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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nnillionaire who wrote (212468)	7/25/2009 11:53:14 AM
From: pheilman_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Blaming Realtors and mortgage brokers for this RE mess is like blaming the horse because the wheel fell off the cart. Government policy decisions and policy decisions at the highest levels of lending institutions may be a better place to look to place your blame. Partial agreement. I could never understand what was driving the RE bubble until I heard about the CDO, ... sink for loans. But, the mortgage brokers and realtors are no more blameless than the recruited guards. "In addition to falsifying the co-conspirators’ salary information, the loan applications included forged appraisals that inflated the cost of the loans and allowed her and her co-conspirators to pocket thousands of dollars in profit." Some of them committed the fraud more explicitly than others. I talked with a realtor neighbor annually during the insanity and she agreed that things were wildly overpriced but I know she still happily "helped" people into "homeownership". I realize this is just hearsay but if they had been in the business a while they had to know. A technician that worked for me last year temporarily took a job as a mortgage broker during the go-go years and had to leave the job because he knew the loans were toxic for the borrowers. A very nice Philippino guy and he could have written up all his trusting ethnic cohorts, and he didn't because his conscience wouldn't let him. Now what the hell, he just entered the trade and he could see the fraud at the heart of it and all the long term brokers couldn't? BS, they just loved the money rolling in.

To: nnillionaire who wrote (212468)	7/25/2009 2:40:25 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Respond to of 306849

>>Blaming Realtors and mortgage brokers for this RE mess is like blaming the horse because the wheel fell off the cart.<< oh, let's not try to rewrite history. nobody in government ever made it legal to make a fraudulent loan application. yet we have millions of them. i was recently asked to commit fraud by a mortgage lender - via freaking email. i refused - even though it was in my self interest to play along. if i lose the deal, i lose the deal, but i'm not committing fraud. IN FREAKING EMAIL THAT LASTS FREAKING FOREVER! yes, the government is responsible for letting this behavior run unchecked, but the perpetrators of criminal activity here have a lot of responsibility, too.