The Perils of One-Stop Shopping
Like many new-home buyers, lead plaintiff Debbie Bolden had availed herself of the builder's in-house services. KB Homes offered not only in-house real estate agents, but an affiliated mortgage company - in a 50-50 partnership with Countrywide Financial. Countrywide also owned the appraisal company...California builder Ryland Group agreed to refund 850 buyers about $250 each and pay a $161,000 fine after North Carolina's banking commissioner's office accused the builder/lender of using unlicensed loan officers and charging borrowers excessive fees... Altlanta's Beazer Homes, another large builder that began funding its own loans during the boom and has since closed its lending division, is also being investigated by the North Carolina banking commissioner's office for alleged violations of federal lending laws. In 2005 a HUD investigation led to KB Home shelling out a record $3.2 million settlement in response to allegations that the builder's mortgage wing pushed through loan applications that overstated borrowers' incomes.

Builder On Line: KB Home Reports $268 Million First-Quarter Loss
KB Home, the industry's fifth-largest builder, lost $268.2 million in the three months ended Feb. 29, compared to a $27.5 million gain in the comparable quarter last year. The builder's revenue from its home building operations fell 47.1 percent to $794.2 million in the quarter, when its deliveries declined by nearly 43 percent, to 2,928 units.

Build it right the first time
If you own a home in Texas, you should get to know Janet Ahmad... Ahmad has paid the price for being an outspoken critic. A recently concluded, six-year, Tarrant County trial found Janet innocent of making a false 911 call to report a bomb in an Arlington neighborhood built by KB Homes on a defunct bombing range...KB Homes was certainly not discreet about spending a great deal of time and effort convincing the Tarrant County District Attorney to bring the baseless felony charges against me in the first place. It’s now been over 7 years since KB Homes first vowed to inflict its powerful wrath and to maybe even put me behind bars. Make no mistake; KB was on a mission to silence its many critics. Before the Arlington charges, they sued me, the HOBB organization, and their own customers for $20 million, alleging that picketing constituted racketeering, of all things!...It’s the voice of the little guy. They are the ones that inspire me. Just look at the people at Mirasol Homes. It’s voices like theirs that have given me inspiration.
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Protest at KB Home Headquarters - Rally & Press Conference
Home Owners for Better Building joined with members of LULAC and its national president Rosa Rosales, the Cesar Chavez March for Justice Committee, Mirasol residents as well as other disgruntled KB Homeowners in a march on KB Home Headquarters.  HOBB Opinion of the Mirasol Fiasco - KB Home constructed defective homes funded by taxpayers and the HUD Office of Inspector General audit confirmed $4M was unaccounted for on the Mirasol project.  Mirasol was a program that was to provide homes for those in need with a promise of homeownership however, KB robed taxpayers and SAHA robed families who could least afford it.  No corporate empire like KB Home should go unpunished for cheating families, rich or poor.  See Protest Photos....  See Video Protest 

A Court Case That Could Be A Sign of the Times
On Feb. 6, Bolden filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court along with her husband, Lonnie Bolden, and her neighbors David and Dolores Contreras against her builder KB Home, her lender Countrywide Financial Corp., along with affiliated businesses and two appraisers. Alleging that the defendants conspired to inflate the price of their homes through deceptive, fraudulent appraisals, the suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages. Asserting that they are the tip of the iceberg and that many other KB Home owners have been harmed by the same practices, the plaintiffs are requesting class-action status for all California KB Home buyers who obtained financing through Countrywide between Aug. 1, 2005 and July 31, 2006.

Texas Supreme Court: Moving at a Snail's Pace
Remember Bob and Jane Cull and their 10-year battle with Houston homebuilder Bob Perry over their problem-plagued home? Of course you don't. Apparently, the Texas Supreme Court doesn't either...The case has focused attention on how construction disputes can last for years without resolution and raised questions about possible influence of big-dollar campaign contributions. Bob Perry is the biggest campaign contributor in Texas. He has given money to every member of the Texas Supreme Court, which now sits in judgment on the Cull case.

KB Home's Mezger Gets $6 Million Bonus in Slump: Graef Crystal
Revenue dropped to $6.4 billion from $9.4 billion. Diluted earnings per share plummeted to negative $12.04 from positive $5.82 the year before. Total shareholder return for the fiscal year ended Nov. 30, 2007, was negative 58 percent compared with a positive 7.7 percent return on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

Regular Meeting of the City Council of the City of San Antonio
Mr. George Alejos stated that Mirasol Residents had walked out of the last meeting and would no longer communicate with the Task Force. He noted that they would be taking their concerns to Congressman Charlie Gonzalez...Mr. Guadalupe Lopez stated that before the Mirasol Residents walked out of the meeting, they had asked Mr. Gordon Hartman to remove Ms. Battle from the Task Force...Workers hired to repair their homes told residents that they are not actually fixing anything, only patching them up cosmetically.

SAHA evicts dead man
The housing authority actually evicted a dead man, using the court system and a constable to deliver an eviction notice for nonpayment of three months' rent. When no one answered the constable's knock at the door, SAHA employees entered the apartment that had been unoccupied for three months and threw the man's belongings out on the street. Though that's odd enough, the sad thing is that SAHA knew three months earlier the man had died and his apartment could be cleaned out because the dead man's family brought the keys by the SAHA office and told officials nobody wanted any of his possessions.

Feds launch inquiry into Mirasol Homes
The federal Office of the Inspector General has started a new inquiry into the Mirasol Homes public housing project.  This is the second probe in five years of the taxpayer-funded project owned by the San Antonio Housing Authority...Community activist George Alejos, a task force alternate who represents City Council District 5, said he has pushed for an independent look at itemized accounts for the $1.7 million already spent on Mirasol... According to information distributed to task force members, the OIG is requesting information in 15 specific areas

Broken Promises Plague Suburban Development
"We were expecting a real nice, clean community," Spector said. "We'd moved from California, and we were expecting the planned communities to be similar to the planned communities we'd lived in in California." Spector says what he got instead was a community dominated by renters and out-of-town investors. Residents say the community is plagued by drug dealing, gang graffiti and poorly maintained properties.  See home builder related articles: Housing Market Tracker - Homeowners Fighting Back Against Homebuilders

Associated Press Reports: Feds investigating Countrywide lender
Federal authorities are investigating Countrywide Financial Corp. for securities fraud, according to media reports. The FBI is in the early stages of an inquiry into whether officials misrepresented the company's financial position and the quality of its mortgage loans, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Saturday, citing law enforcement officials and finance executives. The Justice Department is also involved in the investigation into the nation's largest mortgage lender, said the New York Times, which also cited anonymous sources who said they were not authorized to discuss ongoing criminal matters.

KB Home CEO receives $24.4 million in 2007 despite housing downturn
The chief executive of KB Home received compensation valued at $24.4 million in fiscal 2007, a year in which the homebuilder swung to a loss amid the subprime credit crisis and the downturn in the housing market. Mezger's compensation package included $1 million in salary and a $6 million bonus that Mezger received for strengthening the company's balance sheet, improving performance on a customer satisfaction survey, cutting costs and developing senior leadership in his first year as CEO...The Los Angeles-based company posted a loss of $929.4 million... Revenue dropped 32 percent. See related KB Home construction warranty issues

KB Home to quit building in some markets
Home builder KB Home said Friday that it would stop building in Chicago, the mid-Atlantic region and Albuquerque, N.M., after finishing houses under construction in those regions... KB Home had a loss of $929.4 million in fiscal 2007, compared with net income of $482.4 million a year earlier. See KB Home construction warranty issues

Illinois Subpoenas Countrywide, Wells Fargo
Attorney General Lisa Madigan has issued subpoenas to Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., and Wells Fargo Financial Illinois, Inc., to determine whether the lenders unfairly steered African American and Latino borrowers into higher cost home loans in violation of fair lending and civil rights laws. The study also found marked disparities in loan pricing between white and non-white borrowers, with African American borrowers three times as likely as white borrowers to receive a high-cost home loan and Latino borrowers twice as likely...According to the Chicago Reporter study, the wealthiest African American homeowners are still more likely than the poorest white borrowers to get placed in high-cost loans.