Links and Minifeatures 12 14 Friday

Spent the day looking at property for clients. I had twenty picked out off MLS, and I only managed to get in to see ten. I had twelve theoretically vacant on lockbox, and eight occupied that needed some kind of contact. Of those eight, I only got into three - and I made at least an initial call the day before before. Of the twelve theoretically vacant on lockbox, five had something going on - pesticide notice on the door, key missing out of lockbox, lockbox itself missing. All I can surmise is that these people don't really want to sell. And if they don't need to sell, they should pull the property off the market until the market improves.

People don't make offers without seeing the property. And good agents don't take clients to see a property unless they've seen it themselves. I had that reinforced today by no fewer than four of the ones I did get to see (For crying out loud, man, that lender is paying you a five digit commission to sell that property. Buy a box of trash bags and put the former occupants' trash in them. Or pay a couple high school kids to do it. If the property sells, and especially if it sells for a higher amount, you're ahead of the game. I understand you're not a contractor, but leaving ankle to knee deep trash strewn about every room says that you just don't care)

via volokh Conspiracy, I find that Jake Guttentag (aka "The Mortgage Professor") has written in the Washington Post (and evidently on his web site prior to that) about many of the problems with proposed fixes to the current mess. The last two paragraphs:

However, borrowers often make their decisions on the basis of incomplete and even misleading information from lenders. Instead of requiring lenders to assume responsibility for borrowers' decisions, let's make them responsible for providing borrowers with the information they need to make their own decisions.

The formulation of disclosure rules has long been viewed as a proper responsibility of government, because this is the only way to assure uniformity of disclosures across the market. But the federal government has proven that it is not up to this task. The existing mandatory disclosure rules are obsolete and shamefully inadequate. Every attempt to fix them gets bogged down in politics. It is time to try making lenders responsible for disclosures.

This should sound familiar to regular readers of this site. I've said many similar things.

I have in the past exchanged a couple emails with the Professor, and was formerly a member of Upfront Mortgage Brokers (which he founded) and from observing his actions, he seems to have his priorities in the right place for consumers. We don't always agree, but I have to say that I respect where he's coming from.

Read the whole thing.

I'm working on an article on yield spread. I hope to have it up Sunday or Monday.