This entry in the Well Blog is intriguing. I did not delve into the theories (the pattern of the horse gallop, for instance) but do feel that animals have a postive effect on us all, including our Gregory. I am for anything that “engages.”

There are also some interesting links after the story about the vaccine controversy and other matters of interest. I have bookmarked the blog. 

-Phil

My wife can articulate this better than I can, and this is not a real estate-related post unless you consider the fact that autism probably affects someone you know no matter what type of blog you might be reading right now. 

We have 4 beautiful children ages 2 through 6. Three Boys and a Princess. Our 3rd, Gregory, is on what they call the Spectrum for Autism. He’s not a severe case, but there’s never an easy one. When Gregory was almost three the warning signs were there; he wouldn’t talk, he didn’t do much you’d expect of a child his age, and he was not very responsive. No eye contact. It was as if he were ignoring you. 

We had similar issues with his older sister. She scored so low in the age-appropriate areas of those tests that the school district put her in some intensive early intervention starting at age 3. She utterly blossomed and will be mainstreamed for kindergarten. Gregory has been a different matter. Progress with him has been slow. He was put in the same class as his sister (they are 11 months apart- our “Korean twins”), but was quickly changed to a half day with an aid full time. She taught him some rudimentary sign language, but nothing in the ABA (applied behavioral analysis) that we came to discover would be what he needed most. They also had a doctor meet with us weekly to evaluate his progress. This past year, we switched schools and put Gregory into the best ABA program we could find. We had done a ton of looking around.  

If I do say so myself, this is an extremely sweet child. The feedback from his teachers, aside from the obvious (tantrums, stubbornness, small snippets of progress) along the way has been how attached they have become to him. The theme in all my discussions with the teachers, administrators and therapists has been how much they like him but also how stubborn he can be. His speech therapist told me early on told me she thought he knew what she wanted but didn’t want to give in. It was a very telling discussion. 

Gregory and his late Uncle Paul

A little over a month ago, our family teacher had a heart to heart with us in our weekly home meeting. Gregory, he told us, was his own worst enemy. His stubbornness will be his downfall. We had to break him out of his obstinance. Not break his spirit, he stressed, but break him out of some of his habits. Now was the time to pull the trigger on coaxing him to communicate verbally. You have to do this when they are young; the younger the better. 

It isn’t like we could work harder. We put in 18 hour days running an independent  real estate brokerage in this economy, we have three other young children, a dog, and life happens pretty fast around here. Moreover, we are talking about making changes with a child whose two moods are contentment and tantrums. It wasn’t a DO more for him, in other words. It was a BE more. He couldn’t take our hand and lead us to the fridge. He had to ask for what he wanted. As it is, his sleep habits were always off, so we have to be always on. 

Where’s Ann Bancroft when you need her? 

So, in the midst of March and April real estate in our cyclical market where you have to make hay when the sun shines, his mother shifted her ambidextrous octopus day to include a trip to the potty every 30-45 minutes, engaging him when he’d do that stubborn whispering every time his speech therapist turned her head, and dozens of other daily and hourly practices to make this boy come out. We had a winter break with 9 consecutive off days to start. It was brutal. I can’t take credit for much of the work. I am out in the field or at the office.There are no grandparents in town who can help. No aunts or uncles can step up.  It is all on Ann’s shoulders. 

The first good sign was the feedback from school when he returned after Winter break. the notes in the folder were ecstatic. At home, whispered words became spoken words. Interestingly, some synapse connected in the last 2 weeks where he would get separation anxiety. If I left the room, he’d follow me, distressed that I was leaving. We were told that if he asked for something to GIVE it to him so he’d be rewarded for asking. Yesterday morning, instead of climbing up to the freezer or any one of the old bad habits, Gregory announced his breakthrough:

“I want ice cream food.”

And he got ice cream. For breakfast. I never heard him say more than 2 words, but now he threw out 5 words. Later, he watched Daddy get dressed and he proved it was no fluke: “Socks? Socks for feet?” Clutch. 

This is by no means the epiphany his sister had at age 4. As I type this, he’s having a tantrum after a full Easter with Different Mommy. If I had to guess, I would say that Gregory is finally having his terrible twos.

I’ll take it. 

 

My blog is askew. The header is cut off, posts are center justified, and my sidebar is buried somewhere. I don’t exactly dither in exotic code- I do a postlet for new listings and I’ve embedded 2-3 videos.

Since 4/8 I have had a trouble ticket opened with tech support and the answer is essentially “you have bad code in a post somewhere.”

I have spent a chunk of my Easter removing posts to isolate the offending post to no avail. With tens of thousands of bloggers, it seems to me that my problem is not new or particularly difficult for someone in the know.

I have two questions:

1. How the heck do I fix this
2. For $19 a month isn’t a week with no solution a little weak?

Thoughts?

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You can search the MLS like an agent at http://jphilip.listingbook.com.

J. Philip Faranda ranks among New York’s premier short sale REALTORS specializing in short sales in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam & Dutchess Counties. www.NYShortSaleTeam.com. Read Phil’s short sale blog at http://NewYorkShortSaleBlog.wordpress.com.

J. Philip Serves Briarcliff Manor, Ossining, Croton on Hudson, Pleasantville, Sleepy Hollow, White Plains, Yonkers, Peekskill, Cortlandt, Tarrytown, Yorktown, Montrose, Hawthorne, Thornwood, Valhalla, Hartsdale & all of Westchester County, New York.

On the tail of my recent post on the nasty Times report on REO brokers who had to gall to enjoy themselves at a conference, today’s Times editorial fires some skud missiles into the hides of mortgage brokers. You should read the editorial to get a sense of both the editors’ contempt for, and ignorance of  the industry. I have originated loans for both brokers and lenders. I would love to explain to the author how 1+1=2.

Obviously, there were and are some bad brokers out there who placed people in bad loans. I see the effects of this myself. Those are bad people and should be punished harshly for the ruinous consequences of their corruption. But this is old news. Some of the assertions in the piece are just astoundingly ignorant and misleading. For instance:

The most clearly unethical form of payment is the so-called yield-spread premium. Brokers can claim this premium by steering a borrower whose credit history qualifies him or her for say, a 7 percent loan, into a more expensive loan at a higher rate. Predatory? Yes. And perfectly acceptable under existing lending laws. A House bill introduced by Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts, would rightly make yield-spread premiums illegal.

Note to the Times: the yield spread premium is the commission from the lender. The only other way for a broker to get paid on a loan is to charge up front points, which I am sure is an even greater anathema to the editors. Perhaps the Times, which NPR reported yesterday is threatening to shut down its Boston Globe division if tens of millions of dollars in givebacks are not made by labor, would be happy if mortgage brokers worked pro bono. Interestingly, the Times is OK with a 1 or 2 percent fee for the brokers. Generous souls, those editors. In their view, 1% is a “fee,” yet 2.5% is a “kickback.” You really don’t want the Times to decide what you earn. They can’t even keep their contractual word with their own employees.

Of course, it is absolutely accurate that the higher (and more profitable) the borrower’s rate is to the lender, the higher (and more profitable) the YSP/commission is to the broker. That isn’t corruption, it is capitalism. Yet the very loans the Times is this morning decrying are programs that haven’t existed in almost 2 years, conceived by banks that are by and large gone from the industry. It is also absolutely accurate that many of the people who borrowed these loans were not boy scouts either. Even well intentioned buyers in my experience should have shopped around. You cannot legislate common sense, nor can the state unring the bell of mistakes made by the consumer. At the very least, brokers must disclose their YSP; banks do not.

Having Barney Frank do anything to fix the mess he presided over gives me chills. Notably absent from the editorial is that in the State of New York, no licensure is required for a loan officer to arrange the loan of the biggest transaction of most people’s lives. Originators work under the license of their company, lender, banker, or broker. Other than a perfunctory background check, all one needs to originate loans is to not be a felon. In a state that requires licensing of home inspectors, that is not a high standard.

If the NY Times truly wants to make a positive difference, they should first understand the nature of the problems on which they opine. Rather than ignorantly (and hypocritically) decry that mortgage brokers have the audacity to profit from their commerce, the Times should support a sensible system of licensing all loan originators. That way, those loan officers have something to lose if they hurt a borrower. Then, other responsibilities can be placed on their shoulders, such a those of a fiduciary, which is the same as securities and real estate salespeople. otherwise, the “solutions” advocated by the editors will have abhorrent unintended consequences and throw babies out with the bathwater.

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You can search the MLS like an agent at http://jphilip.listingbook.com.

J. Philip Faranda ranks among New York’s premier short sale REALTORS specializing in short sales in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam & Dutchess Counties. www.NYShortSaleTeam.com. Read Phil’s short sale blog at http://NewYorkShortSaleBlog.wordpress.com.

J. Philip Serves Briarcliff Manor, Ossining, Croton on Hudson, Pleasantville, Sleepy Hollow, White Plains, Yonkers, Peekskill, Cortlandt, Tarrytown, Yorktown, Montrose, Hawthorne, Thornwood, Valhalla, Hartsdale & all of Westchester County, New York.

The Village of Ossining is my hometown. Ossining is in Central Westchester County on the banks of the Hudson and is noted for being the home of Sing Sing Prison down by the river and Maryknoll Mission up the hill a few miles. Notable Ossining natives include Peter Falk, Martha Quinn, Dominic Pace and Erica Leerhsen. The village is densely populated; over 25,000 people live here, so the volume of transactions compared to nearby villages is relatively high. 

Here is the data on single family home sales in the Village of Ossining going back to 2000. All information is from the Westchester-Putnam MLS. 

 

Year	Avg Price	Median Price	# Sales
2000	$  253,000.00	$ 240,000.00	123
2001	$  291,000.00	$ 287,000.00	108
2002	$  330,410.00	$ 309,000.00	118
2003	$  367,162.00	$ 360,000.00	139
2004	$  446,400.00	$ 419,500.00	114
2005	$  464,476.00	$ 440,000.00	135
2006	$  453,712.00	$ 440,750.00	124
2007	$  443,464.00	$ 424,583.00	126
2008	$  422,748.00	$ 418,250.00	80
2009	$  397,278.00	$ 361,000.00	9

 

The thing that strikes me about this is the relatively robust consistency of the transaction total and average price through the years. Consider this: 2007, while widely considered a down year, actually has a higher transaction total and median price than 2004, which was considered one of the hottest years on record. It just goes to show that all real estate is local.

 

2008 was certainly a historically down year in transaction totals, but that really isn’t different from most other places. Of course, even with a stable market problems arise. If you bought your home with 100% financing in 2004 or 2006 and had to sell your Ossining home today, you’d be underwater. You also be in the same boat (or under the same boat) as most other Americans who put nothing down on their homes, so it isn’t so much an Ossining problem. 

Currently, there are just 62 single family homes for sale in the village. Most years that would be a very low inventory, but given how much volume dipped last year fewer people are putting their homes up. The average asking price is $460,000. Only 14 homes are pending sale or under contract, and their average asking price is about $375,000. Only 9 homes closed thus far in 2009 and the average sales price was about $398,000. Without some developments to restore consumer confidence, we are looking at a “correction” back to 2003-type values. Worse, we are only on track to have about 50 or so closings in 2009, which is absolutely paltry. 

I am an optimist, so I am hopeful that the belief that the current low rates and other favorable conditions will bring out more buyers and get us out of the malaise. 

 

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You can search the MLS like an agent at http://jphilip.listingbook.com.

J. Philip Faranda ranks among New York’s premier short sale REALTORS specializing in short sales in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam & Dutchess Counties. www.NYShortSaleTeam.com. Read Phil’s short sale blog at http://NewYorkShortSaleBlog.wordpress.com.

J. Philip Serves Briarcliff Manor, Ossining, Croton on Hudson, Pleasantville, Sleepy Hollow, White Plains, Yonkers, Peekskill, Cortlandt, Tarrytown, Yorktown, Montrose, Hawthorne, Thornwood, Valhalla, Hartsdale & all of Westchester County, New York.

 

 

          

 

          

 

 

          

 

  

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            

 

          

 

          

 

          

 

 

Evidently, a convention of REO brokers should be somber. At least, that what Eric Lipton of the New York Times seems to intimate in this report, which reads more like an Onion article than serious reportage. Apparently, REO brokers, or the brokers who list and sell bank-owned foreclosures, are just lighting their cigars with $100 bills while the country suffers. A few excerpts: 

“What we have seen so far is just a hint of what is coming down the pike in the next three years,” Marty Higgins, a San Francisco real estate broker who specializes in apartment buildings, said as he stepped off his golf cart, smoking a cigar.

*******

 Stephen Christie, a Westlake Village, Calif., broker, said the efforts by the Obama administration to slow down foreclosures made no sense.

“It is screwing it all up,” Mr. Christie said, as a waiter at the hotel sushi bar handed him a giant tray of fresh-cut fish.

********

“Three dozen R.E.O. listings between $1.8 and $8 million,” she said, a pomegranate martini in her hand, as she cited what she soon hopes to be handling. “Hello! Those are big numbers.”

********+

I left out the best one at the end. You should read the article. 

I don’t for a moment think that some unguarded time at a convention is a fair way to characterize the attitudes or lifestyle of any broker, let alone an REO specialist. This article foments resentments that ought not be. Real estate -all real estate- is hard work. Nobody in this industry should have to apologize for what they do in their time off. I have my share of gripes with some REO agents for sure, but it is all in how they conduct their business, not how they conduct their time at a conference.

What about the attorneys who foreclose on the properties? Do we get to see what they do at their conference? Of course not. The real estate agents are the bad guys. 

The next vacation I go on I’ll make sure I don’t speak with any reporters. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat a lobster tail served by a bikini -clad hooters waitress. NOT. 

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You can search the MLS like an agent at http://jphilip.listingbook.com.

J. Philip Faranda ranks among New York’s premier short sale REALTORS specializing in short sales in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam & Dutchess Counties. www.NYShortSaleTeam.com. Read Phil’s short sale blog at http://NewYorkShortSaleBlog.wordpress.com.

J. Philip Serves Briarcliff Manor, Ossining, Croton on Hudson, Pleasantville, Sleepy Hollow, White Plains, Yonkers, Peekskill, Cortlandt, Tarrytown, Yorktown, Montrose, Hawthorne, Thornwood, Valhalla, Hartsdale & all of Westchester County, New York. 

 

The best page on Facebook in my opinion is Alexander Yamet’s Westchester is Not Upstate You Idiot. This is one of those friendly arguments people in Westchester and the Hudson Valley get into with people when we get to college and meet Long Island and New York City types for the first time in the dorm. 

It goes something like this:

Me: You’re from New York also? What part?

Him: Massapequa. 

Me: Where is that? 

Him: LawngGiland. Whehr you from? 

Me: Ossining.

Him: Oh, Yawr from UPstate. 

Me: Upstate? 

Guy from Rochester, overhearing conversation: I’m from upstate. Western New York, really. 

Us: Isn’t that near Canada?

Guy from Rochester: Well T’rahnto is across the lake. You can almost see it it when you go there to get hamburgs and a pop. 

It really goes downhill when a guy from Boston walks by, returning from a 2pm shower dressed in just a towel. 

I had similar discussions with my wife, who is from Queens. She regarded anything north of the Bronx as Upstate. She later amended that to anything north of Yonkers, which I consider a moral victory. Westchester may be up the state from NYC and Long Island, but it isn’t upstate. Upstate is Albany. Upstate is Ithaca. Upstate is Syracuse. In general, if people in your town can feasibly commute to New York City, you really aren’t in upstate New York. Poughkeepsie, for instance is on the Metro North Hudson Line. I don’t even consider Poughkeepsie upstate by that metric, but since I don’t live there I don’t care. I think that upstate starts more or less at the Catskills. More broadly, if you are in the 914 or 845 area code, you are downstate from upstate. It gets tiring. 

Downstate is another post altogether. When I lived in Rochester, where people sound more like they are from Cleveland, Ohio than the Empire State, I was told I didn’t talk like I was from downstate. I guess upstate people think that downstate people should sound like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. 

Rockland, which borders New Jersey, is not Upstate. Westchester County folk do not consider themselves Upstate either, which I think is a requirement for qualifying. I’m fairly certain that residents of Saratoga would tell you they are upstate. This much is true for sure: Westchester, which borders the Bronx, is NOT upstate New York. Anyone who disagrees is overly downstatecentric.

 

This is my version of the Facebook group’s picture, which was too small for this posting. I appreciate Alex’s idea. It says it all better than I could have!

 

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You can search the MLS like an agent at http://jphilip.listingbook.com.

J. Philip Faranda ranks among New York’s premier short sale REALTORS specializing in short sales in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam & Dutchess Counties. www.NYShortSaleTeam.com. Read Phil’s short sale blog at http://NewYorkShortSaleBlog.wordpress.com.

J. Philip Serves Briarcliff Manor, Ossining, Croton on Hudson, Pleasantville, Sleepy Hollow, White Plains, Yonkers, Peekskill, Cortlandt, Tarrytown, Yorktown, Montrose, Hawthorne, Thornwood, Valhalla, Hartsdale & all of Westchester County, New York.

 

Miriam Bernstein wrote a post on mortgage brokers that cited a recent New York Times article on the problems facing mortgage brokers. I’d summarize the post as pointing out that now isn’t the best time to be a mortgage broker as well as pointing out that brokers are not fiduciaries. Miriam’s presentation was flawed in that it came across as unkind to brokers in my view, and judging from the comments, I’m not the only person to feel this way. For the record, I don’t think Miriam wanted to knock anyone. 

Full disclosure: I am technically still a loan officer for a mortgage bank and have worked as an LO for years for both brokers and lenders (in NY they are referred to as mortgage banks). There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

The top-producing mortgage originator in the US for the past 15 years is Melissa Cohen, founder of the Manhattan Mortgage Company. MMC is a mortgage broker. They could become a bank in the State of New York easily, but they don’t. Why not? Because Ms. Cohen feels strongly that brokerage is better for the consumer. She must feel pretty strongly about this, because she’d make more money as a banker. 

But why is brokerage necessary? Here’s my take.

 

• It gives retail banks competition. And competition is good. As banks close and consolidate, consumers have dwindling options. If your only 2 choices were Citi and Chase you’d be in the middle of a de facto  monopoly. Brokers give consumers an option they wouldn’t otherwise have. 
• It gives borrowers more choices. When you walk into your local bank, your loan options are limited to what that bank has in its loan portfolio. An application placed with a broker can be placed with literally dozens of lenders. 
• It serves the niches. Larger lenders scoop the cream off the top of the applicant pool. They don’t need to bend over backwards for a hard to find loan. Brokers are more like boutiques. Before I worked with a broker, I never heard of Ohio Savings Bank or Flagstar. I know brokers that are responsibly placing loans with obscure programs like the Department of Agriculture and other seldom considered but highly useful sources. 
• Personal service. I’ve had too many rate shoppers forego using a local source whose office they could sit in and whose hand they could shake for some nameless, faceless Internet operation that promised a lower rate. When the 11th-hour bait and switch occured, they had no recourse. Worse, they had no time to switch lenders. The brokers I know value their reputation more than their fee. That matters. Moreover, they work harder than the Internet drones. And don’t get me started on banker’s hours. 
• Higher standard of disclosure. Do you know what a bank makes when your mortgage closes? It isn’t disclosed on the HUD-1. Brokers, on the other hand, have to disclose on the HUD-1 exactly what their Yield Spread Premium (YSP, or commission in layman’s terms) is for all to see. The higher the rate, the higher the YSP. That is transparency. 

Mortgage brokers may not be fiduciaries, but neither are bankers and direct lenders in New York. It doesn’t matter. They are bound by confidentiality and won’t get repeat business or referrals if they don’t do right by the borrower. Brokers may have challenges right now with PMI and some some lenders have closed their wholesale channels, but that’s the market cycle. Don’t count brokers out. The race goes to the swift, and my money is on the guy whose good name is on the line over some monolithic, top heavy companies whose eye is on Wall Street instead of the ball. 

 

We live in a great big country. I grew up in Ossining, NY about a half hour north of New York City. My parents were both born in Harlem and grew up in Yonkers. So you can imagine the culture shock I had in 1993 when I lived in New Orleans. Strangers actually talked to each other in the elevator. That isn’t weird in New York, it is insanity. But, when in Rome…

You just don’t know what they are doing elsewhere in this country. That goes for the good, the bad, and the ugly. And just because it doesn’t get reported in your newspaper doesn’t make it untrue.

Lenn Harley’s post, I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT LOAN OFFICERS HAVE TO BRIBE REAL ESTATE AGENTS FOR REFERRALS. takes issue with Bilal Qizilbash’s postingabout some agents who demanded kickbacks in exchange for mortgage referrals. To be fair to Lenn, her disagreement is that it is systemic. I don’t think it is nationally, but all real estate is local. The comment stream on both postings is unkind. There seem to be 3 basic responses:

1. I’ve been in real estate for XX years and I’ve never seen this sort of thing. So you must be wrong.
2. I’ve read the posting or Bilal’s Active Rain profile and he’s contradicting himself because he’s offering to help Realtors with their marketing. He’s breaking the rules himself.
3. If this were true, we’d hear about it. Or, if this were true, you should report these people to the authorities.

I am moved to address these responses because I had a different take:

    4.   I am not offended by Mr. Qizilbash’s post because I find it factually accurate based on my own experience. Mr. Qizilbash is correct. There are bad people in our industry. He didn’t say it delicately, but there are.

I’ll adress each of the three general sentiments. I do this knowing that they come from people on Active Rain that I read, respect, and like. But I disagree in this case.

“I’ve never seen this, so you are wrong”

In 1998, I was a real estate agent in Rochester and I was dating a loan officer. I referred a borrower to her, and she thought that she’d make a better girlfriend if she asked me how many points I wanted. It took me about 15 minutes to grasp that she was offering me a kickback. The romance didn’t last. I never had another incident like that in Rochester. It is not a systemic problem there.

After I married my wife in 2001 I became a loan officer full time myself with a firm in the Bronx. The kickback culture and overall corruption did not exist at my firm, but I had a front row seat to some horrific ethics and their consequences:

• I invested 6 months in helping a woman repair her credit so she could buy a co op. She didn’t call me Phil; I was Felipe. After we got her approval, she called me and said that the listing agent told her if she did not use his lender that she couldn’t buy the apartment. It was an illegal tie-in, but how could I prove it? She was too frightened to name names. She used the other lender because she wanted the apartment.
• A man applied to refinance his home with us. He had a social security number, a credit rating, and, obviously, the house and mortgage. But he was an illegal alien. It was all fraud. And he was furious with me for not affording him the same courtesy as his old agent and loan officer and supply him with the needed identification to get his loan approved. There was no way I could find out who the slimeballs were who committed the fraud with him in the name of a commission. He sure wasn’t telling.
• Some of the largest real estate firms in the Bronx were not board members or MLS participants in the eary 2000s. That way, they didn’t have to cooperate. The market was too hot for them to need other companies anyway. On a number of occasions I called on a “For Sale” sign and  the listing agent would brazenly tell me that they weren’t allowing other brokers to show it unless it was unsold after 30 days. You couldn’t report them to the board. They weren’t in the board.
• Kickbacks were either subtly hinted at or brazenly spoken of as casually as a phone call return policy. And proving that to the authorities was a lost cause without a consumer who was hurt, could prove they were hurt, and were willing to testify. Moreover, I was told a number of times that a buyer or borrower’s unwillingness to complain was “cultural.”
• A group of half a dozen loan officers joined the company late in my tenure there, about the time I started my company. They did gigantic business, and were praised for their repeat borrower’s loyalty. Upon further examination, they were churning. They exploited the greed of the borrowers and refinanced them with 2/28’s every 12-24 months whether their FICOs were 550 or 750. I didn’t have access to their files. I couldn’t document what I knew.
• If a real estate agent asked for a kickback, you either acquiesced or didn’t get the business. I didn’t get the business. But don’t you dare scold me for not reporting them. It did no good. My word against theirs + no hurt consumer willing to talk+ no board membership= no recourse. Albany’s focus in 2002-2005 was equal housing and conformity to community reinvestment. They didn’t care if I couldn’t get a broker to refer his borrowers to me.

My company is located in central Westchester County. I do business in Westchester, Rockland, Dutchess, and even Fairfield County (CT), Orange, Ulster and Queens. I’ll drive an hour or more to do business. But since I started my company in 2005, I don’t think I have ever had a single closing in the Bronx, 20 minutes south of my home because of the bad experience I had there. I simply choose not to deal with the place. This is a link to my company inventory on Realtor.com if you don’t believe me.  

“Bilal is contradicting himself by offering to partner with agents in marketing.”

One agent even mentioned that Bilal is breaking RESPA 8(a) with that on his profile. I disagree. Go to a supermarket and pick up a homes magazine.

8a states:

No person shall give and no person shall accept any fee, kickback,
or thing of value pursuant to any agreement or understanding, oral or
otherwise, that business incident to or a part of a real estate
settlement service involving a federally related mortgage loan shall be
referred to any person.

Those ads are from a recent local Real Estate Book. There is NOTHING about those ads that are contrary to RESPA. Those mortgage companies are NO DOUBT paying for part of those pages with the real estate broker, and there is nothing wrong with it. They either get a call on their portion of the ad or they don’t.

“If this were true, we’d hear about it.” or “You should report those corrupt agents!”

It is true that there is corruption. Is it systemic? Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not their own facts.

FACT: The Bronx is a borough of over 1 million people. There are about 1 million people in Westchester County.

FACT: The Bronx-Northern Manhattan MLS exists virtually in name only. In a Borough of 1 million people, fewer than 70 firms participate, and fewer than 500 homes are listed. By contrast over 60 Bronx firms are in the Westchester Putnam MLS, listing over 1100 properties.Most Bronx inventory is in another MLS!Now…why do companies leave one MLS for another?

The reason so many Bronx-based brokerages are defecting to Westchester for governance is because they have given up on their own board, which has done a deplorable job overseeing Bronx firms and ensuring a level playing field. I know. I talk to these brokers. They tell me it’s the Wild West, and they have no reason to lie. Neither do I. Want names? I can introduce you to a number of decent, respectable mortgage and real estate professionals who just hear the word “Bronx” and they’ll just shake their heads.

We are not talking about a few bad apples. We are talking about all too common conduct which is causing the exodus of dozens of firms per year to a “foreign” albeit neighboring, board and MLS. The evidence that some firms in the Bronx do not play fair is overwhelming. Bribes, fraud, anti-competitive practices, and lack of cooperation are all pervasive in the Bronx. Does that offend you? It should.  Why haven’t you heard of it? You’re hearing it now. Why haven’t you read it in the paper? Because it doesn’t have big boobs.

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I am encouraged that so many agents commented that they don’t see corruption in their marketplace. But just because things are the way they are in Sarasota, Rockville, Anaheim or San Antonio doesn’t make them the same way in other places. Like I said, there are some places where strangers talk in the elevator. I don’t for a minute pretend to know or purport to tell you how things are in your neck of the woods. Don’t tell me what I see doesn’t happen. It happens. And the evidence is overwhelming.

If you were offended by what Mr. Qizilbashe’s post said, you should be. But you shouldn’t be offended at him, you should be offended that there are corrupt people in our industry. And catching them is very, very, tricky. Now that we’ve got a government that actually cares about fraud in mortgages and real estate we might see stories of bad guys getting caught. But until those who are hurt step up and start naming names, the government will view what you or I say as the hearsay of a disgruntled competitor. I’ve been down that road. I have put victims of predatory lending in front of reporters. But I have never gotten anyone with any real clout to listen. Maybe someone in power can make a difference.

Oh, and for the record, I never met Bilal. I never did business with him. I’m not particularly inclined to defend him, and he didn’t mention the Bronx in his post. But I am interested in defending the truth. What he said in his post, while indelicate, is 100% consistent with my experiences in the Bronx. Moreover, just a few miles south on Wall Street there was (and probably still is) some of the most heinous corruption known to man the past few years. That is why we are in the mess we are in with this economy. I love that this guy has only been in mortgages for 8 months. Out of the mouth of babes. It’s too bad he went and edited his profile and post after getting hammered for not sugarcoating true events.

Bilal is the messenger. Stop being offended at him. The problems in this economy occurred right under our collective noses. If what someone says ruffles your feathers, listen more closely. I am glad things are fine in your marketplace. But believe me, the Bronx is burning.