Private equity firms have been hoovering up houses all over the US to convert into rentals. But they were active in the New York City rental market before their big buying spree, and that experience gives a window on how they are likely to behave as landlords.
Read more...The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.
Read more...I once had a good opinion of bank analyst Chris Whalen, despite having some reservations about him. But his error-filled screed against mortgage servicing regulations means he can no longer be taken seriously on the subject of banking. Whalen has become a textbook illustration of the Upton Sinclair saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Read more...Never underestimate the willingness of banks to find new and creative ways to cheat customers, particularly when big bucks are at stake.
Read more...It’s good to see that a lawsuit providing critical new evidence of systematic foreclosure abuses is getting the attention it warrants.
Read more...Yesterday, the National Mortgage Settlement monitor, Joseph Smith, released his final crediting reports, confirming that all five banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Ally, now known after bankruptcy as Residential Capital, or ResCap) have now satisfied the consumer relief portion of the foreclosure fraud settlement. The banks were required to spend $20 billion in “credited” relief (some actions received less than a dollar-for-dollar credit). Smith exults that the gross relief provided totaled over $50 billion, and that “more than 600,000 families received some form of relief.”
What the mainstream media reports on this don’t tell you is that the $50 billion number is wildly inflated: for example, it includes $12 billion in deficiency waivers in non-recourse states, which the IRS confirmed have no value whatsoever. But I didn’t know just how inflated these numbers were, and how empty the promises, until I went through them.
Read more...Hello, folks! As Yves is off explaining the world to Washington, I’m manning the controls for a couple days.
This allows me to ensure that NC has that whole Justice Department IG report on mortgage fraud covered. I know that Yves heaved the written equivalent of a sigh at the news, and she wasn’t wrong. Nothing tangible is likely to happen for the borrowers victimized by the abusive practices that DoJ willfully neglected to prosecute. And there’s surely a seat being kept warm at Covington & Burling for Eric Holder’s post-government career; this won’t hurt him a bit.
But because I don’t feel the coverage so far has plumbed the depths of this corruption, and because it’s still happening, it’s not worth going silent just yet. It’s probably spitting into the wind, yes, but I’ve got the time and the spit, so I want to note a few things.
Read more...Catherine Curan of the New York Post has an important new story on a Federal lawsuit that looks to have unearthed a smoking gun about systematic document fabrication at Wells Fargo.
Read more...Few have it quite as bad as the tenants of a growing number of social housing projects in Spain who are finding out their new dodgy landlords hail from Wall Street.
Read more...Wealthy investors love to talk about the sanctity of contracts until little guys assert their rights. Then the idea that they might have to fork over a lot of dough to get the other side to give up its right is presented as an offense against nature.
Read more...Yves here. It’s remarkable how much of London has turned into a ghost town thanks to the influx of serious foreign money. When I worked for a few months in London, in 1984, it was Mayfair that was the destination for Saudi money, and it clearly had far too little in the way of street […]
Read more...Some savvy investors were warning the single family home rental market was overheated nearly a year ago. Now it looks like more and more are realizing that party is over.
Read more...It’s gratifying to see that some jurists are still able to be offended by banks who come to court assuming they can foreclose on borrowers based on their say-so.
Read more...A Blackstone deal in the runup to the financial crisis, its acquisition of Equity Office Properties Trust from Sam Zell in early 2007 was recognized at the time as a sign of a market peak. Is history about to repeat itself with Blackstone’s rental securitization?
Read more...Funny what a difference a few days makes.
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