Finance

Ken Mascia from Oxford Financial is back today with some wisdom about the sub prime implosion and it’s impact on our Southeast Michigan real estate market.
One topic has gotten a lot of press lately and it’s how everybody is in foreclosure. I have heard some of the craziest statements made as if they were [...]

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Just received news (not good news) from Lansing that the proposed moratorium on the pop up tax is not likely to come to be this year. We were looking at it as a short term stimulus for the housing market and were optimistic that it would have helped to motivate home buyers over the [...]

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Last week Larry Ruehlen from the West Bloomfield Observer-Eccentric called me to chat about the proposed moratorium on the pop-up tax, which, if passed, should help to stimulate sales of existing homes. My conversation with Larry made me think about some of the aspects of how this legislation will impact the way I sell [...]

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Potentially good news out of Lansing for Michigan home sellers. Democrats are initiating legislation to allow home buyers to pay the same amount in taxes as the home seller was paying.
Under the state’s current tax structure, the assessed taxable value of a home can rise annually by no more than 5 percent or the [...]

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It is Board of Review time again, and citizens across the state are headed in to appeal their property taxes. If they read the Freep today, the might be left with the impression that they are destined to be overtaxed. Yes, it does seem ironic that taxable values/SEV’s went up last year by 3.7%, the [...]

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I hear the craziest things that people have been told to do in order to rescue or improve their credit score. Have you ever gotten a copy of your credit report and then gone through it and closed all of the accounts you were not actively using? You thought this would be good for fraud [...]

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This came in my email today. I searched high and low (on Google) to find the source of the article, but I cannot. I would have linked to it if I had found it.
I’ve spoken before about the problems with Proposal A. As a matter of fact, I think I have ranted [...]

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Josh Plummer, my favorite guy at Flagstar Bank, does a great job of keeping me up on the latest in the world of mortgages. He does it without making me yawn, which is a compliment, of course. Plummer recently put me on notice about a change in the law that makes PMI (Private [...]

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Just got back from a seminar on mortgage fraud conducted by Phil Seaver from Seaver Title Company and sponsored by Julie Plotnik from Victory Home Loans. Interesting stuff.
It seems that Michigan has the distinction of being the number one state for mortgage fraud. That certainly is a dubious honor. To fight the [...]

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Yesterday Brian Dickerson put out a very good piece about property taxes in the Freep. Long story short, Brian is right. Proposal A needs to be shelved. The sooner the better. But I will get to my question for Brian shortly. My first order of business is to highlight the [...]

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The credit score – as mysterious as a gypsy palm reading? Kind of, yea. Sometimes I’m surprised that some credit scores are better than it appears they should be and others are worse. Why? I have no idea. This system is not perfect and nobody knows exactly how it works (strange [...]

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