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.

Fannie, Freddie agree to new appraisal standards
The two largest sources of U.S. mortgage financing agreed on Monday to sponsor a new home appraisal watchdog to prevent inflated home values...Since Wall Street gladly bought and bundled home loans for investors during the housing boom, lenders may have felt more comfortable inflating loan amounts. Cuomo filed subpoenas against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine whether the companies stood by as that happened.

One in 10 home loans is under water: Economy.com
One-tenth of U.S. homeowners hold mortgages that are larger than the worth of their homes, Moody's Economy.com said on Friday.Nearly 8.8 million homeowners, or 10.3 percent, are in over their heads, its chief economist, Mark Zandi, estimates...

Fraud compounds woes of housing crisis
As the U.S. housing meltdown forces hundreds of thousands of Americans from their homes, the extent to which fraud was a factor in the crisis is just coming to light. Products such as stated-income loans -- known as "liar loans" because no proof of income was needed -- led to widespread misrepresentation by borrowers about their earnings. But far more sinister forms of fraud, including identity theft and "straw buyers" -- those created using fake documents -- are also coming into the open.

Texas case may mirror Orlando bombing range site at PinecastleThea King-Lewis found out that her dream home was built atop a former military bombing range after children and a dog dug up live ordnance in a yard down the street. The discovery touched off evacuations, a real-estate panic and plummeting home values. Teams of Army Corps of Engineers combed backyards with high-tech gadgets on the hunt for more bombs... their homes and a school were sitting on a powder keg. (Lewis) She also was among three women accused of planting an old piece of munitions on KB property, in the neighborhood where the Army Corps of Engineers found hundreds of similar objects. Those accusations were also later dropped. King-Lewis is bound by the terms of her settlement not to speak about specifics of her case. But her history there is well documented...And in a sworn affidavit, King-Lewis asserted that an attorney for KB Home offered to drop the lawsuits and buy back her property if King-Lewis were to lie about Janet Ahmad, the leader of the watchdog group HomeOwners for Better Building, which championed the cause of the Arlington homeowners..."It was an out-and-out bribery attempt and she wouldn't go for it," Ahmad said.  See related feature: KB Home Attempts to Bribe Homeowner Plus See Sworn Affidavit

NASAA Calls on FINRA, SEC to Improve the Integrity of Securities Arbitration System by Removing Mandatory Industry Representative from Arbitration Panels
The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) today called upon the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to take immediate action to improve the fairness of the system of securities arbitration, beginning with the removal of the mandatory industry representative from arbitration panels used to resolve securities disputes involving customers and industry.