Today is a day when I’m glad to stay home. It is cold, and it snowed again sometime either this morning or last night. It was still snowing this morning when I got up and looked out at 3 inches of the stuff. Later we got hail and wind. Now it is still nasty outside — cold, wet and windy. We expect to have more wind throughout the day. This is not a good day to go out.
We are still waiting for our property tax statements in Mason County. They are changing to some new system and haven’t got all the bugs out yet. I just heard that, starting on Monday, we will be able to pay our property taxes, even though we haven’t received any tax statements. A lot of people have been protesting their property taxes because throughout the county our property taxes saw a very large increase. I’m guessing when the statements finally go out, more people are going to complain.
We are starting to count down the days to opening day at Safeco Field when the Mariners will once again raise our hopes for the coming season. With Ken Griffey, Jr back on the team there is a little added excitement. No matter that he is now an old man of 39, going on 40, people are looking forward to having him back. Opening day tickets sold out in 55 minutes! See article. Real estate agents and mortgage lenders are buying up magnets with the team schedule to give out to their clients. Good form of marketing, because many of us will use those magnet schedules.
President Obama, with Timothy Geitner, is going to announce plans to help small business.
The broad package of measures to be announced Monday includes $730 million from the stimulus plan that will immediately reduce small-business lending fees and increase the government guarantee on some Small Business Administration loans to 90 percent. The government also will take aggressive steps to boost bank liquidity with more than $10 billion aimed at unfreezing the secondary credit market, according to officials briefed on the plan who demanded anonymity to avoid pre-empting the president’s announcement. (see article)
Help for small business has been on the agenda since the campaign, and it is good to see something happening in that area. I’m not exactly sure when this announcement is going to be made. Maybe tomorrow? I guess we’ll find out with the morning news. Here in the Pacific Time Zone, we get our news pretty early in the AM because of that 3 hour time difference with the East Coast.
There is an article on The Economist about Alan Greenspan and the “Housing Bubble” that is rather an interesting read today. I suppose people are going to keep chewing on this stuff for years to come, looking for who to blame. I’d rather look back on the history in order to prevent it from repeating again in the next decade.
There are many other regulatory steps that could have been taken over banks (requiring them to hold capital against off-balance sheet vehicles) and mortgage originators (requiring all of them to document income and to escrow insurance and taxes, for instance) that, while not stopping the bubble, would have mitigated the consequences. It’s worth noting that many of the countries that have had housing bubbles, like Australia and Spain, have not had banking crises in part because their regulatory regimes did not permit the same degree of leverage.
And did you see the article on CNN about “One Reason You Can’t Get a Mortgage?” The article is about appraisals and how hard they are to do now.
Now, there’s pressure on appraisers to be too conservative, so many homeowners are finding themselves unable to purchase a new home or refinance their existing mortgage.
“Lenders want the appraisal at the lower end of the range,” said Joni Herndon, a Tampa, Fla.-based appraiser. “The lender may want it at $100,000 and the appraiser thinks it’s worth closer to the high end of his or her range, say $115,000.”
If the lender does reject the appraisal, one of three things usually happens. “Lenders can order a second appraisal, the seller can lower the price on the house or the buyer can come up with more cash,” according to Jim Amorin, president of the Appraisal Institute, the industry’s professional standards organization. “In some cases, none of those happens and the loan doesn’t go through.”
Makes me glad I’m not an appraiser.
Well, that’s the odds n ends for a Sunday afternoon blog. I’m listening to the hail beat on my windows as I type, and wondering when this storm is going to pass us by. I’ve got that wonderful view property up in the Potlatch/Hoodsport area that I’d love to sell, and people are not eager to go out and look at property in this kind of weather. And the homestead close in to town is still available to see. May our weather soon get back to sunshine.
Tags: appraiser, mariners, Mason County, property tax, small business
