Richard's Real Estate Thoughts

The Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring the annual Spirit of Innovation luncheon this year on April 29. Stefan Jacoby, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, is the keynot speaker.

The awards recognize Chattanooga "area companies whose innovative ideas resulted in a creative new product, service or way of doing business."

Six companies are finalists for the Kruesi Award which is given in honor of John Kruesi, a Swiss born immigran who immigrated to the United States and worked with Thomas Edison as the head machinist for many of Edison's key inventions.

The Kruesi Award is America's first community innovation award. It was started in 2001 to honor John Kruesi and the family who settled in Chattanooga in the early 1900's and have been active in the community since then.

The finalists this year are Airnet Group, Andersen Flaps, DJO Chattanooga, Thermal Transfer Composites, and Utiliflex.

The Kruesi Award points to Chattanooga's commitment to entrepreneurship and business innovation.

It will be especially exciting to hear from Stefan Jacoby to update the progress of the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga.

I stumbled on this online community for book lovers, especially book lovers with a lot of books. It has been around since May 2006. You can catalogue your books, make and receive book recommendation, participate in group discussions regarding any subject matter that interests you.

The cataloguing process is very helpful for me. Type in the ISBN and the book information loads. You can tag the book and search to find it when needed.

You can catalogue up to 200 books for free. Unlimited for $10 annual or $25 for life. There are over 600,000 members.

www.LibraryThing.com

Hope to see you there.

NAMB had earlier withdrawn its lawsuit against the imminent changes to the appraisal ordering process. Last week it issued a "call to action" for mortgage brokers to contact their congressional representative to delay implementation of this disasterous requirement.

It has always seemed odd to me that the parties that were involved in the original law suit that brough about this settlement were representatives of the very entities that will now be trusted to protect against appraisal fraud: lenders and appraisal management companies.

Here is a copy of the original settlement announcement. For those who follow such things, it should not come as a surprise that Senator Schumer is headlined as praising this agreement. 

There are numerous blogs and articles pronouncing the harm that this new requirement will cause: increasing expense, decreasing choice, producing appraisals, and creating additional loan processing delays.

I just think that we need no additional drags on the housing recovery.

Does anyone besides the AMC's and AG Cuomo that think this is a good move?

From my view the likelihood that congress will move to stop this action is about the same as the likelihood that they will reinstate FHA down payment assistance. The NAMB announcement today though says, "there has been significant bipartisan movement" in Congress to delay the implementation of HVCC.

Here is the link to the NAMB site location to find your congressional representative to give you opinion for or against the HVCC changes.

The Wall Street Journal has just reported that Michael J Williams, the Chief Operating Officer of Fannie Mae, has just been promoted to the position of president and CEO.  He will evidently not will not receive a raise this year along with his promotion. He will have to be satisfied with a base salary of $676,000 and incentives of about $1.04 million.

He has been with Fannie Mae since 1991, making him a part of the rise and fall of Fannie Mae, and a large part of the billion dollar losses the company has suffered in the credit crash since the fateful decision to purchase significant amounts of subprime and Alt A mortgages.

As COO since 2005, he would have been instrumental in the decision to purchase these non conforming loans. It was this decision that dragged down the conventional mortgage market.

Business Day offers some more details.

It still bothers me that the people that led the charge to crash the economy are the ones that we must pay such high "retention bonuses" in order to retain their essential services.

The Guaranteed Rural Housing program with Rural Development has always been a great loan. In the mad mortgage rush of previous years it had lost some popularity.

With the new income structure and the new income limits, the program will be even stronger.

Previously, income limits for many counties, including Hamilton County, TN, depended on the number of persons. There was a different income level for each additional person.

The new structure only has two income levels for the Guarantee Program: 1-4 persons and 5-8 persons. This increases the maximum income level for most families.

Additionally, effective also on 4/20 is the increase in the actual income limits. Previously for a 4 person family the income limit was $70,750.

The new limits for 2009, in Hamilton County are $73,600 for a 1-4 person family and $97,150 for a 5-8 person family.

Good news.

Here is the link to see the Rural Development income limits for your area.