Zee Links and Minifeatures: September 2007 Archives

A coffee break for Sisyphus! Even if I don't drink coffee and that's making way too big a deal out of it, the internal links should now be all fixed. What this means is that for those folks who find the article they were looking for, they can now find the linked and related articles as well.

So if any internal link of Searchlight Crusade comes up with a 404 error (page not found - and I have a customized 404 page that says it's a 404 page), please email me to tell me I missed one.

I'm going to be fixing the external links (via a 404 redirect function) as soon as I can.

I know I only put out three new articles this week. Trying to Rehabilitate the Negative Amortization Loan - NOT! really did take a lot of work, basically every spare minute for two days, mostly reminding myself of what all that math really meant, and then I ended up not using most of it. Fixing the internal links was also a pretty significant project. Still, I'll try to do better next week.

UPDATE: Almost forgot, but I believe that I have also fixed TypeKey registration, so you should be able to log in and comment via TypeKey. Let me know if that's not the case!

Conforming Loan Limit Guessing Game!

I got an emailed question about the raising conforming loan limits. We're coming up on that time of year, as they usually announce the decision within two weeks plus or minus of the beginning of November, to be effective January 1st. Last year, there was no significant upwards pressure on the limit, as they'd just raised it all the way from $359,650 the year before to $417,000, a nearly 16 percent rise, so it was left alone. I expect that to be very different this year.

For full documentation conforming loans, the fact remains that we can do basically anything we used to be able to. The rates have even improved a little. However, for stated income or non-conforming loans, this has changed, and the loan prices have gone very high, proportionately. When the willingness of lenders to touch non-conforming financing plummets, well, that increases the demand for conforming financing, and translates to pressure to raise the conforming limits, as Fannie or Freddie standing behind it means the lender isn't stuck with the loan, and doesn't have to deal with the rest of the secondary market.

Furthermore, due to the need to substitute PMI for a second mortgage loan in the current market (as I discussed here), the conforming loan limit has become a lot more relevant to the average person than it was even a few months ago. When you can use a conforming loan coupled with a piggyback second to purchase a property with a value of up to about $522,000 without any down payment, well, that's more house than the average person can afford. When that option goes away, as second lienholders don't want to go above 90% CLTV lest they lose every dollar, now we're talking about the conforming loan limit (currently $417,000) suddenly becoming a lot more constricting in practice.

Finally, with efforts to tie the FHA maximum to the conforming limit while other parties in Congress want it raised above that, this creates even more pressure to raise the conforming limit. This is the sort of back door approach that's very common in legislative circles. "Okay, the president says he'll veto the bill if it goes over the conforming limit, so we'll give him what he wants in the bill, and then get the conforming limit raised."

The upshot of all of this is that I would be surprised if the conforming loan limit doesn't get raised this year. I'm going to enter $460,000 as my guess for single unit residences, as opposed to $417,000 currently. Depending upon the strength of behind the scenes pressure, it could well be more. I wouldn't be surprised to see $480,000. I would be surprised to see less that $440,000.

Roofable has today's Consumer Focused Real Estate Carnival.

It will return in two weeks, at this site unless I get another volunteer. I'm still recruiting hosts.

I also need to put up a post iterating the guidelines.

Victor Davis Hanson, as always, well worth reading on the geopolitical state of things.

I wish I were making this up: A lawyer who was convicted of aiding and abetting terrorism (serving as a communication channel to help a jailed terrorist leader continue to manage his terror network) and disbarred over the same, is going to be a speaker on the subject of ethics

Brainpower short circuits

The Soros threat to democracy

Funny! M&M duels

"Think of it as evolution in action"

Hillary: "inherent" U.S. authority for force in Iraq since 1991

Armies of Liberation on Yemen's despotic ruler with an electoral figleaf.

Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Capitalists

Upon several occasions, I've mentioned that initially overpricing a property is a good way to get less than it's really worth, and less than you could have gotten by pricing it correctly in the first place. Here's the best, most graphic illustration of why that I have yet come across, as well as the most understandable.

Sorry I haven't had the time to link out much of late. It's more important to get the internal links fixed (I'm into April of this year, and hoping to at least finish it before I go home), and then institute redirects for external links that have gone bad (I looked a few days ago, and had over 250k "404" errors at that time. I'm working on it!)

On the professional front, I have been finding some WOW! bargains in my usual stomping grounds in east county. There's a lot to be said for the older cities of east county (and adjacent areas of San Diego City). You tend to get a lot more for the same price than Clairemont, University City, Mira Mesa, etcetera, while the schools and construction standards are mostly better and the traffic is easier to handle. I've had two sets of clients change their own minds about where they wanted to buy, so far this year. As I said a few days ago, Affordability has improved a lot over the last year while people have continued to make more money.

Almost forgot! It was 29 years ago today that PSA Flight 182 landed in the North Park area of San Diego.

You Go Girl! Should teachers be allowed to pack a gun? Talks about an Oregon teacher who has filed suit to be allowed to carry on campus.

I was interviewed by Channel 10 news about the local real estate market yesterday. I actually watched their 5:30 news, and it came across pretty well. They went so far as to mention my locally oriented website.

Here's the video, although I don't know how long it'll last. The website shown is my locally aimed, professional voice only site.

Here's their website linking to mine

Progress report: I've now got the internal links fixed through the end of September 2006. I seem to be averaging about a month's worth of articles per day. When I've got them all fixed, I'll go back and add re-directs so the existing external links go to the article they wanted in the first place.

I know I've already written four new articles this week, but I'm going to try and squeeze in one more new article if I can.

Carnival of Personal Finance

Cool! Gregg Swann thought my post on "Should Lenders Be Permitted to Sell Real Estate?" worthy of his Odysseus Medal.

The San Diego Special Edition

FTC Warns Some Mortgage Ads May Violate Law

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.

If you're hoping this means the FTC is not going to be missing in action anymore, well it's a good sign, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

My new host has a function that tracks the most recent few hundred visitors. I just went over this log, and counted a visit a "success" if any of the html codes for the visit was not 404. Success rate: Just over 15%, and a large number of the successes were web crawlers. I've explained the situation about as thoroughly as I can on the 404 error page, and people just aren't following directions. Through the first 10 days of September, I'm showing 143,000 404 errors, and only 29,000 successful page requests.

I'm working as fast as I can, but there's only so many hours in the day. Anybody have any ideas to raise the success rate until I can get everything fixed?

UPDATE: I've been made aware of an issue viewing the site with Internet Explorer. Evidently, on the main page only, the dark footer on the bottom of the page overlays everything starting about a paragraph down. In Firefox, the main page is the only one with the huge gap in the left sidebar. So I think these problems are likely to be somehow related, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure them out yet.

To quote Shrek, "It's on my To Do List" If anyone with more knowledge than I would like to help, I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, Firefox is both free and much closer to compliant with standards.

Evidence that there are gaps in our knowledge about the universe: Kilo prototype mysteriously loses weight

I'm not going to get all mystical on you. It's possible that the custodians have gotten careless and left fingerprints or partial fingerprints on the bars, although I'd think it likely they would deal with that possibility before discussing it with the news media. This sample mass and several exact copies were made at the same time, from the same material, to the same standard. Measurements to this standard were well within the capabilities at the time. The difference between the masses now is significant, even by the standards of when they were made. This difference cannot be explained by any known phenomenon. Therefore, there's something we don't understand going on. This is not to say that there's anything supernatural happening. I suppose that's possible, but it's not a leading hypothesis. But known masses that start identical should stay identical, according to theory I remember studying. Perhaps there's some natural process going on on the quantum level, and over 118 years, it has become noticeable. And just to point this out, should there be some sort of matter creation or destruction going on, by Einstein's famous e=mc squared, 50 micrograms is 4.5 billion Joules (300 million meters per second squared times 50 times ten to the minus 9th kilograms). The Solar constant is 1366 Watts per square meter. So if you had a solar power array in orbit, 100 meters on a side (roughly the size of two football fields), pointed straight at the sun, it'd take just shy of 330 seconds, or five and a half minutes, to generate that much energy. If your car engine generates 200 horsepower, that's 28,300 seconds or almost eight hours of that engine running flat out, to match the energy of 50 micrograms of matter.

No I haven't forgotten 9/11. I've said what I have to say. Nothing has changed, except how shrill those who blame the United States have become. Since I have nothing new to say, I'm going to adhere to Tom Lehrer's advice and shut up.

Victor Davis Hanson on what schools do and do not need.

Best Markets For Landlords

Foreclosures and risky lending have dogged the housing market. As lenders have tightened their standards, attractive mortgages have grown harder to come by. Yet rental fundamentals have remained strong, especially in the 10 areas that made our list of Best Markets for Landlords.

I've only been predicting this for two years now.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Oversalted Burger Leads to Charges. Anyone else would have complained to the manager and gotten a new burger plus maybe a discount on the next one or a freebie. But because it happened to be a cop, the person who made it - and properly informed their supervisor, who made the decision to serve it - gets to spend a night in jail. Does this strike anyone else as police brutality or intimidation? Use of office for personal ends? Or maybe just petty vengeance and abuse of authority, which is something we're trying to weed out. Time for a certain cop to lose his badge.

FYI, as I'm going through fixing the internal links in old posts and adding tags for indexing, for some reason a lot - not all - are re-sending trackbacks. I'm not certain why this is happening on some posts, but I do apologize for it.

My younger daughter turns 3 today. I'm going to try to have a new article for tomorrow, but it might get delayed by the fact Daddy needs to be at the party.