The Real Estate Wonk

What the robo-signing settlement means for all borrowers

2012-02-17T11:00:00Z

If you're not in trouble on a mortgage and didn't lose your home to foreclosure in the last few years, you might think the national settlement between state attorneys general and big mortgage servicers has nothing to do with you.

But the settlement includes a 42-page directive intended to broadly improve mortgage-servicing practices, which critics contend are the pits.

Though the settlement applies only to the big players that signed on (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial/GMAC), the Maryland attorney general's office says the federal government could eventually make all federal institutions play by these servicing rules.

Here's a taste of what they require:

o Better handling of borrowers' payments. Servicers must "promptly" record payments and post them within two days. If a borrower makes almost all of a scheduled payment -- within $50 of the amount due -- then the servicer must apply it and at least one more such payment to the mortgage, rather than shunting it to a "suspense account" and letting interest and late fees mount.

]]> o More rules about suspense accounts. When payments are put in such accounts, servicers must tell the borrower and apply money from the account to the mortgage as soon as there's enough there for a full payment. They must not sap the money with their own fees until all principal, interest and escrow amounts are paid.

o More disclosure to borrowers. Monthly bills must note not only the amount due but how payments have been allocated, how much principal is left, what fees and charges have been added and how much is left in escrow. If payments are due to change, servicers must give the reason three weeks in advance.

o "Force-placed" insurance reform. This type of insurance, purchased by the servicer and charged to the homeowner, is supposed to protect the asset when the borrower's own policy has lapsed. But it's far more expensive than a regular policy. Homeowners have complained that their servicers stuck them with it when their normal policy was already in place and refused to remove it, putting them behind or digging the hole deeper.

The new force-placed rules state that servicers cannot get force-placed insurance unless they have actual cause to believe there's no policy protecting the home. If homeowners make escrow payments to cover the insurance policy, servicers must forward them to the insurer even if the borrowers are behind on their mortgage payments. Servicers must accept as proof of insurance "any reasonable form of written confirmation of coverage," and if they do force-place, the cost itself must be reasonable.

o No fee shenanigans. Servicers can't collect late fees while they're considering a loan modification or short sale or when borrowers are making prompt trial payments toward a modification. They can't charge unreasonable default fees, including pass-throughs from attorneys, and they must disclose everything in detail. And they can’t keep repeatedly dinging homeowners for "inspection fees," broker price opinions and the like.

o Better loan-modification efforts. The agreement includes a requirement for an "easily accessible" single point of contact for borrowers seeking help so they're not starting over with someone new every time they call, as has happened for years. The rules are also designed to avoid the so-called "dual track" of one division working with a homeowner on loan modification while another simultaneously pushes toward auction at the courthouse steps.

o No blight. Servicers have to keep repossessed properties from falling apart and hurting neighborhoods. They have also agreed to "enhance" participation in local efforts such as land banks and community redevelopment.

o No more robo-signing -- of course, since that touched off the entire inquiry. The term refers to people signing court affidavits to allow foreclosure without even reading the documents, let alone having any idea whether the information is right. Faked signatures (Joe Schmoe signing as John Q. Public) and false notarizations were common, according to court depositions.

The new rules say servicers may not use inaccurate affidavits to get the OK to foreclose, must require their signers to review the records before putting ink to paper, must give staffers enough time to do the job properly and cannot pay incentives to anyone -- including contractors -- to reward affidavit-processing speed.

David Paulson, a spokesman for the Maryland attorney general, call the servicing rules "the unsung section" of the settlement agreement. "I know the AGs are very proud of this," he said.

Here's a summary of all the rules. I'm quoting from that. (The full 42 pages probably won't be public until the settlement is given the OK in federal court.)

The Maryland attorney general's office has details for borrowers here, including general information and a Q&A. The staff's suggestion to homeowners hoping they might qualify for help: Contact a nonprofit housing counselor.

Paulson says former homeowners who were foreclosed on might want to touch base with their servicer. "Finding you might be difficult," he said. "We’re kind of encouraging everybody to start this process by contacting the bank and letting them know where you are, at least."

Oh, and one more link: Here's the national site about the settlement.

What do you think?

Crime, school and amenities data paired with real estate

2012-02-15T11:00:00Z

Real estate search site Trulia now has neighborhood data on crime, schools and other things that aren't real estate but that homebuyers and prospective renters might like to know about before moving in.

The "Trulia Local" option -- here's Baltimore -- offers up a map showing you where violent and non-violent crimes happened, where the schools are (and how parents have rated them) and where you can find restaurants, banks, gas stations and grocery stores. Oh yeah, and the homes for sale along with the recently sold stuff.

What do you think? Does the information look useful? Accurate?

What do you really want to know before you buy or rent?

If you've seen other examples of neighborhood-level data, with or without housing details, please share in the comments.

Here's a link-fest of local resources for crime and school data, if you're in the market for more.

Company town

2012-02-14T11:00:00Z

Pete from Highlandtown, one of my favorite commenters here (though I love you all), touched on a subject this week that everyone in the region should be giving some hard thought about: Are we a company town? And if so, are we going to go the way that all company towns eventually do?

"In my opinion, much of the 1995-2008 gentrification in Canton/Fed Hill/etc., was due to our proximity to DC," said Pete, who sees neighborhood change at an up-close-and-personal level doing interior demolition and basement excavations for rehabbers. "Im sure that most of your readers know people that commute to DC (or its suburbs) every day. In many ways we have become a suburb of DC. There is nothing wrong with using our proximity to DC to our advantage. But we are very vulnerable to gas price increases, and Federal Budget cuts."

He's sure that if Washington wasn't carved out of Maryland and Virginia in the 18th century, Baltimore's situation would be much more dire, and he's worried about the outcome when the spiraling federal deficit is finally attacked in a real way. He's hardly alone.

]]> Some local economists warned for years that the rapidly increasing amount of federal contracting dollars flowing to Maryland would inevitably have to stop growing, at the very least, taking the accelerator off a prime source of new jobs in the area. (Local officials say they're hopeful that the big federal agencies in Woodlawn, the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will be A-OK thanks to the aging baby boom generation.)

So much of the I-95 corridor is tied up in some way with Uncle Sam, whether directly (more than 56,000 people work at Fort Meade, enough to populate a small city) or indirectly (think federal research grants to Johns Hopkins, No. 1 recipient of federal science and engineering bucks).

The Johns Hopkins institutions are themselves big players in Baltimore, with more workers than any other private employer in Maryland.

"Baltimore has become a 'two industry town,'" Pete wrote. "We seem to survive solely on Johns Hopkins and the Federal Government. We need to diversify our economy. Or we will suffer the same fate that Detroit did, when its main (and pretty much only) industry ran into trouble."

This matters to housing because people usually need jobs to buy or rent. A healthy economy keeps a region from bleeding population.

There's some talk about more diversification. Coping with tighter federal budgets is the raison d'etre of Blueprint Maryland, launched by a banker now running for Congress. (Here's a Q&A from last year.)

What would you suggest?

How hard do you think your neighborhood would be hit if budget cuts come and there aren't non-government-related jobs to take the place of the ones that disappear?

Few bedrooms, big price

2012-02-13T11:00:00Z

You'd be forgiven for thinking that pricey homes always have a lot of bedrooms. They so often do.

Take this seven-bedroom spread in Annapolis. Or this 12-bedroom, 19-bathroom mansion (who's using all these bathrooms?) in New Jersey. Or, heck, this 30-bedroom house near Orlando with an entrance designed to look like the opulent Palace of Versailles. Thirty bedrooms!

But one house selling in the Baltimore region last month in the $600,000 to $799,999 category has two bedrooms at most, according to the newest sales statistics from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

I don't know much about this place, except that it's in Anne Arundel County and so is probably well-above-average in price thanks to waterfront. To give you an idea of how unusual this is, there wasn't another one- or two-bedroom single-family house in the entire Baltimore region that sold for more than $400,000 last month.

Average price of a two-bed-or-less house in the Baltimore area last month: $148,000. Almost half sold for less than $100,000.

]]> When it comes down to it, though, how many bedrooms does a mansion really need? I mean, is anyone entertaining enough to make 30 bedrooms a must-have? Also ... 19 bathrooms?

Most buyers are opting for three or four bedrooms. But most buyers aren't rolling in dough. If you were, would you drop some of it on a place with bedrooms in the double digits? (If not, what would you have in your ideal digs?)

On the flip side: Lots of bedrooms does not always an expensive house make. Here's a place with 10 of 'em in Northwest Baltimore currently on the market for $39,000. So if you really need a bunch ...

Thanks, by the way, to colleague Gus Sentementes for handling last week's January home sales story while I was on vacation!

Md. foreclosures since 2006: Almost 50,000

2012-02-09T13:05:00Z

Mortgage firms have foreclosed on about 49,600 homes in Maryland since the final days of the inflating housing bubble in January 2006, real estate data firm CoreLogic says. That's about 23 homes per day.

Just over 20,000 of those completed foreclosures were on homes in the Baltimore metro area, the company says. (National numbers here.)

It's difficult to get good statistics on the number of done-deal foreclosures. The Mortgage Bankers Association's quarterly survey of delinquent mortgages tracks most of the market, but only to the point of the foreclosure process pre-auction. Not every homeowner who starts down the road to foreclosure ends up losing his or her property. And sometimes homes go in and out of that process several times.

Factoid: Mortgage servicers foreclosed on 3,400 homes statewide last year, about 1,400 of them in the Baltimore region. That's well under the six-year average -- not surprising. We've seen the effects of slowdowns in the wake of the robo-signing revelations in a variety of different measures. This is just the latest.

Speaking of robo-signing: Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler decided to sign on to the settlement with banks over such practices, a deal that gives Maryland nearly $1 billion for various purposes -- including principal reduction -- but means his office cannot pursue civil liability claims involving mortgage origination or servicing misconduct.

More in Hanah Cho's story here. (Many thanks to Hanah for handling this while I'm out.)

Renting by default or by choice

2012-02-07T11:00:00Z

As the homeownership rate drops, the renter ranks swell. Some are renting because it's the only option, except possibly crashing with family, but others could buy and have decided against it -- either for now or indefinitely.

So, tenants, which group are you in?

Take a quick poll to share the top reason (realizing you might have a bunch) that you're renting:

I'm taking a much-needed week off, by the way. So please forgive the short posts.

Talk amongst yourselves, OK?

Proposal would help state keep banks from getting homeowner tax breaks

2012-02-06T11:00:00Z

A reader wrote in the other day because she discovered that her former neighbor's house, foreclosed on several years ago, is still listed in public records as if he owns it and lives there. She wondered whether the foreclosing bank has been reaping property tax breaks all this time because the home is on the books as owner-occupied.

This is not an unusual problem. State officials say mortgage servicers are taking months, sometimes years, to take title to foreclosed property, leaving it in a sort of limbo that makes it difficult for neighbors and officials to determine who's actually responsible for the property.

But I don't think anyone knows just how many times this has happened -- or how much money local jurisdictions have lost as a result of Homestead Property Tax Credits doled out after the homeowner who qualified became a former homeowner. The state Department of Assessments and Taxation relies on title transfers to strip the credits from properties.

State Sen. Richard F. Colburn, an Eastern Shore Republican, tried last year to require deed recordation within 60 days after a foreclosure is ratified by the court, but the bill died in committee.

Now legislation before the Senate judicial proceedings committee would give the assessments agency another way to figure out which homes aren't homestead-eligible because they've been foreclosed on.

]]> Robert E. Young, director of the assessments agency, said the department-requested SB 123 would require that foreclosing firms forward a copy of the court ratification order within 30 days so his staff can change their records -- and any tax breaks.

"If a bank forecloses on something ... and they don't transfer it until somebody ... buys it two years later, that bank has been improperly receiving a homestead credit that the former owner who was foreclosed was entitled to receive," Young said. The proposed requirement would supply "a trigger to catch those kinds of accounts."

He thinks it's a simple rule. "We're not saying you've got to file a special form or anything, just give us a copy."

If mortgage servicers handling foreclosures don't do so, they'd be on the hook to pay back any homestead credits plus interest and penalties once transfer finally occurs and the jig is up.

Young doesn't know how many banks have benefited from homestead credits they shouldn't have received. Because there's better tracking of mortgages before foreclosure than at the point of no return, it's not even clear how many homes in the state have been repossessed in recent years.

"No one really has a good handle on the number," Young said.

On a related note: A state foreclosure task force recommended a foreclosure registry to give local officials, neighbors and homeowners' associations a point of contact for every foreclosed home. More here.

Where Baltimore-area residents would rather be

2012-02-03T11:00:00Z

Real estate search site Trulia says the Baltimore region is seventh on the list of metro areas with the weakest demand among the online search crowd -- specifically, more renters and homeowners looking to move out than in.

For every search on Trulia by someone outside the region checking out places for sale or rent here, there are two (or more specifically 2.2) searches by people in our area looking somewhere else. The company, which ranked the 100 largest metro areas on search demand, says big regions tend to have more people looking to leave than to arrive.

Maryland overall has seen more going than coming in recent years, starting at the height of the housing boom and continuing in a bigger way afterward, according to the state Department of Planning's analysis of IRS migration data.

That doesn't mean the population dropped, though -- it grew. As a planning agency chart in an earlier analysis shows, births outnumber deaths and international migration is also adding to the mix, even as state-to-state migration subtracts.

Trulia says Baltimore-area residents searching online for apartments and homes outside the region are most frequently checking out these places:

1. The Washington area

2. The Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick mini-metro area (usually lumped in with the D.C. area, but not always)

3. The York-Hanover area in Pennsylvania

4. New York City and environs (an area that reaches New Jersey)

5. The Philadelphia area

But what about the people who live elsewhere and are checking us out? Trulia's list made me go "whaa?" -- here's why:

]]> It's an eerily similar list.

1. The Washington area

2. The Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick area

3. The NYC area

4. The Philadelphia area

5. The Salisbury area

A case of the grass is always greener?

All that's missing in this list compared with the first one is York -- York County tends to draw Baltimore-area workers looking for cheaper housing, and I don't think York County-to-Baltimore moves are as common. (Certainly Maryland sends more people to Pennsylvania than the other way around.)

People also tend to move in greater numbers from the pricier Washington area to Baltimore than vice versa, though the gap narrowed as the recession set in. I suppose we'll find out down the road whether the Trulia search results suggest a change or if it's just wishful lookylooing.

Oh, and No. 3 on the weakest search-demand list, with 2.5 outbound searches for every inbound one? That's D.C. (No. 1 is Newark, N.J.)

The top 10 at the other end -- places getting more lookers-in than lookers-out -- is filled with Florida communities. Trulia looked at searches in October, November and December, so weather might have helped there.

Where are you looking to move, if you're looking?

Having trouble finding a Baltimore foreclosure to buy? Here's why

2012-02-02T11:00:00Z

If you're trying to buy a foreclosure in the city and feel like your choices aren't what they were a year ago, it's not your imagination. While there were more short sales on the market last year than in 2010, bank-owned homes for sale (the purple line in the graph below) took a steep drop:

The data comes from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence. Though it probably won't come as a complete shock to anyone following the news about robo-signing, it's a striking chart nonetheless.

Here's the change in actual sales of distress properties:

]]>

As short-sale deals crept upward, foreclosure sales slumped, narrowing the gap. But if you compare the two charts, you'll see that there are still way more city homeowners hoping to sell short than those actually managing to do it. The odds of a bank-owned property listed for sale last year getting to settlement were much higher. (I am hearing some agents say the short-sale process seems to be getting better, but it depends on the bank.)

Are you trying to buy or sell in the "distress" category? What are you seeing out there?

Deadline to appeal new property assessments: Feb. 10

2012-02-01T11:00:00Z

If your home or other Maryland property was recently reassessed, your deadline to appeal is fast approaching.

Paperwork must be in by Feb. 10 for the one-third of property owners whose reassessment notices were mailed in late December. The state Department of Assessments and Taxation lays out a brief how-to here, noting that you can request your assessment worksheet to check it for accuracy and suggesting you find sales of comparable properties to make your case for a different valuation. (Here's the state's property look-up site, which gives you an option to search for sales.)

If you weren't just reassessed but are buying a home in the first six months of this year, you too can appeal to try to change the bill you'll get in July. That's called an "appeal upon purchase," and you have 60 days to file after settlement.

It's too late to appeal for the upcoming tax year if you aren't in one of those two groups. You can send in a "petition for review" anytime between now and Jan. 1 (or the first business day after Jan. 1, generally), but it won't have a chance of affecting your bill until July 1, 2013.

But some Baltimore homeowners might get a lowered bill this July without appealing -- because someone else did it for them.

Rockville-based Property Tax Pros, which offers an online appeal service for owners of houses, townhouses and rowhouses in large Maryland jurisdictions, filed pro-bono, out-of-the-blue appeals of 100 city homes' property assessments in January.

Larry Giammo, the company's co-founder and a former Rockville mayor, said he and his team picked modest homes -- assessed at about $70,000 to $120,000 -- that they believe are far overvalued now, about a year after they were last assessed. (Each property in the state is reassessed once every three years.)

]]> "Some parts of Baltimore, the prices have just collapsed in the last several years," Giammo said. "We're looking at some properties where we have five, six, seven comps in the $20-$30,000 range and nothing higher. So these folks are potentially paying $1 [thousand], $2,000 or more per year than they should. ... These are the people least able to afford paying too much in property taxes."

So how could his company appeal for people who didn't ask for the help? Turns out the owner and/or someone the owner hired aren't the only ones who can argue the assessment is off.

"It's called a third-party appeal," Giammo said. "Hardly anybody knows this, but in Maryland, anybody can appeal anybody else's property [assessment]. ... We haven't gotten hearing dates or anything yet, but when we do, we’ll go in and give it our best shot."

The one limitation on third-party appeals: Local governments can't ask for a review of homes last reassessed a year or two ago. They can only appeal newly reassessed properties, said Henry J. Sikorski, state supervisor of assessments.

Back story: Montgomery County officials used to aggressively appeal in the off-years when properties changed hands for a lot more than their assessments, angering the new owners and not winning any fans in the assessments agency, either. A 2002 Sun story quoted the then-head of the state assessments agency as calling the practice "the Welcome Wagon from hell."

The General Assembly unanimously voted to ban it during that legislative session. "The actions of local governments to appeal real property assessments by use of the petition for review process are contrary to the triennial assessment system and uniformity of taxation," legislators wrote in the Senate bill.

But nothing prevents an individual from appealing someone else's assessment out of cycle, as Giammo did. Of course, he's trying to get them lowered, not raised.

The ZIP code where many of those appealed homes are located: 21224, which includes a wide swath of southeastern Baltimore. Property Tax Pros appealed the assessments of 43 homes there. Here's the breakdown of the rest: 21213 (17 homes), 21216 (15 homes), 21215 (11 homes), 21207 (eight homes), 21218 (four homes) and 21217 (two homes).

Giammo said he's hoping the homeowners "will have a pleasant surprise later in the year, and less of a property tax bill that they have to pay."

Decent income, little savings?

2012-01-31T11:00:00Z

Maryland is a high-income state. But it's also got a big share of defaulted mortgages, delinquent loans of all sorts and outsized credit-card debt, according to a new study by the Corporation for Enterprise Development.

What gives? Some of it is probably housing costs. Two-thirds of states have a smaller percentage of "house poor" homeowners, people spending 30 percent or more of their before-tax income on their mortgage, property taxes and other ownership expenses.

But we could probably do better. Sure, if you're between jobs, it's awfully hard to save. And if you've already locked in a high mortgage payment that strains your budget, your options might seem limited. Still, chances are there's something you can do.

]]> Take the budgeting challenge with me: Figure out what you spent last year and on what -- something you might be able to do down to the item if you generally use plastic rather than cash. Then add up your various forms of savings and see how much bigger, or smaller, the grand total is compared with a year ago.

Some questions to think about when you're done:

Have you managed to save enough for at least six months of expenses -- or (considering how long unemployment can drag on these days) even more? Are you able to also set aside something for your life priorities, whether it's a down payment or a retirement nest egg? (Eileen Ambrose's column today points out that one in five Maryland households has little or no savings.)

Can you cut something out to save more? Or find a way to earn more money? Or both?

Sometimes revenue-raising possibilities are closer to home than you might think. Some homeowners are renting out a room or two in order to save or to help cover their mortgage.

My own trick for saving is to be extremely boring and limit entertainment outside the house to a few movies a year. (Hey, my $50-a-month Internet connection offers more entertainment than I'll ever get to the end of.) I bring leftovers to work for lunch, and I don't drink coffee. Those things add up over time.

What are your savings tricks? Inquiring cheapskates want to know.

If you're trying to save more and don't have a clear idea of where your money is going, here's one example of a budgeting worksheet.

And there are plenty of places for inspiration. The Get Rich Slowly blog has posts on avoiding "lifestyle creep," for instance, and having a baby on a budget. And, possibly of more interest to you if you're a regular, this piece by a schoolteacher who cut her spending 30 percent and saved enough to buy a house.

Oh, and if you're a single person making no more than $25,000 or in a family of two or more with $50,000 or less, remember that you're eligible for free tax preparation help from the Baltimore CASH Campaign.

Here's to more financial security.

More incentives for principal reduction

2012-01-30T11:00:00Z

The Treasury Department is trying to get more mortgage servicers to reduce the principal of struggling borrowers by tripling the incentive it pays for such a move -- and offering to pay financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, too.

Fannie and Freddie are essentially government-owned. As you can imagine, this new twist strikes some as the equivalent of Uncle Sam tossing money from his left hand to his right.

Of course, calls by Congressional Democrats for more principal reduction have so far had no effect on Fannie and Freddie, never mind their ownership status. Their independent oversight agency insisted shortly before last week's Treasury announcement that "principal reduction never serves the long-term interest of the taxpayer when compared to foreclosure." (The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Friday that it will do another analysis to account for the new payments.)

The deal being offered: For every dollar knocked off a borrower's principal, Treasury will fork over between 18 and 63 cents.

A state task force recently recommended principal reductions in which homeowners, in exchange for no longer being underwater, would agree to share any profits if they sell or refinance during the following nine years. Shortly before Treasury made its announcement, I chatted with a local loan officer who thinks the financial industry will have to move in that direction.

]]> "There has to be some sort of partnership or some type of understanding between homeowner and lender now that 'we have a problem here, so what are we going to do about it?'" said Robert Nusgart, a senior loan officer at the Baltimore office of Mortgage Master, a correspondent lender that makes loans and then sells them to banks. "It's a matter of coming up with some realistic solutions on both sides."

He added, "A lot of people have gotten hurt. They have handcuffs on their hands because they can’t do anything. They can't refi; if they sell, they're going to take big losses. ... If there's something that can be worked out, work it out."

Nusgart -- The Sun's real estate editor from the late '90s until 2002, as it happens, which is before I took over the housing beat -- said another recommendation from the state task force that seemed particularly useful focused on how mortgage servicers should work with homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure.

Rather than make borrowers talk to different representatives every time they call in for an update, to see if paperwork was received or to figure out why they were denied for help, servicers should appoint a specific person (or a very few, at most) to work with each homeowner all the way through, the task force said.

"I get calls all the time from frustrated people -- 'what do I do?'" Nusgart said.

You might get lucky when you call in and just "happen to get somebody who knows what they're doing, knows what they're talking about and gets you on track," he said. But too often homeowners are just bounced around from one staffer to the next, making little progress and getting conflicting information.

He pointed out that people about to purchase a home or refinance aren't passed from one loan officer to the next like a hot potato. That constant switcheroo "is terrible service," he said.

Fast home sales, slow home sales

2012-01-27T11:00:00Z

Above: The homes that sold in the Baltimore region in December, organized by how quickly -- or slowly -- they went from listed to under contract.

The breakdowns come from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence, which notes that yes, some homes really do come on the multiple-listing service as already sold -- hence the 34 properties in December in the "zero days" category.

But it's rare that someone had to have the house so badly that they snagged it from the owners before they were even thinking of selling. It more likely was for sale but not on the MLS -- a new home, say, or a for-sale-by-owner -- and an agent entered it into the system afterward.

So let's ignore the zeros. If you add up everything from one day to 30, that's almost 400 homes, close to a quarter of all (non-zero-day) sales that month. That's by far the most common period for a home to sell, comparing just 30-day stretches.

]]> To put it into perspective: 415 homes that sold in December -- not that many more than the 30-and-under group -- had been on the market more than six months. (Of those, 15 had been on the market more than two years.)

Newly listed homes are more likely to get attention. But that's not the only reason the sales stats show a sizable chunk of homes selling in the first 30 days. An owner might have been trying to sell for considerably longer but went on and off the market a few times before finally finding a buyer. (On that note: Here's an explanation of the difference between "days on market" and "days on market property," the latter of which does track the total number of days for sale over time.)

The most common selling point in the first 30 days in December: Day 11 through 20, according to RBI.

Buyers, do you find yourself focusing on the new stuff or do you keep an eye on older inventory for price drops?

Sellers, what was/is your pricing strategy at various lengths of time on market?

New proposal for ground-rent registry

2012-01-26T11:30:00Z

For those of you with a vested interest in (or just curiosity about) ground rent: The newest twist in the saga is a bill aimed at the registry.

Fourteen state delegates have proposed that owners who don't register their leases with the state can't collect payments on them.

Here's a short piece about the bill, which comes after an appeals court ruling left the registry intact but struck down the penalty for not getting on the state's list by the 2010 deadline -- the ground rent ceased to exist. (That piece of the law was unconstitutional, Maryland's Court of Appeals ruled, and thus the leases popped back to life.)

Here's the proposal itself.

If you're trying to find out whether a ground rent has been registered on a particular property, go to the state Department of Assessments and Taxation's property look-up site, type in the address and then click on the "ground rent registration" link in the upper right-hand corner. The registry is supposed to provide the owner's name and contact information.

'Stealing Trust' screening event in Baltimore

2012-01-26T11:00:00Z

If you haven't had your recommended daily dose of outrage, here's an upcoming source: The Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition is showing its "Stealing Trust" documentary at the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Central location in downtown Baltimore next Wednesday, Feb. 1.

The group's film focuses on local residents who lost their homes, savings "and even their capacity to trust others" through abusive financial practices. Some fought back.

The free screening, co-sponsored by St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center, the Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition and the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, will include new details about foreclosure-prevention efforts and offer homeowners a chance to ask questions about the foreclosure crisis.

The event is scheduled for 6 p.m. The library is at 400 Cathedral St.