Real estate in your market area is affected by influences outside of your own region. For example, when I sold real estate in Portland, Oregon, what was happening in terms of inventory, appreciation, and activity in Seattle, Washington had an effect on my own marketplace. The two metropolitan areas are less than 200 miles apart, and one influences the other due to the easy and frequent population movement between the two cities.

This is an updated version of a post that I sent out earlier in the year:

I have gotten the impression from many real estate agents that they are unaware of the effect of a Short Sale on their clients’ credit report. The common belief is that a Short Sale isn’t as bad as Foreclosure or Deed In Lieu of Foreclosure.

The world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years.  There has been more innovation and more technological progress in the last 80 years than there were in the previous years added together since the beginning of time.

Everyone hears about the problems in real estate; that there are many homes on the market and many more being lost to foreclosure every day.

I have gotten the impression from the many real estate agents are unaware that the effect of a Short Sale on their clients credit report isn’t as bad as Foreclosure or Deed In Lieu of Foreclosure.

I have actually seen a lot to the contrary in advertising. It scares me because I see a lot of lawsuits in the future regarding this.

Short Sales, Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure, or full blown Foreclosure are all weighted the same in determining credit score computations. This information comes directly from MyFICO.com. My FICO is a website for FAIR ISAAC,  the inventors of credit scoring.

Foreclourses has become the new real estate Four-letter word.
In March one in every 538 households in the U.S. received a foreclosure notice with Nevada (1 in 139 homes) leading the pack, followed by California (1 in 204 homes), Florida (1 in 282 homes) and Arizona (1 in 283 homes).
And the bad news is just everywhere…CNN, Fox News, USA Today, the Web, etc. etc.
To assist homeowners Real Estate Wiki (see previous entry on launch of the new wiki in real estate) has added a bunch of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) covering questions such as:

Can …

First American CoreLogic, a member of The First American Corporation family of companies and America’s largest provider of advanced property and ownership information, analytics and services, announced this week the release of REiSource, a new Web-based real estate information gateway to the most complete and accurate suite of property profiles, new homeowner and refinance lists, resale trends, mortgage leads and custom reports for title insurance companies.

After only two hours of deliberation yesterday, the jury unanimously vindicated a buyer’s agent accused by his clients of failing to disclose that two other homes in the neighborhood sold for less than what they paid. As a trial court case, this decision in Ummel v. Little is binding on the parties to the case, but has no binding authority for other cases. Moreover, the buyers may file an appeal.

New real estate wiki for real estate industry is launched. 
History of wikis in real estate
BiggerPockets (launched in 2006) claims to be the first real estate wiki but it unfortunately closed down in May 2007 due to lack of sufficient content.  Introduced shortly therafter, and still going strong, is InmanWiki (part of InmanNews, InmanTV and InmanBlog).  
Origins of wikisWikiWikiWeb was the first site to be called a wiki. It was started by Ward Cunningham in 1994 and was based on the name of the Honolulu International Airport shuttle called “Wiki-Wiki” … in Hawaiian that …

America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced today that they are investigating 14 financial and mortgage companies for insider dealing and fraud as part of a criminal inquiry into the sub-prime crisis. The FBI suspects that the house price boom, once seemingly endless, encouraged mortgage lenders to take increasingly large risks, making loans to people with weaker and weaker credit histories as they sought new customers. 

Read the complete article here.