Craig's New House

Typical unfinished home; leaks caused by unfinished and loose plumbing, unsecured tube and plumbing not installed properly, dents, unfinished drywall and paint. You Tube Video...

Builder Mortgage Fraud "The Making of Modren Day Ghost Towns"Top ten builders participated in mortgage fraud to sell homes.  Inflating appraisals and paying off packages: new car, paid credit cards, furnishings, and swimming pool. A Realtors got big bonuses and trip to Hawaii . Addendums were destroyed for hidden incentives.
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Builder Mortage Companies Creative Mortgage Fraud Part 1
Las Vegas Real Estate - Buildr Incentives...Fluf or Fraud: New homebuilders participated in massive mortgage fraud to sell new homes.  Insider Dana Ellis talks about builder fraud.  Builder paid off debt, credit cards and new cars for the buyer. See Part I You Tube Video more...  See more related videos... 

FROM THE HILL: It’s so important to protect our right to a day in court
When students learn about our system of justice in civics class, they’re told that every American has a right to his or her day in court. Yet, people from all walks of life often unknowingly sign away their right to a trial when they sign a contract...Sometimes consumers only find out they’ve given up their right to trial when a big company forces them to take a dispute to a private arbitration company instead of going through the court system. Arbitration has some serious downsides for consumers, including high administrative fees. It also lacks discovery proceedings and other due process protections, and meaningful judicial review of arbitrators’ decisions...Arbitration should be a choice, not a mandate...Across every sector of our economy, Americans are being strong-armed into this consumer-unfriendly system.

Home Builders Hire Some Jumbo Lobbying Help
The National Association of Home Builders is bringing out the big guns for its lobbying battle on the housing bill. The association has hired former Republican Rep. Michael Oxley of Ohio and his lobbying firm, Baker and Hostetler, according to recently filed lobbying reports. It also has contracted with two other lobbying firms over the past month. In signing on with three new firms, the association doubled its roster of outside lobbying representatives to six. The association also has a stable of in-house lobbyists representing its agenda on Capitol Hill.

Tom Hanks loses $2 million battle over Sun Valley home
Superstar Tom Hanks may not be accustomed to being told "no," but that's exactly what a Blaine County judge told him and his actress wife, Rita Wilson. The Hollywood couple's been fighting with a local contractor over construction of their Ketchum home and guest cottages in 2002. Hanks claims the work was defective, but four years ago a judge ruled against him and ordered that the builder be paid $2 million.

The arrests took place over the past three months in about a dozen cities.
Over the past couple of months, federal agents have nailed hundreds of real estate wheeler-dealers, charging them with fraud in a crisis that has crippled the mortgage industry and left thousands of homeowners, particularly African Americans, cribless. Even as the FBI was announcing the arrests of some 400 alleged financial criminals – including housing developers, mortgage lenders and brokers, lawyers, real estate agents and appraisers – Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan association, was firing 1,200 people across the country. Many of WaMu’s layoffs will be in its home loan business, Forbes.com reports, as the Seattle-based bank dissolves its riskier loans, such as sub-prime mortgages. The arrests, 60 of which occurred on Wednesday alone in a dozen or so cities, including Chicago, Houston and Miami , were part of a crackdown against fraud that has cost homeowners about $1 billion. “Mortgage fraud poses a significant threat to our economy, to the stability of our nation’s housing markets and to the peace of mind of millions of American homeowners,” Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip said at a news conference. The sting, known as “Operation Malicious Mortgage” has netted 406 people since it kicked off on March 1, he said. While there is a rainbow of Americans crushed under the weight of predatory lenders and their unscrupulous cohorts, nobody has felt the pressure more than African Americans. Studies have shown that Blacks are more likely to be targeted for high-risk loans than less credit-worthy Whites. These sub-prime mortgages, with interest payments that often balloon after reeling in borrowers with relatively low introductory rates, have triggered a cascade of foreclosures, particularly in Black and Latino communities.

Hundreds swept up in mortgage fraud arrests
More than 400 real estate industry players have been indicted since March - including dozens over the last two days - in a Justice Department crackdown on incidents of mortgage fraud nationwide that stem from the country's housing crisis... Law enforcement officials said their stepped-up focus on mortgage cases aims to combat problems that have grown out of the risky lending practices prevalent until the mortgage market collapse started last year. Officials have identified 10 "mortgage fraud hotspots" nationwide in California, Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Georgia and Florida...Those named in the cases include housing developers, mortgage lenders and brokers, lawyers, real estate agents and appraisers, said Sharon Ormsby, section chief in charge of financial crimes for the FBI.

News from the Swamp: Countrywide scandal
Both senators received their juicy home loans from Countrywide honcho Angelo Mozilo, as did Jim Johnson, a top Demo operative who was slated to handle Barack Obama’s vice-presidential search committee until his relationship with Mozilo became public. Other friends of the toxic Mozilo include Alphonso Jackson, the former HUD secretary who resigned in April, and Donna Shalala, former HHS secretary under Bill Clinton. Dmocrats had been hoping to plow a mortgage bailout through Congress before this whole mess gets exposed, but President George W. Bush has threatened a veto because of the overly generous terms for Countrywide and similar lenders.

Twin Cities builder files for Chapter 11
Twin Cities homebuilder MW Johnson has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, in the latest fallout of the housing market collapse. The Builders Association of the Twin Cities ranked the company as the 11th-largest home builder in 2007, based on gross revenues, which it estimated to be $41.4 million.

How homeowners, speculators and Wall Street rode a wave of easy money
It was the peak. It was the embodiment of business success," Connelly said. "We underestimated the bubble, even though deep down, we knew it couldn't last forever." Indeed, Pinnacle's party would soon end, along with the nation's housing euphoria. The company has all but disappeared, along with dozens of other mortgage firms, tens of thousands of jobs on Wall Street and the dreams of about 1 million proud new homeowners who lost their houses...The aftershocks of the housing market's collapse still rumble through the economy, with unemployment rising, companies struggling to obtain financing and the stock market more than 10 percent below its peak last fall... Seen in the best possible light, the housing bubble that began inflating in the mid-1990s was "a great national experiment," as one prominent economist put it -- a way to harness the inventiveness of the capitalist system to give low-income families, minorities and immigrants a chance to own their homes. But it also is a classic story of boom, excess and bust, of homeowners, speculators and Wall Street dealmakers happy to ride the wave of easy money even though many knew a crash was inevitable.

Builders to pay $4.3 million in settlement over runoff
Four of the biggest U.S. homebuilders will pay a total of $4.3 million to settle federal and state allegations that they violated clean water laws at construction sites across the country. entex Corp, KB Home, Pulte Homes Inc. and Richmond American Homes also agreed to improve their environmental compliance programs and put safeguards in place that will keep 1.2 billion pounds of sediment annually out of U.S. waterways, the U.S. Justice Department said yesterday.

The Magazine of the National Association of Home Builders
Parallel Universe
The worldview of Home Builders versus that of the people who post negative web sites about them is so different that some might wonder whether the two groups live on the same planet.
The negative Web postings depict builders as unscrupulous businesspeople who market shoddy, hastily built products and force people into binding arbitration agreements that forfeit the legal rights of home buyers.

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Mandatory Binding Arbitration Still Sucks
BusinessWeek has published a pretty substantial cover story on arbitration, and why it disadvantages consumers. Consumerist readers will be familiar with many of the story's criticisms: one study finds 99.8% of arbitration cases are decided in the corporation's favor, some arbitration firms market themselves to companies as a sympathetic and partial judge, the arbitration process is intentionally structured to handicap consumers, and more. Read more: Business Week: Banks vs. consumers (Guess Who Wins)