Real Estate Update in Palo Alto & Los Altos

People getting plain-vanilla mortgages benefited this week from a few weeks’ worth of turmoil in the markets for jumbo and stated-income home loans.
There was a plunge in the average rates on conforming mortgages — home loans of $417,000 or less for which the borrowers documented their incomes. And that drop was an indirect reaction to [...]

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Forget buyer’s market and seller’s market: housing today is a banker’s market. And borrowers are feeling the pain.
The one-two punch of a tighter mortgage environment and tougher credit standards is forcing buyers toward more conservative home loans, according to economists who study the mortgage industry.
Home buyers and homeowners who want to refinance are moving away [...]

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Good news: You’re preapproved for a mortgage. Bad news: The lender that approved you just went bust.
Now what?
“Ordinarily, the consumer does not have a lot of recourse if the lender goes under,” says Donald C. Lampe, chairman of the American Bar Association’s consumer financial services committee and partner with Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge and Rice in [...]

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Lenders have abruptly stopped offering the most popular type of subprime mortgage. Credit-challenged borrowers suddenly have fewer options.
“Many borrowers are not going to be able to refinance,” says Deborah Goldstein, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending. The consumer watchdog group has criticized loose standards for subprime mortgages, which are home loans for [...]

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Have you received an advertisement offering to save you thousands of dollars on your thirty-year mortgage and cut years off your payments? With email “spam” becoming more pervasive as everyone tries to “get rich quick” on the internet, these ads are popping up with troublesome regularity.
he ads promote the “Bi-Weekly Mortgage” and for the most [...]

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