There was an envelope in the box addressed to Hope Marsh from Northeast Ohio Title Company. "Why is that name familiar?" I thought.
I looked up the transfer details online when I got home. Hope Marsh bought the house for $62,000 on August 27th. That's good, as it puts the decline in value right where I thought it would be. Remember, I bought the house for $99,000 in 2001. But that name...why was it ringing a bell?
Oh yeah. Hope Marsh is a prominent Cleveland-area real estate agent.
Keep in mind, I have no emotional attachment to the house or the issue anymore, and I am happy with the way I relinquished the house. But I am a thinking person with an interest in macroeconomic trends and foreclosure crisis issues. This is very, very interesting to me.
- While Hope Marsh and my real estate agent do not work for the same company, I can't help but think the practice of realtors buying property in the area they sell in as being a conflict of interest or a form of insider trading. I mean, what realtors are touting is their customer service and ability to leverage relationships, not just to find the buyer the home she wants but also to negotiate with the seller and their agent and recommend contractors, inspectors, insurance agents, mortgage brokers. That's a lot of information and ability to manipulate it and market players to capitalize on it for one's own gain.
- Realtors control the MLS. What's recently sold, at what price and why is not necessarily apparent or comprehensible to the man on the street. My real estate agent recommended an original price of $110,000 which if you recall I thought was optimistic. Now I wonder if she wanted a higher price that was unrealistic in the market so that it wouldn't sell and an investor friend could scoop it up. Again, manipulation of the market.
- Frankly, I am a little surprised that an investor bought the house, and that I assume the plan is to rent it out for a bit. One of the things I learned on the housing audit is that investors are buying the better houses on the market, and here in AZ it was a horrible frustration that working people who intended to stay in a neighborhood for a long time were unable to access decent properties And certainly that a sale was completed within 3 weeks of my surrender of the deed being filed is suggests that Ms. Marsh was able to put her own knowledge and contacts in the Cleveland area market to good use. But is that really good for the neighborhood in the long run?
- As we've been rickrolling the blame for the foreclosure crisis through the major players (investors, banks, people who bought too much house who should have known better, appraisers, mortgage brokers), real estate agents and their role haven't been examined, as far as I can see. And I do think they had a bigger part in stirring up the froth that they've been credited with.
Any comments, aspects of this I've missed, opinions? I'd love to hear them!
4 comments:
Hope Marsh is on Facebook. Why not ask her?
I place a great deal of the blame on real estate agents. They seem to routinely encourage buyers to purchase homes at the top of their budget or slightly above their budget. Before the crash the assumption was that the properties would just keep going up in value. As real estate agents they couldn't possible have believed prices would go up forever unless they are just under educated or do poor research.
It also seems pretty routine to encourage people to by homes with more space than they need. On the house hunting shows it is common to see people with no kids purchasing 2,000 + sq ft homes. When I read the ARM articles there seem to be people who bought huge homes and did not take into consideration the extra heating/cooling bills that these homes require.
Yes home owners should do their own research but they work with real estate agents for their expert advice.
In Sacramento at the height of the bubble, 1 in 4 adults had a real estate license. The field had attracted just about everyone who had more gumption than is needed to flip burgers but not the right skills or education for a profession.
So absolutely most realtors were uninformed enough to parrot what the NAR told them, which was that perpetually rising prices were based on fundamentals. And plenty of biz-school RE professors backed them. This is why the people in the bubbliest regions who have multiple foreclosures tend to be realtors.
That said, sure, realtors probably take advantage of having MLS access that's not available to the public.
Let me get this straight, you found yourself upside down on your mortgage and decided to let your house go into foreclosure, a tactic many homeowners took to keep from taking huge losses on their house. Smart move. Hope Marsh, a realtor and real-estate investor, saw a foreclosed house up for sale by a bank and bought it at a good price. So, what is your problem here?
Both parties should be happy. And as far as the neighborhood goes, instead of a vacant house in the neighborhood, there is now a house that is being renovated to welcome a new family into the community.
Who the hell is hope Marsh? She is the smart enterprising woman who is improving neighborhoods one house at a time. Oh, and by the way, she has NEVER foreclosed on a house she has owned.
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