Seattle Real Estate:

We all know the mortgage and real estate industry is changing. What you may not know, is how recent regulation in the appraisal process of a mortgage loan has changed in recent months, and how it may affect your loan approval. A real estate appraisal is the documentation a bank requires to form an opinion [...]

There’s been a lot of squawking going on about appraisals lately. The HVCC, the Home Valuation Code of Conduct which applies to any loans to be sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, was devised in response to claims that pressure was inappropriately applied to home appraisers resulting in artificially high appraised values. There’s been [...]

There has been an unprecedented proliferation of loan modification offers and practitioners recently.  What is a loan modification?  It’s when a person that owns real estate and has a mortgage on the property asks the institution that holds the loan to change the terms of the mortgage – like reduce the interest rate temporarily, reduce [...]

UPDATE 1/13/09: The Washington State Department of Revenue reversed their stance. See updated WA REET ruling post. See all posts regarding Short Sales. Think You Might Need To Do A Short Sale? From the Washington Association of Realtors: The Department of Revenue(DOR) recently sent a letter to the Escrow Association explaining its position that in [...]

I try to keep track of the searches people type into search engines to end up at our site.  From time to time, someone ends up visiting based on a question or certain search term that we touch on, but don’t necessarily cover in depth.  Recently, I noticed a new one that falls under that [...]