Often found selling homes throughout the Santa Monica mountain range in the Los Angeles area, Modern Homes Los Angeles specializes in curated mid-century modern home sales.
Incredible new perspectives continually blow my mind. But, what I strive for most in homes sales, is making my clients 110% happy. I believe in listening and focusing on the needs of my clients.
~Steven Ward, Realtor®, CIPS®, ABR®, SFR®
ModernHomesLosAngeles.com | BRE#01871422 | 213.305.8537
It sounds like Palos Verdes Estates received an incredible number of letters on the Moore House, but we cannot let up off our Preservation throttle. Letters can still be sent to the city in support of LA Conservancy and our mission to notate specific properties with value to the community and society at large. Even if you are not a resident of the Palos Verdes Estates community, it is important you speak out now before it is too late. The options by the current owners are really not options as they want to tear down most of what is all ready there.
There is still time to help preserve this unique mid-century modern home designed by the son of Frank, Lloyd Wright. "The city Planning Commission is set to weigh the project in January", said city Planning Director Allan Rigg.
Please take a moment and support LA Conservancy in preserving Modern Architecture.
To comment on plans to demolish and replace a modern, Lloyd Wright-designed home in Palos Verdes Estates, e-mail city Associate Planner Stacey Kinsella at skinsella@pvestates.org, or fax 310-378-7820. Also, please cc mvavala@laconservancy.orgmodernhomesla@gmail.com in order to keep a track of the support.
Any owner in Los Angeles contemplating going solar, should act quickly to take advantage of the city's incentive's to go Green as reduced rebates go into effect Jan. 1, 2011. The decision by the Department of Water and Power is an attempt to stretch the program's funds, totaling $318 million meant to be distributed through 2016.
It seems that the trend to work with sustainable alternatives of energy has emerged as a beast to the department. This year alone, the applications for rebates total $70 million. The city had only budgeted $30 million!!! So, as you can see, the department is now concerned and has to roll back some of the steam and spread the wealth to a larger pool of people.
The Department of Water and Power's current rebate is $3.24 for every watt installed. A homeowner who installed a 4-kilowatt system would receive a rebate of $12,960. As of January 1, the rebate is reduced to $2.20 per watt installed. The same project would only garner a rebate of $8,800 as of January 1, 2011.
Reductions will continue as the utility meets goals for home-generated electricity. We will see the rebate be reduced to $1.50 per watt then to .60 cents per watt over time. As we are a city of progressive thinkers, I would not doubt the reductions to occur faster than anticipated. Hence, take advantage of the $3.24 per watt rebate! Get in while the gettin's good, folks!
Not sure if many real estate buyers who meet the requirements of Fannie Mae's FirstLook program are aware of such a great program. Let modernhomeslosangeles.com explain to you the advantages of the program. Here it is, plain and simple...
NO INVESTOR COMPETITION on HomePath.com listed properties, typically for the first 10-15 days on market! Now, do you understand?
Fannie Mae's innovative First Look period contributes to neighborhood stabilization by encouraging home ownership. During this period, owner occupants, public entities, and their partners can submit offers and purchase properties without competition from investor offers. The Neighborhood Stabilization Program was created to address the housing crisis, create jobs, and grow local economies by providing communities with the resources to purchase and rehabilitate vacant homes. The NSP grants that HUD has awarded are helping state and local governments, as well as non-profit developers, acquire land and property; demolish or rehabilitate abandoned properties; and/or offer downpayment and closing cost assistance to low- to middle-income homebuyers. Are you a teacher, Fireman, Police Enforcer? Welcome to real estate. This plan directly effects those who work within municipalities, schools and other non-profit agencies. It's time you took advantage of some benefits especially for you within the Los Angeles real estate market and elsewhere around the country.
Fannie Mae initially rolled out its First Look initiative last fall. Julia Dugger, Fannie Mae’s senior manager of marketing communications, says the First Look policy provides buyers looking for a primary residence with a “real opportunity” to find an affordable home without having to worry about being outbid by an investor.
Public entities, too, are taking advantage of the no-investor marketplace provided by First Look, particularly those agencies that have been awarded federal funding through HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) to purchase, rehabilitate, and resell foreclosed and abandoned properties.
The Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was established for the purpose of stabilizing communities that have suffered from foreclosures and abandonment. Through the purchase and redevelopment of foreclosed and abandoned homes and residential properties, the goal of the program is being realized. NSP1, a term that references the NSP funds authorized under Division B, Title III of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) of 2008, provides grants to all states and selected local governments on a formula basis.
As the Foreclosure crisis continues, I found this article from the Washington Post to shed the most light into the practices involved with the Robo-signing debacle being revealed as week after week, the exposure into the bank's practices is starting to shed some light.
Regulators flawed in foreclosure oversight By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 8, 2010; 12:02 AM
As foreclosures began to mount across the country three years ago, a group of state bank regulators suspected that some borrowers might be losing their homes unnecessarily. So the state officials asked the biggest national banks for details about their foreclosure operations.
When two banks - J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo - declined to cooperate, the state officials asked the banks' federal regulator for help, according to a letter they sent. But the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees national banks, denied the states' request, saying the firms should answer only to inquiries from federal officials. In a response to state officials, John Dugan, comptroller at the time, wrote that his agency was already planning to collect foreclosure information and that any additional monitoring risked "confusing matters."
But even as it closed the door on state oversight, the OCC chose itself not to scrutinize the foreclosure operations of the largest national banks, forgoing any examination of their procedures and paperwork. Instead, the agency relied on the banks' in-house assessments. These provided no hint of the problems to come until they had tripped the nation's housing market, agency officials later acknowledged.
"Based on what we were seeing and what we were concerned about, it felt like a chronic underreaction at the federal level," said John Ryan, a senior official with the Conference of State Bank Supervisors.
Even when the mortgage industry itself identified possible flaws in foreclosure paperwork, the agency was slow to act. In September, Ally Financial suspended foreclosures after discovering problems with tens of thousands of cases. But even then, the OCC did not begin to examine the operations of other major banks. Instead, the agency asked them to undertake internal reviews and told them it would conduct its own examination later, an OCC official said.
Over the following weeks, most of the major national banks announced one after the next that they were reviewing their foreclosure practices and putting thousands of cases temporarily on hold. While the freeze offered new hope to thousands of distressed borrowers, it also threatened to undermine the real estate market, which was already struggling to recover from crisis.
Two weeks ago, for the first time, the OCC began sending its staff into the banks to examine their foreclosure operations, interview bank employees and review paperwork.
The OCC is one of the nation's four federal bank regulators and has primary oversight over the largest banks, while the other three - the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of Thrift Supervision - share responsibility for many small and medium-size financial firms. All the agencies failed to spot problems in the foreclosure process.
The OCC's recent initiative is part of a broad federal effort to assess the U.S. foreclosure breakdown. Regulators said they hope to complete a preliminary report this month but have not decided whether it will be made public.
In monitoring the financial health of banks over the years, the OCC had been far more aggressive. Agency staff members have been assigned to work full time inside the largest banks, checking to see whether the banks are taking excessive risks, for instance, by analyzing their holdings.
But the agency did not look closely at how banks foreclose when borrowers don't make their mortgage payments. OCC officials treated foreclosures as the simple act of filing documents to seize ownership of a home once a borrower couldn't pay.
"We looked at the final stage of the process and thought of it as one that would be governed by standards and procedures in internal controls," said Julie Williams, the OCC's top lawyer. "You would only be able to know for sure if there was a problem with the document-signing process if you were standing in the room watching someone sign documents. That is not traditionally part of the bank examination process."
'Gouging consumers'
Even as the OCC and other federal regulators were failing in recent years to detect flawed foreclosure practices, evidence was building that abuses were widespread, according to interviews with federal regulators and outside lawyers. It was surfacing in academic studies, court cases, complaints that other regulators brought against mortgage companies, and reports by federal watchdogs.
There was much evidence, for instance, that mortgage servicers - responsible for collecting payment from borrowers and foreclosing when loans default - were charging improper fees and engaging in other questionable practices.
A 2007 study by Kathleen Porter, a University of Iowa law professor, found that servicers often tried to seize people's homes improperly, adding new fees when borrowers wanted to try saving them. She found that many servicers "lack the required documentation necessary to establish a valid debt."
Her findings prompted a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee held in May 2008. Afterward, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who chaired the hearing, concluded that mortgage servicers have "failed to keep even the most basic records to justify their claim."
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission, which traditionally regulates non-bank financial companies, had been receiving complaints from consumers for several years. In 2003, the FTC reached a $40 million settlement with Fairbanks Capital over defrauding borrowers by not crediting them for payments.
Then in 2008, the FTC reached a $28 million settlement with EMC Mortgage, later bought by J.P. Morgan Chase, to resolve complaints about defrauding borrowers and failing to properly keep track of mortgage documents.
Joel Winston, associate director of the division of financial practices at the FTC, said the two cases were a warning sign about the foreclosure industry. "The conclusion could certainly be drawn that the practices at these companies were at best sloppy and in many cases they were deliberately gouging consumers," Winston said.
He said the FTC routinely passed complaints on to banking regulators and often coordinated with them in sorting out which agency had jurisdiction. "It's fair to say that, over this span, there were frequent and regular communications between us and the bank agencies about servicing issues and companies that might be engaged in problematic practices," he said.
The courts also highlighted abuses. In 2008, for instance, a federal judge in Texas sharply criticized Countrywide Financial, later acquired by Bank of America, for hiring lawyers who ignored the rights of borrowers and being part of a "corrosive assembly line culture of practicing law." The Justice Department was a party to the case.
Then, last year, a pair of reports by federal watchdogs highlighted troubles inside the mortgage business that were undercutting efforts by the Obama administration to help distressed borrowers modify their mortgages to avoid foreclosure. The reports, from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Oversight Panel for the government bailout of the financial industry, warned that mortgage servicers were understaffed, gave borrowers inaccurate information, failed to track complaints and lost important paperwork.
More oversight failures
Some critics say the OCC's failure to effectively regulate the foreclosure operations of banks echoed other oversight failures in the lead-up to the housing crisis. For instance, state officials criticized the OCC for preempting local laws that restrict risky lending practices, which could have protected many borrowers against taking on unaffordable loans.
"They were a light-touch regulator all along the way," said Kathleen Keest, a consumer lawyer at the Center for Responsible Lending.
While acknowledging they did not police foreclosure practices, OCC officials defended their oversight of banks' mortgage operations. They cite multiple cases brought against loan servicers in recent years. In an instance where the agency caught a manager allowing legal documents to be improperly signed, the OCC fined her $5,000 and told her not to do it again.
OCC officials said they have put their energies into examining whether banks take steps to help borrowers avoid foreclosure. The agency has sent staff into banks to review their mortgage-modification efforts and instructed the firms to hire more staff. The OCC says banks have complied.
"With the benefit of hindsight, would it have made more sense to look more at the foreclosure process?" said Williams, the OCC official. Without answering her question, she said: "In the context of the need for preventing avoidable foreclosures, we put emphasis on the modification process."
Residence #1701 is exclusively being offered onto the market at $1,350,000. Amazing southern exposure with beautiful light throughout. The balcony is what friends are for! This 2/2.5 2,346sf unit will blow your mind with high-end finishes throughout.
Along with the buildings 6th floor Sundeck + Pool, you can enjoy the 24th story Residence Retreat. Outdoor entertaining kitchen and rooftop fireplace lounge make this a perfect sophisticated choice in living in South Park, Los Angeles. With the building's on-site concierge and Sky Gym, you can live as you wish with dining and retail located below on the street level.
EVO has had much success in the past year with 32 closed/sold. Currently 3 Residences are Pending and only 10 units being offered on the MLS. Residence #1701 1155 S. Grand Avenue is only being offered to preferred agents at this time. If you would be interested in experiencing Downtown luxury in a responsibly built urban dwelling, let us know. Over 90% of the building has sold, so there are not many units left to chose from. This is your chance to own at one of the best-selling addresses in the city.
Close to L.A. Live + Staples Center. If you have never experienced South Park, you really need to. This area has been in development for years now with the Staples Center elevating the presence of the Los Angeles Convention Center. With movie theatres and groceries abound, take advantage of this opportunity and become an Urban guerilla!
Text Steve for quickest response, 213-305-8537 EVO 1155 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90013
The real estate industry got clobbered yesterday by the news of Bank of America (BofA) freezing their foreclosure process in ALL 50 States. Many homeowners with mortgages with Bank of America are happy to hear the moratorium news yesterday freezing all Foreclosures nationwide, opening the scope wider from the original 23 states originally affected (not California).
Bank of America has to review it's process for handling loan related documents. A lot of this is due to the electronic systems the banking industry set up to package loans for Wall Street. In the midst of all of this changing of the guards, i.e. Bank of America purchasing the lethal Countrywide Home Loans, Wells Fargo purchasing Wachovia, Chase purchasing Washington Mutual. Remember, the taxpayers were the ones paying for these buyouts through the 'bailout program'. During all of these transitions, the banks got careless with documenting signatures properly and are now seeing the results of their management of these loans.
My buyers and some distressed sellers have asked me in the past 24 hours how this new guideline affects those of us in California? Allow me to answer a few questions you may have.
The moratorium is only related to Bank of America loans, here in California. If you do not have a mortgage with them, you are still at risk of the bank moving forward with a trustee sale if you have been notified of such sale.
If you are an owner in foreclosure with a Bank of America mortgage and have been notified the property is to be sold in a trustee sale, the bank, as of today will not proceed with the trustee sale until the freeze has been lifted.
During the freeze, if an owner who received a Notice of Default, but have not received notification of a trustee sale, the bank will stop the process of foreclosure.
The bank will not stop the bank foreclosure on a property where the owner is behind in payments and have not received a formal Notice of Default. The bank can still move forward with placing the mortgage into default as they will track late payment history and will decide as to whether or not to place you into default.
Many industry insiders see the freeze a negative in regards to our overall economic recovery and of the real estate industry. They believe the moratorium will only prolong the process and not fix the problems of upside down mortgages and high unemployment. On the other hand, I think it may give a person more time to find employment and gather themselves in order to resurrect themselves financially. (Hey, I'm a glass half full kind of guy.)
Maybe the bailout program will finally hit Main Street as we all get a break from the banks' heavy hands?
Because many of my buyers ask, I thought it prudent to create a quick blog post taking an overview of the California Tax Credit and the additional benefits to owning a new home:
The $10,000 credit is the lesser of 5 percent of the purchase price or $10,000
You must close your new home before December 31, 2010 deadline
First-time buyers can purchase a new or existing home
Repeat buyers can only purchase a new home that has never been occupied
The credit is spread over 3 years, up to $3,333 per year
The credit has no income or purchase price restrictions
The true advantage is for the first-timers. Along with historically low interest rates, an additional tax write-off is icing on the gluten-free cake!
