Team Thayer Property Servicing

If you've never listened to Peter Thiel you have missed out. He's the billionaire known for starting Paypal with Elon Musk and for being one of the first investors in Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook (he bought 10% of Facebook for $500,000, haha). I think Thiel might be one of the top ten smartest people living on planet Earth today. For today's Book-of-the-Day, I was reading his book,  Zero To One . I was also watching a few video interviews he did that had tremendous insight into his genius brain. Here are 11 things I wrote down about Peter's perspective on life: 1. Avoid extreme worldviews:  "Extreme pessimists find no point in doing anything. And extreme optimists find no need to do anything. They both converge on doing nothing." 2. Conventional wisdom leads to you competing for something worthless:   “Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of...

Team Thayer Real Estate While existing-home sales have seen solid gains in 2015, reaching levels not seen since before the crisis seven years ago, the rate of increase may be slowing down, according to data released by Auction.com  on Tuesday. Auction.com's August 2015 Real Estate Nowcast predicted that seasonally adjusted existing-home sales for August will fall between the rates of 5.46 and 5.86 million annual sales, with a targeted number of 5.64 million. Though that would be a 12.9 percent year-over year hike from August 2014 – the largest year-over-year gain for existing-home sales in two years – it would be an increase of only 1 percent from July. “We may be looking at the beginning of a shift in existing-home sales activity,” Auction.com EVP Rick Sharga said. “The volume of sales, while continuing to increase, appears to be slowing down. And home prices, which have consistently appreciated over the past few years, may finally be leveling off.” “We may be lookin...

The hearing, titled " Dodd-Frank Five Years Later: Are We More Prosperous? ", included witnesses   Phil Gramm , Senior Partner with U.S. Policy Metrics and former U.S. Senator;   R. Bradley Miller , Of Counsel with Grais & Ellsworth and a former member of Congress; and   Peter Wallison , Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute. A recurring theme at the hearing was that Dodd-Frank represented overregulation which has stifled economic recovery rather than accelerated it as was intended. rank Act on American prosperity, freedom, and financial stability five years after the controversial law was enacted took place in the  House Financial Services Committee  on Tuesday. "By any measure we are today experiencing the weakest recovery of a post-war era," Gramm said. "Had this recovery simply matched the strength of the average of the other ten recoveries since World War II, 14.4 million more Americans would be w...

Stronge r-than-expected economic activity for the second quarter will drive accelerated economic growth for the second half of 2015, according to the July 2015 Economic Outlook released Thursday by Fannie Mae 's  Economic & Strategic Research (ESR) Group . The U.S. economy  contracted at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent  in the third and final Q1 estimate from the  Bureau of Economic Analysis  released in late June. Improved conditions in Q2 were driven by increases in consumer spending and residential and nonresidential investments, combined with a waning drag from net exports, according to Fannie Mae. In the July Economic Outlook, Fannie Mae expects the economy to pick up to an annualized rate of 2.8 percent in Q2, which is 0.4 percentage points higher than the June estimate. Despite volatile economic conditions overseas that could pose headwinds to the U.S. economy, the ESR Group's estimate for full-year economic growth in July is an annualized ...

Mortgages by first-time homebuyers tend to perform worse than those of established buyers, but that doesn’t mean first-timers are an inherently riskier group, according to a new working paper authored by Saty Patrabansh of the  Federal Housing Finance Agency's  Office of Policy Analysis and Research. The  working paper ,  released Thursday, analyzed mortgages backed by  Fannie Mae  and  Freddie Mac between 1996 and 2013. The author found that while first-time mortgages performed worse than repeat homebuyer mortgages, the comparison is actually an apples-to-oranges mismatch. Patrabansh called first-time homebuyers “inherently different from repeat homebuyers. They are younger and have lower credit scores, lower home equity, and less income and, therefore, are less likely to withstand financial stress or take advantage of financial innovations available in the market than repeat homebuyers.” However, with these “distribution...

The Royal Bank of Scotland ( RBS ) may have to pay as much as $13 billion in a mortgage-backed securities lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency ( FHFA ), according to multiple media reports . FHFA made a filing in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut in late June seeking $13 billion in damages, according to a  report from Bloomberg . RBS was one of 18 lenders sued by the FHFA in 2011 to recoup U.S. taxpayer costs following the government's $187.5 billion bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008. The lawsuit against RBS in the Connecticut court involved  the selling of about $32 billion worth  of faulty mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the crisis. The bank had  set aside about $3 billion  for a possible settlement but reports surfaced that the FHFA might ask as much as $7.7 billion. The case should go to trial sometime in 2016 if a settlement is not reached. Analysts from Bloomberg Intelligence predict...

The  Federal Reserve Board  announced that the aggregate financial sector liabilities  equaled approximately $21.6 trillion, according to the Fed's first-ever determination of aggregate consolidated liabilities for all financial companies  released on Wednesday . According to the Fed, the amount of total liabilities for the financial sector – $21,632,232,035,000 – will measure the aggregate consolidated liabilities for the purpose of section 622 of the Dodd-Frank Act for a one-year period from July 1, 2015, through June 30, 2016. Section 622 of Dodd-Frank, implemented by the Board's Regulation XX, prohibits a merger between two financial companies or one financial company from acquiring another if the resulting merged company's liabilities exceed 10 percent of the aggregate financial sector liabilities. Insured depository institutions, bank holding companies, savings and loan holding companies, foreign banking organizations, companies that control insured de...

As first-time buyers enter the housing market, the total number of existing-home sales saw the largest increase in May than it has in nearly six years, according to a  report  by the  National Association of Realtors  (NAR). May home sales experienced a growth spurt following April's decline and are now at their highest pace since November 2009. All major regions experienced sales increases in May, led by the Northeast. According to NAR, total existing-home sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums, and co-ops, increased by 5.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.35 million in May from an upwardly revised 5.09 million in April. Sales have now seen increased year-over-year for eight consecutive months and are 9.2 percent (4.90 million) above a year ago. "Solid sales gains were seen throughout the country in May as more homeowners listed their home for sale and theref...

Freddie Mac  is now offering distressed homeowners a complete guide to foreclosure and how to avoid it, from assessing your situation to what to do when your home has been foreclosed on, as part of a new website  launched this week as a one-stop resource for homeowners. The " MyHome by Freddie Mac " site offers homeowners a number of options under the "Foreclosure and Alternatives" tab that tell a borrower who to contact for help as well as non-foreclosure solutions that include both home retention and home forfeiture options. Freddie Mac first discusses the importance of taking stock of your financial situation and determining what a borrower can and cannot pay for as far as home-related expenses, such as major and minor repairs. If a borrower cannot pay for these things, or is incurring another major expense that will keep them from paying the mortgage, Freddie Mac recommends reaching out to the lender as soon as possible. "Your lender wants to help...

If you thought about selling your house this year, now may be the time to do it. The inventory of homes for sale is well below historic norms and buyer demand is skyrocketing. We were still in high school when we learned the concept of supply and demand: the best time to sell something is when supply of that item is low and demand for that item is high. That defines today’s real estate market. Jonathan Smoke, the chief economist of realtor.com, in a  recent article  revealed: “Our preliminary review of April activity on realtor.com shows that traffic, searches, and listing views are up more than 35% over last year. With 3 million jobs created and close to 1.5 million new households formed in the past 12 months, many more people want a new home of their own, and they want it bad. Their patience will be tested with tight supply—indeed, the No. 1 impediment of active shoppers in April was not being able to find a home that meets their needs.” In this type of market, a...

 Default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 126,868 U.S. properties in May 2015, up 1% from the previous month and up 16% from a year ago to a 19-month high, according to the latest report from  RealtyTrac . The U.S. foreclosure rate in May was one in every 1,041 housing units with a foreclosure filing. The increase in May was driven primarily by a jump in bank repossessions, which at 44,892 were down 1% from the previous month but up 58% from a year ago, and a 5% year-over-year increase in scheduled foreclosure auctions. REOs increased on a year-over-year basis for the third consecutive month, and scheduled foreclosure auctions have increased on a year-over-year basis in four of the last eight months. May REOs were 56% below the peak of 102,134 REOs in September 2013 but still nearly twice the average monthly number of 23,119 in 2005 and 2006 before the housing bubble burst in August 2006. (Also see special methodology note on REO da...