I can substantiate Armstrong’s warning from personal experience. My mother sold her home on Monday. I went to the closing with her. There were three real estate agents in the room, along with a person from the title agency. As the poor 26 year old tattooed schmuck across the table signed his life away, the real estate agents made small talk.
They were old timers and talked about how a closing could be done in the 1970s with three forms to be signed. Today, there are dozens upon dozens of cover your ass forms that must be signed. Then they started talking about August and how it would become ten times worse. I inquired as to what they were talking about.
They said that Dodd Frank rules would go into effect on August 1 and make their lives miserable. Today, the agents can correct errors or omissions at the closing table. They are given some flexibility for human error. As of August 1, there will be dozens of new rules that will slow down the closing process dramatically. If every t is not crossed and every i dotted, the closing will have to be delayed. The threat of litigation will paralyze the housing industry.
Has adding 100 forms to sign and dozens of hoops to jump through made buying a house safer than when 3 forms were required in the 1970s? Who benefits, other than lawyers and government drones? Everything the government touches turns into a giant clusterfuck of failure.
As a result of Title XIV of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another agency to complicate matters, issued a number of mortgage-related rules that are not actually voted on by Congress. They will impose far more paperwork and raise the cost of mortgages while the Dodd-Frank portion to actually reform bank trading was vacated. So we now have a new agency to comply with to get a mortgage as of August 1st, 2015 and this should help to cap the real estate rally for the average American sending prices back down.
Government is great at expanding its own powers when it takes payoffs behind the curtail to allow the same conduct that created the problem to begin with. More government jobs and pensions. It never ends.
Nothing like doing all they can to discourage people from buying! I can envision an entire generation of Americans not owning homes. Between a lack of good, secure jobs, mountains or credit card and student loan debt. It may be a generation or more before the housing market normalizes
If people are going to have ANY chance at all of being middle class going forward, owning a home or productive land will be essential.
Liberals tend to believe that problems are best fixed by regulations. While some regulation is needed (don’t dump stuff into the river), most problems are better fixed by prosecuting criminals under existing laws rather than layering new law upon old. Meanwhile Jon Corzine walks the streets a free man.
This move is also consistent with other government rules and regulations which strongly favor big businesses which can absorb the extra overhead while simultaneously discouraging entrepreneurship and small business.
My 2 cents.
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I used to do small-time real estate deals. Hardly any paperwork that I couldn’t type up myself. Now? Uber complicated–and come August it will be even worse.
Check out the amount of useless paperwork for a new car. I bought new in 2009. All manner of needless nonsense.
And in much of it is verbage about national security and anti-terrorism.
Oh: The new car deal was for cash; no financing. I shudder to think of the paperwork if I’d gone that route.
Couple things…
– While I agree that some regulation is necessary (“Hey, don’t build you lead smelter next to that orphanage!”… “And no, you can’t have a pig farm next to the cathedral”… this is where our modern zoning laws come from..), this is possibly clinical insanity…
– If this does indeed kill new home sales, then that means the easiest way to own a home is to inherit from family.
– If folks are inheriting their homes, that means folks won’t be moving around much.
Anyone see how this links up with Obammy’s HUD initiative to invade middle-class neighborhoods?
No more “white flight” of the middle class… they just made us sitting ducks.
Folks can still rent, I’m sure… but divest people of the means to acquire property?
This is going to get interesting…
Greetings,
As I like to remind people, it isn’t possible to own property in the United States. Think you own your car??? No way, the title is always held by the State and you can not transfer “ownership” without involving the real owners of the car who, for a fee, will swap some names around. The same is true for the home you think you own but actually rent from the State.
The slaves are given some gizmo’s and trinkets but can never outright own anything.
When you purchase a home it’s probably the biggest purchase of your life – use a real estate attorney. All those ‘papers’ you are asked to sign – well they have been drawn up by the real estate firm, and the lender, and their lawyers have carefully crafted those documents.
Don’t fall for: “It’s just our standard ….. ” There is nothing such as a standard any kind of contract. Don’t sign documents you haven’t read / understand.
This is why I think Realtors and Title people are really useless: they are not lawyers, they are not engineers who can determine if the home is up to code, they are salesmen.
@Dutchman: although it’s great advice to have the documents reviewed by an attorney, the reality is that you have no bargaining power over most terms. Even if your lawyer asks and makes an issue of it, chances are that either (1) no one anywhere will claim they have the power to change X, or (2) you will reach someone who absolutely refuses to change X, whether or not they might have the power to do so. In my experience with large companies it’s likely that only the general counsel or someone in their office actually has the real authority to change X and bind the company, and your piddly little six figure mortgage loan is not likely to get their attention. (The only way to get their attention is to be a state regulator or a successful class-action lawyer.)
Your only power is in selecting a company whose standard terms are less offensive. However, I have not found that mortgage lenders (etc.) are willing to let you see their required terms up front, other than some minimal terms on the application side. If you find something problematic a week before closing, you are generally stuck, looking at rescheduling closing and finding a different lender.
I would recommend people consider this and avoid doing business with the lenders known for sleaze. That includes the majority of large national names. You can still find problems with smaller ones, sometimes even bigger problems, but there is at least more variety. Maybe someone like a lawyer should catalog the terms of different mortgage lenders and have a website showing who screws you the least?
We paid cash for this land five years ago. Paid for the log home on the “three year same as cash” plan because we weren’t ready to build. Literally paid cash to build it. I am so glad that was then not now.
WASHINGTON–The Office Comptroller of the Currency imposed restrictions on the mortgage-servicing operations of six banks, including the national bank arms of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM, -0.16% and Wells Fargo & Co. WFC, -0.01% , for failing to fully comply with enforcement orders related to home foreclosure abuses.
The OCC said on Wednesday the six banks had not met all the requirements of consent orders issued in 2011 related to foreclosure-processing mistakes. The 2011 orders triggered a controversial probe into major U.S. banks’ foreclosure files to determine how many borrowers should be compensated and were amended in 2013 when the OCC and the Federal Reserve decided to halt the review before it was finished. The regulators ultimately reached a settlement with 15 banks related to foreclosure problems.
The national bank units of EverBank Financial Corp., HSBC Holdings PLC HSBC, -0.26% , Santander Holdings USA Inc. and U.S. Bancorp USB, +0.38% were also hit with additional penalties for failing to complete “required corrective actions,” the OCC said.
OCC didn’t immediately indicate what corrective actions each bank had failed to complete.
HSBC and Wells Fargo face the harshest restrictions of the six. Both are flatly prohibited from increasing the size of their mortgage book by purchasing servicing rights, entering into new contracts to do servicing for other parties and offshoring additional servicing activities.
IndSer: “owning a home or productive land will be essential.”
See you and raise you own: BOTH will be essential.
Having both wholly owned was an obsession and one of the principal reasons I moved to S.A. One wonderful feature is that neither land nor one’s principal dwelling can be seized for unpaid taxes, although neither can be sold without taxes in arrears being paid first.
Maggie acted at the right time and so did I, because what I was able to do over a decade ago I couldn’t do now, given the exponential growth in regulations in a short time in a place that had nearly none back then. I’m beginning to become convinced that it’s time to double down on getting production from already productive land and a comment made on the fatso post with respect to getting the whole cow is one I plan to heed for the coming year; I’ve done it before with a quarter cow, but I guess it’s time to quadruple down on that one, and the aerator for a fish pond is an equally good idea.
One can only hope that my fear is unfounded that all this will keep on getting worse while generalized apathy permits it to worsen, and no one hopes it more than I for here, there and everywhere, but…
Persnickety…I like this one form Will Rogers :
With Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke.
All loans from banks are BS…Usury at its finest . Nothing like loaning “Money Printed Out Of Thin Air ” .
Jim….BofA wasn’t hit y the gooberment ?
Since MERS entered the picture, real ownership of property in the U.S. is a giant clusterfuck. The TBTF banks created this monster so they could avoid recording fees at the local level. It will NOT end well.
As an aside, last time I bought a house the closing agent handed me docs to sign that were meant for the seller. She wanted me to sign it anyway, I refused and pointed out her error. Don’t trust anyone at closing and make sure you know what you’re signing. Even with my due diligence and caution, the servicer wound up screwing up the escrow account and they demanded a $1,000 a month increase in my payment for a year, then a $300 monthly increase thereafter for the remaining 28 year term. Needless to say it wound up in foreclosure.
I am getting despondent.
Every fucking thing is fraudulent, devalued, corrupted, poisonous, or just plain bullshit.
I don’t want to eat food that will kill me
I do not want to drive a car that will monitor me
I do not want a phone that is an NSA tracking device
I am seriously going to with go nuts, or just drop out of modern society.
Over the course of my 57 years on this earth, devolution right before my blurry eyes.
What the fuck happened? Was it a planned assault or just a bunch of stupid, ignorant, corrupt, insane people running around shitting on everything?
planned assault
Planned assault by stupid,ignorant, corrupt, insane people running around shitting on everything. There… that is the answer TaxSlave.
There is nothing in this country left that hasn’t become a bureaucratic nightmare.
Nearly every agreement entered into comes with problems, errors, law that stops progress or profit.
Which just proves the theory that complexity breeds chaos and eventual collapse.
More rules to bind our hands while the mega-corps gobble up the little guys and capitalize on offshoring our jobs.
Sheep argue about gays, Caitlyn Jenner, abortion and increased safety for every minute detail of our lives.
Freedom is long dead, most alive today don’t miss it, nor want it.
The rest of us will suffer longer, the sheep will trundle along until they are murdered, or jackbooted into our realm.
Good luck to us all, the final nails are all nearly pounded flush.