Foreclosure helps homeowners and the economy
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Maybe whomever submitted this article should have titled it: "Foreclosure helps real-estate consultants and brokers"
Basically what it boils down to is that there needs to be a smaller gap between cost of ownership and rents in an area. Diminishing this gap will reduce the "power" that 99.9999999999999 percent of real-estate people have leveraged during the last eight years.
The only way to reduce this gap is by paying people in the real estate profession less: get them to divulge their pay in dollars, not percents. Unfortunately, with the current "mortgage meltdown," people in real estate are the first ones getting paid! Whether a home is getting foreclosed upon or simply just "sold," Realtors always get paid. I studied their games. I know how they play it.
Then you summarize the article by basically stating the exact opposite of the premise of the article which is actually closer to: "foreclosure helps home owners who are in trouble while at the same time helping the finance industry recover."
Then you state that there should be a smaller gap between the cost of ownership and renting. Fine, this is probably easy enough for everyone to agree with. But you, unlike the author of the article who talks about supply and demand equalizing the market through the foreclosure process, say that the solution is somehow for real estate professionals to "divulge their pay in dollars, not percents."
First of all realtors, by divulging the percentage they are paid of a transaction, are already divulging their pay in dollars since everyone who is a party to the transaction knows the amount of the transaction. It's simple math.
Second, someone is paying real estate professionals for a service that apparently worth what realtors and brokers charge. The market is sustaining their fees, if the service they provided wasn't valuable, someone would step in and do it cheaper.
Third, even if real estate professionals didn't make a cent off transactions, even if there were no realtors or brokers, it doesn't change the core problem or anything suggested the article's solution. They aren't the ones who control market values or financing.
As a side point - if in a discussion someone brings up someone elses professional background/employer/affiliation (the implication being that it undermines their authority) is that really an ad-hominem attack?
Say Joe (a libertarian) is arguing for legalization of smut films in public theaters. Frank (a smut rental store owner) is arguing the opposite case.
Joe may say, "you shouldn't tell adults what they can or cannot watch in a theater because that encroaches on their rights."
Frank will then reply, "Don't listen to him, he's just the quack libertarian 'round here, this is about protecting our public places for our kids."
Joe's reply of, "18+ theaters are out of the accessible areas of children and therefore his argument is flawed, and furthermore Frank is most likely primarily concerned about reduced profits of smut rentals due to market substitution towards theater movies."
Frank's original reply - That Joe is a "quack libertarian" is invalid because it exposes no hidden motive on Joe's part.
Joe's reply is valid because the public should understand all reasons why Frank does not want a public smut theater or they may fall for a "lie of omission" and because Joe attacked Frank's primary argument.
So maybe my critique of her comment being an implied ad hominem is unfair
"Mr. Su is a real-estate consultant and a former REO broker."
Still, it's not obvious that he stands to profit off more foreclosures based on his status as a consultant, and the fact that he was formerly a broker seems to lend credibility to his expertise rather than detracting from it.
Which party is hurrying the transaction such that the owners of the belongings in the home don't even have time to move out or to coordinate efforts with an ecologically-friendly recycling charity?
The Realtors.
Everything into a landfill? Seriously? Realtors make $ by flipping properties like flipping burgers. They are the only ones who are "thriving" from such a mortgage mess. It should, for all practical purposes, be illegal.
P.S. The video starts off slow; watch until where Lisa Ling starts reporting. Take note of who is paying the dude to "paint the grass green".
Even if realtors did cause foreclosures to somehow sneak up on people, it has nothing to do with what causes people to end up in foreclosure in the first place.
You're going after the wrong target.
If the reporters were really trying to do their jobs correctly they'd have found some of the people who ditched all their stuff and asked them why they left it. Instead, they resort to speculation.
It has everything to do with why people end up in foreclosure. The video does not showcase an isolated event: it showcases a phenomena that has been happening almost everywhere for the past few years. Take note of the statistics mentioned during the report about how many families are affected by things of this nature. Care to guess how many pounds are going into the landfills?
Realtors don't make money when people are allowed to stay in their homes; they only make money when people are forced out of their homes. The key word in the video snippet is "contracts" . . . as the video stated, the people being _paid_ to _trash_ homes are under contract to not leave anything out or "by the curb."
Surely I'm not the only person who takes note of how utterly wasteful this is.
Yes. A lot of their stuff ends up in landfills.
Those are bad things. I agree.
What you haven't showed is how realtors have anything to do with why people end up in foreclosure or why these people move out so quickly leaving everything behind. Foreclosures still take months to happen, people have months to get rid of their stuff somehow. If they don't, they are the irresponsible ones, not realtors.
People stop paying their loans, banks foreclose. Realtors stand a chance of profiting from two events they neither caused or influenced.