George B. Flessas intended to retire in the Philippines after selling his REO firm back in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Instead of settling, living in a new country inspired him to start another venture due to a need he saw for a nationwide Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and the low cost to operate a business in the Philippines.
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eMortgage Logic, LLC is celebrating its 10th year in business. The company provides residential real property valuations, data, analytics, and customized solutions for mortgage lenders, servicers, and investors nationwide. The idea for eMortgage Logic originated with Ralph Sells during his tenure at Freddie Mac, after Sells revived a struggling internal broker price opinion company acquired by the GSE's HomeSteps division.
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Bank of America is making changes to its short sale procedures and introducing an improved task flow within the short sale technology module from Equator, BofA's short sale management platform of choice. The goal: to reduce the timeframe for a short sale decision to less than three weeks. Starting Saturday, April 14, real estate professionals working with BofA will be required to submit five documents for short sales initiated with an offer, and they will be able to complete tasks such as document collection, valuations, and underwriting at the same time.
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The valuation firm Clear Capital released the results of its home price forecasting models Thursday. The company expects residential property values at the national level to begin to show slight increases over the next three months, ending the year with a growth rate of 1.2 percent. Clear Capital's diagrams depict the valley shape with current prices at the bottom and a subtle upward trend from March through December of 2012. Markets in the southern part of the country are expected to perform the strongest.
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Despite the fact that key market indicators released in recent weeks have shown declines in home sales, anecdotal reports from real estate agents in the field suggest better days are ahead for the industry, according to commentary released Monday by the economic team at Wells Fargo Securities. Most agents are reporting "significant gains in buyer interest and sales," and as a result, Wells' economists have nudged their forecast for home sales slightly higher. They are expecting sales of existing homes to top out at 4.50 million in 2012 and rise to 4.65 million in 2013.
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Clear Capital announced the availability of ClearQC, a hosted service to automate the review of BPO and appraisal reports.
ClearQC allows loan originators, servicers, and investors to run their valuation reports from any provider through an automated process to highlight complete and well-supported valuations, while also flagging those needing further review.
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Home prices in many areas are already rebounding from the bottom of the market, according to the March HomeValueForecast.com update from Pro Teck Valuation Services. This month, the company explores the turnover rate, which is the number of non-distressed sales divided by the total housing stock in a particular market. Pro Teck says this calculation is one of the most powerful and, yet, simplest leading indicators of the future direction of home prices, with the turnover rate hitting bottom six to 18 months before the bottom in home prices.
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Tuesday's S&P/Case-Shiller release on home prices was labeled "disappointing" by a number of analysts and market participants as both the 10- and 20-city composites and eight cities set new cycle lows. With the Case-Shiller numbers failing to fit the mold of improving market conditions, several commentary notes from analysts dismissed the latest results as "old news," with a two-month lag time and home price assessments based on three-month averages. S&P's index committee chairman took to the web to defend the Case-Shiller report against naysayers.
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Standard & Poor's reported Tuesday that it's closely watched Case-Shiller index declined in January for the fifth straight month. But according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting (JBREC), that's stale news and doesn't reflect what's actually happening in the market right now. In fact, the independent research company says home prices are rising. JBREC conducted its own analysis of home prices in 97 markets and found that over the January-to-March period prices are up in 90 of them, with an average increase of 1.1 percent.
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The commercial real estate (CRE) sector faces $362 billion in maturing debt this year, according to the latest estimates from Trepp LLC. For the five-year period of 2012 to 2016, the company's research team estimates $1.73 trillion of CRE maturities, with the largest one-year sum of $371.1 billion dropping in 2013. They also reported that nearly two-thirds of the maturities through 2016 are underwater or close to sinking underwater, which could reduce borrowers' chances for extending the loan term upon reaching the balloon date.
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