Home

HomeAway files for $230M IPO

By Inman News, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

Austin, Texas-based vacation real estate company HomeAway Inc. has registered its intentions for an initial public offering worth an estimated $230 million, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday.

The company has not yet indicated how many shares it will offer, the price per share, or when it will start offering them. According to the filing, HomeAway estimated the $230 million maximum offering price for the purposes of calculating the IPO registration fee.  more...

FHA chief to head Mortgage Bankers Association

By Inman News, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.
David Stevens

David Stevens will leave his job as head of the Federal Housing Administration at the end of the month and take over as the top executive at the Mortgage Bankers Association in early May, the trade group said.

The former Long & Foster Cos. executive took over at FHA in 2009, when demand for its mortgage insurance program had soared but losses on loans insured during the housing boom were mounting.

Auditors say FHA's mortgage insurance program is unlikely to require a taxpayer bailout, in part because of premium restructuring and tightened underwriting standards and oversight of lenders instituted on Stevens' watch.

Stevens "has had a tremendous impact at FHA," and brings "a wealth of industry experience in mortgage lending" that he can bring to bear in advocating the positions of mortgage bankers, said MBA Chairman Michael Berman in a statement.

Stevens will succeed John Courson, who faced another set of challenges running the MBA, Berman acknowledged.  more...

Disclose old inspections reports -- or else

By Barry Stone, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

DEAR BARRY: We bought our house about six months ago. Since then, we've learned that someone else nearly bought the property and that those buyers hired a home inspector. The sellers were given a copy of the inspection report, but they never mentioned it to us or gave us a copy when we were the buyers. Shouldn't they have disclosed the information in that report? --Vince

DEAR VINCE: Questions about who should have disclosed what and when they should have disclosed it never cease to arise. There seem to be no limits to the doubts and reservations surrounding real estate disclosure. At the root of the confusion is one basic question: How does a seller or an agent know what to disclose and what not to disclose?

Fortunately, the answer is simple and straightforward: Disclose all that you know: without exception, without compromise. When in doubt, disclose. The worst that can happen when everything is disclosed is that another buyer might have to be found.

On the other hand, the consequences of abridged disclosure may include financial loss, needless litigation, and in the very worst cases, injury or death due to undisclosed safety problems.  more...

California Regional MLS joins RPR

By Inman News, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

Realtors Property Resource LLC has signed up California Regional Multiple Listing Service as a partner, bringing the number of MLSs and Realtor associations participating in the national property database to 235.

There are about 900 MLSs in the U.S., but RPR has licensing agreements with several of the nation's largest. All told, RPR says it now has agreements in place with MLSs representing more than 380,000 Realtors, or roughly 38 percent of the National Association of Realtor's 1 million members.  more...

Use animal instincts to win in the business world

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.
Image courtesy of <a href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470947802,descCd-release_text.html" target=blank>Wiley</a>.

Various clichés have been used to describe the recessionary market. The seemingly lawless nature of today's real estate transactions has brought to mind for many the Wild West. Others might say, more generally, about the economy at large, that "it's a jungle out there."

Longtime real estate industry analyst Stefan Swanepoel appears to agree with the latter assessment; to help us all navigate this jungle, Swanepoel has just published "Surviving Your Serengeti: 7 Skills to Master Business and Life."

"Surviving Your Serengeti" is a parable. It's a modern-day, fictional story about very lifelike characters: regular old Americans who have had a rough go of things lately.

There's a retiree-turned-real estate broker and his wife/business partner whose business has been hard hit by the housing crisis. There's a teacher who got laid off, and has found herself somewhat accidentally successful in multilevel marketing. Her husband owns and operates a renewable energy company that is struggling, desperate to land a big contract to stay afloat. There's an unemployed banker and his wife.  more...

Must-do's after mortgage is paid off

By Benny Kass, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

DEAR BENNY: Because savings interest rates are so low, I've decided to accelerate paying off my home mortgage. But after I pay off the mortgage, then what? What else do I need to do, or make sure is done by the bank/mortgage company? For instance, changing the home insurance beneficiary from the bank to me. Are there any other things I need to do? --Nelson

DEAR NELSON: That's an excellent question. My standard and perhaps somewhat glib response is: "Don't burn the mortgage."

When you first obtained your mortgage loan, you signed two documents: a promissory note and a mortgage document (usually called a deed of trust). The trust was recorded among the land records in the county where your property is located. You must make sure that the deed of trust is formally released from land records. This is accomplished by filing a release -- often called a "certificate of satisfaction" -- on those same land records.

Lenders treat this in different ways. Some actually will arrange to have the release recorded, and will charge you a nominal fee for this service. Other lenders, however, will just send you the promissory note, marked "paid and canceled" and you have to record the release. If your lender is a private individual, make sure that you get the note back simultaneously when you make the final payment.  more...

A human touch for digitizing business cards Premium Content

By Gahlord Dewald, Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

Despite the promise of a paperless universe run entirely on mobile phones and laptops and tablets, the humble business card is still with us. When we're out in the real world, the fastest way to reliably get our contact information to another human being is to hand them a piece of paper with our info printed on it. Business cards don't crash or require an upgrade, or autocorrect our names into gobbledygook.

But the challenge then becomes making use of the information we gather by way of business cards. The proverbial shoebox full of business cards that gets ever more full. The stack of cards from the last conference. The loose card you picked up by chance after a short conversation at a coffee shop.

I don't know about you, but for me, the percentage of cards that I'm handed that make it into a usable digital format is lower than I'd like. But recently, Wendy Forsythe of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate tipped me off to an iPhone app that solves this problem: Cardmunch.

Cardmunch is an iPhone app (a BlackBerry app is coming soon, according to the company's site). It uses the phone's camera to take a picture of the business card. That image is then uploaded to the Cardmunch server, where actual human beings transcribe the information.  more...