Chance Gates' Blog

THE PROJECTS THAT ARE MOST URGENTLY NEEDED BY OUR SILVER SPRINGS COMMUNITY ARE AS FOLLOWS:

1. Commercial mall containing a national brand grocery store, pharmacy bank, family
restaurant and retail stores is greatly needed by our community.
2. Solar farm: We have many acres of available land for the
production of energy.
3. Wind farm: Silver Springs is known as one of the most affluent areas
of wind in the USA and would like to attract investors for wind farm development to
produce energy.
4. Train terminal for commercial and public use to stop
centrally in Silver Springs, Nevada.
5. Defense Training Facility: Silver Springs has many secluded
open areas suited for the development of a special defense training campus.
6. Amphitheater with seating and stage for public performances
and events, including farmers markets/flea markets/craft booths and exhibitions near
the intersection of Hwy 95A and Hwy 50.
7. Job Center to provide a building for job training classrooms
and job recruitment. This could act as teaching facility if equipped with classrooms
and computers.
8. The development of Lake Lahontan shoreline with commercial
outlets, services for outdoor recreation and boat storage. This is a state run park so any business would have to be off site.
9. Community Center and Convention Center with indoor events
stage, meeting rooms, possibly Boys and Girls Club room, areas for indoor and outdoor
events. Possibly a public pool, commercial kitchen, boce ball court and outdoor
courtyards. Possibly just a one room movie theater as in #11 below.
10. Hotel accommodations along highway 95A or 50 with family style
restaurant.
11. Movie theater as well as old school open-air theater for mild
seasons.
12. Mixed use housing built around community gardens.
13. Old Western Town experience built like a village setting with
real retail stores (souvenir), a bank (hopefully Wells Fargo for the stagecoach logo), a
blacksmith shop, a old time saloon, and a restaurant with a hotel façade and tickets
to see gun fighters on certain days.
14. Provide a link to commercial property and land available for
sale here (from local realtors). Hopefully, all can work together and cooperate to get
the growth moving in Silver Springs, Nevada
15. Also Events that need to be developed to attract tourism:
a. Kite Flying competitions- create an event in open area of SS
by contacting the National Kite association.
b. Have model airplane contests at the airport just before or just after the Lyon county
Fly in.
c. Food Festival like Stew competition, or micro beer brewing as
a yearly event-advertised as a competition with prizes.
d. Lake festival with boating competitions in summer and ice
snow-mobiles in winter- can we get an EPA grant to clean lake and put in catfish
for fishing competitions?
e. Art competition, Trash Art: Invite artists to pick up desert
trash and turn it into sculptures to be used for target practice. We would clean our
area, provide art and entertainment.
Contact the Chamber of commerce for land availability and details for possible
investments in Silver Springs. Telephone: 775-5774336.
Other local contacts for showing potential investors
the design renderings and project ideas we have. Our contact info here: Jean at
wolfladyjj@aol.com  or Mojra at mojra@arkablue.com

Mark your favorite properties and get instant updates price changes,  new pictures and status changes.

As a Reno/Sparks Nevada real estate professional and property manager, I encourage all questions and comments on the Reno/Sparks real estate market or any of the articles posted in this blog. Please feel free to use my back door to the MLS and search the houses available in the Reno/Sparks and most Northwest Nevada neighborhoods. I can be reached by email @ chance@ballard-company.com http://www.myspace.com/chancegates .  You can also follow me at http://www.twitter.com/chancegates .  To checkout some of  my property manager services goto http://chancegates.com/property-management-services/

If you are behind on your house payment and looking for a loan modification, go to making homes affordable

If the modification fails, contact your local real estate professional to help short sale your home.  To make sure there is no deficiency judgment a homeowner might find it necessary to hire an attorney.

– Establish that you would be better off with a modification than with refinancing: In general, borrowers should seek refinancing rather than a modification if they can do so at a significantly lower rate at a reasonable cost. However, you can’t refinance advantageously if you are behind in your payments, have little or no equity in your property, or don’t qualify for a refinance for other reasons such as a low FICO credit score or inability to document adequate income.

– Deliver the information the servicer requires, in the form the servicer specifies: The loan servicer is the company to which you make your mortgage payments. It will be the one you deal with on your modification. The most important part of the process is to place in the hands of the servicer all the information about you that the servicer needs to make a decision. While this information is pretty much the same for all servicers, each has its own questionnaire that it expects to be used.

To help you with this, I have compiled the information required by each of the major servicers and how to get their questionnaire in “Mortgage Servicer Information” on my Web site.

Make sure the information you provide is correct: Having the right form is one thing, but filling it out correctly is something else. A questionnaire with obvious errors may fall to the bottom of the pile, or it may lead the servicer to conclude that you do not qualify for a loan modification when, in fact, you do. Being accurate is a challenge for some borrowers because most questionnaires are not borrower-friendly. In the future, I will write about some of the sources of help available

Make sure your information does not get lost in the shuffle: Most servicers prefer to receive documents by fax, although some also provide mailing addresses. I am told fax is more reliable. A few servicers, including Chase and Wells Fargo, want borrowers to call them before submitting detailed data, and thus provide only telephone numbers for contact. They evidently prefer to have their own staff participate with the borrower in compiling the information.

The principal danger of delivering documents by fax is that they will get mixed up with those of other borrowers. To prevent that, place your name and mortgage account number at the top of every page you fax.

– Determine whether you are eligible for special modification programs: Servicers are under a lot of pressure and they might overlook your eligibility for specific programs. Borrowers who took subprime adjustable-rate mortgages after Jan. 1, 2005, that have interest rates scheduled to reset before July 31, 2010, may be eligible for a modification under the “fast track solution” adopted voluntarily by servicers last year. Borrowers with housing expenses that exceed 31 percent of their gross before-tax income may be eligible for a modification under the government’s recent Making Home Affordable program.

If you have good reason to believe that you are eligible under either program, add a statement to that effect in your hardship letter. (My Web site also has an article that looks more closely at the eligibility requirements for these programs.)

– Nudge the servicer as needed: The process of modifying mortgages is slow and error prone. A firm that two years ago may have had two people modifying mortgages today may have 200, most of them newly trained. Development of computer systems has lagged and much of the work is done manually.

So you may need to nudge. If the servicer’s stated policy is to reply within 21 days, call on day 21 if you haven’t heard back. If they give you a quick denial on the grounds of ineligibility and you believe that’s wrong, let them know it is wrong — in a nice way. Remember that getting a modification is not a negotiation, and you have no place else to go.

Jack Guttentag is professor of finance emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted through his Web site, http://www.mtgprofessor.com.

© 2009, Jack Guttentag

As a Reno/Sparks real estate professional, I encourage all questions and comments on the Reno/Sparks real estate market or any of the articles posted in this blog. Please feel free to use my back door to the MLS and search the houses available in the Reno/Sparks and most Northwest Nevada neighborhoods. I can be reached by email @ chance@ballard-company.com or  http://www.myspace.com/chancegates .  You can also follow me at http://www.twitter.com/chancegates .  If you are behind on your house payment and looking for a loan modification, go to making homes affordable to request a modification.  If the modification fails, contact your local real estate professional to help short sale your home.  To make sure there is no deficiency judgment a homeowner might find it necessary to hire an attorney. For a free copy of my blog titled  “5 Steps For Reno/Sparks Homeowners To Prevent Foreclosures” go to my about page http://chancegates.com/about and ask for more information on preventing foreclosures.

In an effort to end the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration has been trying to keep defaulting owners in their homes. Now it will take a new approach: paying some of them to leave.

This latest program, which will allow owners to sell for less than they owe and will give them a little cash to speed them on their way, is one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts to grapple with a problem that has defied solutions.

More than five million households are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. The government’s $75 billion mortgage modification plan has helped only a small slice of them. Consumer advocates, economists and even some banking industry representatives say much more needs to be done.

For the administration, there is also the concern that millions of foreclosures could delay or even reverse the economy’s tentative recovery — the last thing it wants in an election year.

Taking effect on April 5, the program could encourage hundreds of thousands of delinquent borrowers who have not been rescued by the loan modification program to shed their houses through a process known as a short sale, in which property is sold for less than the balance of the mortgage. Lenders will be compelled to accept that arrangement, forgiving the difference between the market price of the property and what they are owed.

“We want to streamline and standardize the short sale process to make it much easier on the borrower and much easier on the lender,” said Seth Wheeler, a Treasury senior adviser.

The problem is highlighted by a routine case in Phoenix. Chris Paul, a real estate agent, has a house he is trying to sell on behalf of its owner, who owes $150,000. Mr. Paul has an offer for $48,000, but the bank holding the mortgage says it wants at least $90,000. The frustrated owner is now contemplating foreclosure.

To bring the various parties to the table — the homeowner, the lender that services the loan, the investor that owns the loan, the bank that owns the second mortgage on the property — the government intends to spread its cash around.

Under the new program, the servicing bank, as with all modifications, will get $1,000. Another $1,000 can go toward a second loan, if there is one. And for the first time the government would give money to the distressed homeowners themselves. They will get $1,500 in “relocation assistance.”

Should the incentives prove successful, the short sales program could have multiple benefits. For the investment pools that own many home loans, there is the prospect of getting more money with a sale than with a foreclosure.

For the borrowers, there is the likelihood of suffering less damage to credit ratings. And as part of the transaction, they will get the lender’s assurance that they will not later be sued for an unpaid mortgage balance.

For communities, the plan will mean fewer empty foreclosed houses waiting to be sold by banks. By some estimates, as many as half of all foreclosed properties are ransacked by either the former owners or vandals, which depresses the value of the property further and pulls down the value of neighboring homes.

If short sales are about to have their moment, it has been a long time coming. At the beginning of the foreclosure crisis, lenders shunned short sales. They were not equipped to deal with the labor-intensive process and were suspicious of it.

The lenders’ thinking, said the economist Thomas Lawler, went like this: “I lend someone $200,000 to buy a house. Then he says, ‘Look, I have someone willing to pay $150,000 for it; otherwise I think I’m going to default.’ Do I really believe the borrower can’t pay it back? And is $150,000 a reasonable offer for the property?”

Short sales are “tailor-made for fraud,” said Mr. Lawler, a former executive at the mortgage finance company Fannie Mae.

Last year, short sales started to increase, although they remain relatively uncommon. Fannie Mae said preforeclosure deals on loans in its portfolio more than tripled in 2009, to 36,968. But real estate agents say many lenders still seem to disapprove of short sales.

Under the new federal program, a lender will use real estate agents to determine the value of a home and thus the minimum to accept. This figure will not be shared with the owner, but if an offer comes in that is equal to or higher than this amount, the lender must take it.

Mr. Paul, the Phoenix agent, was skeptical. “In a perfect world, this would work,” he said. “But because estimates of value are inherently subjective, it won’t. The banks don’t want to sell at a discount.”

There are myriad other potential conflicts over short sales that may not be solved by the program, which was announced on Nov. 30 but whose details are still being fine-tuned. Many would-be short sellers have second and even third mortgages on their houses. Banks that own these loans are in a position to block any sale unless they get a piece of the deal.

“You have one loan, it’s no sweat to get a short sale,” said Howard Chase, a Miami Beach agent who says he does around 20 short sales a month. “But the second mortgage often is the obstacle.”

Major lenders seem to be taking a cautious approach to the new initiative. In many cases, big banks do not actually own the mortgages; they simply administer them and collect payments. J. K. Huey, a Wells Fargo vice president, said a short sale, like a loan modification, would have to meet the requirements of the investor who owns the loan.

“This is not an opportunity for the customer to just walk away,” Ms. Huey said. “If someone doesn’t come to us saying, ‘I’ve done everything I can, I used all my savings, I borrowed money and, by the way, I’m losing my job and moving to another city, and have all the documentation,’ we’re not going to do a short sale.”

But even if lenders want to treat short sales as a last resort for desperate borrowers, in reality the standards seem to be looser.

Sree Reddy, a lawyer and commercial real estate investor who lives in Miami Beach, bought a one-bedroom condominium in 2005, spent about $30,000 on improvements and ended up owing $540,000. Three years later, the value had fallen by 40 percent.

Mr. Reddy wanted to get out from under his crushing monthly payments. He lost a lot of money in the crash but was not in default. Nevertheless, his bank let him sell the place for $360,000 last summer.

“A short sale provides peace of mind,” said Mr. Reddy, 32. “If you’re in foreclosure, you don’t know when they’re ultimately going to take the place away from you.”

Mr. Reddy still lives in the apartment complex where he bought that condo, but is now a renter paying about half of his old mortgage payment. Another benefit, he said: “The place I’m in now is nicer and a little bigger.”

I know I said this before but a person need to hear something 3 times before they remember.  In the Reno/Sparks area about 1\3 of all real estate transactions are short sales.

As a Reno/Sparks real estate consultant I always welcome any comments or questions on the Reno/Sparks real estate or any of the articles I posted.  You can email me directly at  chance at ballard-company.com