs can be paid-off into temporary obscurity by the government, without the whole "murdering bank tellers and landlords" thing taking place first. People like Matt Taibi and Dylan Ratigan are making some headway into the popular mind, and many people are receptive to their messages. That's one spot of light as far as I can tell.

The kingpins are sociopaths. A sociopath's greatest fear is being exposed. Even violence and incarceration takes a back seat to being exposed. If you notice the press is very careful at not naming names other than the totally obvious. They'll publish the names and addresses of gun owners no problem, or people accused of blue-collar crimes, but they'll never expose the real major players, what they are doing, what they look like, and where they live. Did you watch Frontline's The Untouchables? How many "untouchables" did they expose?

Reality says

Just want to make it clear that not every housing service provider is a scum of the earth. I'm in the process of accumulating a portfolio. The goal is to rescue a bunch of starter homes that would otherwise rot

Every housing service provider has a way to rationalize so they can do what they do guilt free. Your dealing in tainted merchandise and helping the banks clean up their mess. Sorry. You're just another brick in the wall.

They should go to jail, bankers alike. That is a start, but since they own the us gov.

Pledge allegiance to the banks...oh well orwell

This is the fall of the society and dark ages will ensue.

ELC says

Reality says

Just want to make it clear that not every housing service provider is a scum of the earth. I'm in the process of accumulating a portfolio. The goal is to rescue a bunch of starter homes that would otherwise rot

Every housing service provider has a way to rationalize so they can do what they do guilt free. Your dealing in tainted merchandise and helping the banks clean up their mess. Sorry. You're just another brick in the wall.

There are correct ways to build a portfolio that are beneficial to the public. You don't see it much now because the business has been over run by crooks.

It's harder to make a buck when you're competing with deeper pockets, who can make a quick short term profit.

JodyChunder says

Gimme a holler next time you're desert-bound. I was just in Joshua Tree! I discovered a shockingly great little Indian restaurant there. It's in a filling station. I'll buy the suds.

I'm thinking of maybe visiting that area around Feb 15 to 18. Is it worthwhile? I've heard Death Valley is best in February.

The area is hit-or-miss this time of the year. It can either be 75F during the day and mid-50's at night, or 38F in the middle of the day with 40MPH winds. You just have to go take your chances, it can change in a matter of a few hours sometimes. Generally though, I have run into the best weather in mid-March. The main section of Joshua Tree natl Park is definitely worth visiting for a day, but my personal favorite place is Indian Cove. Park out at Rattlesnake Canyon & go for an awesome day hike / scramble up a creekbed. There are actually small waterfalls sometimes, depending on how much rain fell that year! It is super cool to see in the middle of the high desert.

Also be sure to hit up the Joshua Tree Saloon Grill & Bar. Order a pastrami sandwich, and ask them to grill the pastrami (you have to ask for it specifically). Best damn pastrami sandwich you'll ever have. The joint is on the corner of Twentynine Palms Highway and Park Blvd in the town of Joshua Tree.

ELC says

Every housing service provider has a way to rationalize so they can do what they do guilt free. Your dealing in tainted merchandise and helping the banks clean up their mess. Sorry. You're just another brick in the wall.

Do you mean every house ever borrowed against or foreclosed upon should be torn down? It seems to me that my rescuing of the houses keeping them on the market available for rent at low prices (and hopefully declining prices) not only work as price competition to the bankster rental portfolio but also help people avoid the need to take on huge loans to buy houses and get ripped off by the banksters yet again. My long term goal is actually eventually letting the long-term renters own the houses that they rent from me.

Reality says

Do you mean every house ever borrowed against or foreclosed upon should be torn down?

It's litterally a crime scene, so yes it should be torn down. Your renters will never own the houses they rent from you. Most will lose the extra rent they are paying you to rent to own. You're selling them a pipe dream. Just because you truly believe the same dream doesn't change reality. If you want to succeed with that particular business model most of your renters will need to fail. It's not a win/win as you believe. Either you or they must fail.

BTW, I'm not saying not to be in that business. Just don't fool yourself that there's a higher and lower ground within that business. Most doctors and lawyers are bottom feeders too and most parents want their daughters to marry a doctor or lawyer. I would even lump most pastors in the bottom feeding catagory as well, so don't worry about it.

Most businesses and professions that truly help people don't come with high profit so in the world there's a choice to be made if you're able to be really really honest with yourself, but it's hard to choose with all the shiny little trinkets metal disks and paper strips can buy these days.

John Bailo says

So are you saying that they intend to monopolize real estate and then set the prices without regard to a "free market"?

I certainly am. Assuming that they hold onto the rentals for any appreciable amount of time, rather than dumping them onto the market en-masse when they decide that they want to cash out, they will engage in wealth extraction that makes the mid-2000's look like a kiddie birthday party.

bmwman91 says

Assuming that they hold onto the rentals for any appreciable amount of time,

I think the deal is they have to hold them for five years.