All Forum Posts by: Paul B.

Danny, that is too funny. I've had a similar experience where I had to put the woman's number on my cell phone as "Do Not Answer" as well. She used to call me every week asking if I want to buy her house. This lasted about a year. And she kept calling me even though I never called her back (after the first couple of chats). I can just picture her opening her desk drawer, seeing my postcard, and saying, "Oh, this is new! I better call this fella today!"

Nice lady, too...just not all there. Sad.

And I've definitely had my share of people calling me and calling me all sorts of names because of my pre-foreclosure letters. I'm always careful not to use anything that would upset a child or perhaps even a spouse who doesn't know what's going on.

I've almost had my butt kicked a couple times, too, when I was much younger and would just walk up to people's houses without an appointment. I stopped doing that, though.

Well, at the very least, we've found a topic about which people are passionate.

For me, it all begins and ends with the word "strategic." That means that people are defaulting not because they have to, but because they want to. We're not talking about people who simply cannot pay. I have every sympathy for those people who are losing their homes because they've lost a job or endured some other awful event.

Instead, though, we're talking about people who choose not to pay. Naturally if someone simply doesn't have the money, they default. Nothing "strategic" about that.

Sure, the lender has collateral, and sure, the agreement is, "If you don't pay, we'll take the property back." And obviously when that agreement was written, the idea was that the property would be worth enough to cover the loan in the event it ever came that. So, did the lender take that risk? The risk that the property might lose value? Yes, of course. No one's arguing that.

However, the lender's primary criteria for underwriting any traditional loan is not the collateral itself but rather the borrower's ability to service the debt. Not willingness to service the debt, mind you, but ability.

And by definition, anyone who is contemplating a "strategic" default has the ability to pay. They just choose not to. Sort of a "Heads I win, Tails you lose" approach to borrowing. If real estate values held or went up, then the lender gets a small amount of interest. And if real estate values tank, well, too bad, so sad, you just take a 20% to 50% loss on your principal. Suckers.

And to try to blame the lenders for putting people into products they should not have been in, well, that just falls on deaf ears to me, again, when we are talking about people contemplating "strategic" default. Again, they have the ability to pay, so it's not like they got into something they couldn't handle. They're just choosing not to do so.

Somewhere along the line, someone made an analogy about breaking a cell phone contract and paying the termination fee. I don't think that's anywhere near an apples to apples here because, by design, that termination fee is meant to make the carrier whole. As we all know, that fee is meant to offset the money put out by the carrier to the hardware manufacturer to reduce or offset the cost of the phone.

Now, if the mortgage note said, "Feel free to cancel this deal any time, just pay us the difference between what you owe us and what the house is worth, if it's worth less," you'd have something to compare.

Again, I say that if you're OK with strategic default, then you should just get as much unsecured debt as possible and not make any payments. I mean, you have the ability to make the payments, but now you just choose not to do so.

"To me it is just a business transaction and I don't see why all of this morality business enters the equation anyway."

Yes, because what place do morals have in business?

Even if you never use the email address elsewhere, if it's posted on the Web, you can be sure it's been harvested/scraped by spammers.

Also, on the subject of SEO, the post earlier gave some good ideas about developing keywords (using the wonder wheel), but that is really just the beginning.

The next step is to find out which keywords have that magic combination of being searched a lot but without having much competition.

Then, you work on on-site optimization as indicated in that post, by tweaking content and formatting, etc.

Lastly, you need as many keyword-based inbound links from high PR-ranking sites as you can muster up, assuming they don't have "nofollow" code for robots. This is sometimes called "off-page SEO."

In short, there's a lot more to it than just finding keywords and peppering your site with them.

It can take years of effort, but it is worth it. We are finally in the Top 10 for the three most important (that is, relevant to our business), widely searched terms in the country.

Anyone can be #1 for phrases that nobody is searching.

I think at the very least, however, you need to put the www. in front, possibly the http:// as well.

The way you've structured your link above, it actually does *not* work.

You need to put "[ url ]" before the link and "[ /url ]" after the link (without the spaces between the brackets and without the quotes).

I understand completely, but you can't discourage anyone from applying who wishes to do so.

If someone wants to apply, you let them apply. That's the law. Just be sure you have a legitimate reason to deny the application.

Perfect.

We have a trillion-dollar annual deficit, and we're going to recruit experts and convene panels with the hopes of saving $15 billion over three years.

I better stop now. I feel a deficit rant coming on.

Are you dropping your price, too? If so, then I'd bump the price up 3% to offset the concession, assuming you think it will appraise.

If the buyer is not putting anything into the deal, they don't care about the price. All they care about is the monthly payment, and a 3% bump in price isn't going to change the payment much.

The last house I sold was also to an FHA buyer. They tried to get 10% off the listing price AND a 3% concession to closing (read: their down payment), and the Realtor told me I should take it. I told the Realtor that if they weren't putting any money into the deal, they'd pay more. I said to counter with a full-price offer but I'd pay the 3% as they asked. They took it.

Bottom line: Give up the 3% in concessions to get the deal done, but make it up on the top line, if you can.