KTS Message

We would like to thank our clients for their wonderful response to our monthly newsletter. We welcome your input and suggestions. The goal of the "Connections" newsletter is to keep you current with changes affecting the real estate industry. As always we are here to answer your questions.

Very Truly Yours,


Jason S. Kane

P.S. Thank you to all of the contestants who entered the previous newsletter's trivia contest. Congratulations to Linda Cordeiro of Wells Fargo for winning a gift basket of gourmet coffee from Mills Coffee Co. Linda answered correctly to last months trivia question:

On Three's Company, what's the first name of Mr. Furley's (landlord) tight ward brother who owned the building?

Correct Answer: Bart

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Faster Condo Loans

To help lenders meet the growing demand for mortgages on condominiums, Fannie Mae is in the process of adopting a more straightforward process for project approvals and loosening the rules concerning pre-sales and investors.
The update to Fannie Mae's guidelines is in response to lenders' requests for clearer, more concise rules that will allow them to originate more loans for what has increasingly become an affordable alternative to single-family detached homes.

According to the National Association of Realtors, sales of existing condominiums and cooperatives hit their ninth consecutive annual record in 2004. There were a total of 970,000 existing condo and co-op sales last year, up 8.0 percent from the previous record of 898,000 units in 2003.

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Home Sales For March

Existing-home sales rose to near-record levels in March with a continuation of strong home price gains, according to the National Association of Realtors®.
Total existing-home sales -- including single-family, town homes, condominiums and co-ops -- increased 1.0 percent in March, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate* of 6.89 million from an upwardly revised pace of 6.82 million in February. March sales were the third highest level on record, and were 4.9 percent above the 6.57 million-unit pace in March 2004. The record was a sales rate of 7.02 million in June 2004, followed by 6.98 million in November 2004.

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First American's Non Traditional Credit Score

First American Corp. has added a credit scoring system to its suite of services designed to give borrowers with non-traditional credit histories a home-buying boost.
The move adds to a small but growing number of credit reporting services designed to make more loans available, more quickly, to borrowers with thin or nonexistent credit histories.

The estimated 50 million borrowers are often first-time home buyers, older home buyers, low- and moderate-income households, immigrants, ethnic minorities who struggle to reveal their creditworthiness.

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Real Estate Brokers Challenged By Justice Dept.

The Department of Justice has two blunt warnings for the American home real-estate establishment:

Do not block efforts to save consumers money through rebates of real estate commissions.

Do not stand in the way of discount "fee-for-service" firms that list sellers' properties for a fixed-dollar amount, but don't perform all the traditional brokerage services, such as holding open houses or advising on buyers' offers.

Ignore that advice, according to Justice, and you will find yourself in big trouble. Lawyers for the department already have begun following through on those warnings. On April 8, the department sent a highly unusual message to the Oklahoma Legislature urging it not to pass a state Realtor association-supported bill that effectively would squeeze low-cost fee-for-service realty brokers out of the state by redefining the service requirements for holding a brokerage license.

A week earlier, the Justice Department sued the Kentucky Real Estate Commission, a regulatory body dominated by state realty-association board members, for prohibiting brokers from giving customers rebates on sales commissions.

The department also has stepped up the pace of its investigation of the National Association of Realtors' rules covering online access to Multiple Listing Service (MLS) databases for possible federal antitrust violations.

- Excerpt from Providence Journal - Sunday, April 24, 2005 -

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