Q-Law Blog

Housing Buzz

HIVE Houston will not be your ordinary live/work artists’ colony.  But if it is ever completed, it will certainly look like a colony – for

Selecting A Real Estate Agent To Sell Your Home

We are experiencing a buyers’ market in residential housing today. In other words, the number of available homes far exceeds the number of available buyers. Selling a home today is more than just planting a sign in the yard. It requires a knowledge of the current statistics, a marketing plan, and a skill to keep the closing on track. In short, it takes a good Realtor to successfully sell a home today. But there are thousands of Realtors in Oregon. How does a homeowner find the right one for them?

Why Now?

Why would an Oregon attorney nearing retirement, choose to leave his comfortable firm, open a solo real estate practice, and start a website and blog? Well, they say sharks have to keep moving to stay alive….

Market Conditions

The National Association of Realtors has published some excellent summaries and charts for local markets.  Their Oregon research covers Portland, Salem, and Eugene.

“Strategic Defaults” – Making Borrowers the Bad Guys?

Fannie Mae, the secondary mortgage giant, is targeting certain borrowers, whom they say, are voluntarily electing to go into foreclosure rather than continue paying on a loan that may be a hundred thousand dollars or more over the value of their home today. Fannie calls these “strategic defaults’ and vows to either go after them personally, refuse to buy their future housing loans for seven or more years, or do both. Apparently, Fannie has forgotten that the very banks who sold them the paper created many of these exotic loan products, ignored borrowers’ credit, and basically helped create our credit mess in the first place.