Residential builder probed in connection with potential mortgage fraud
Amid the meltdown of the subprime housing sector, mortgage lenders and brokers have come under fire from state and federal officials for predatory lending practices with those risky borrowers. Now one national homebuilder is feeling the heat. BusinessWeek has learned that federal investigators have opened a broad […]

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NEWARK — After Franklin Abazie fell behind on his mortgage last year, he tucked one of his foreclosure notices, still in its ripped envelope, into the visor of his car — a looming reminder of why he had to take a second job.
Rashid and Yvonne Moore, a middle-aged couple whose lenders are threatening foreclosure because […]

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SOME homeowners may have skipped recent articles about the subprime mortgage meltdown, thinking it’s of interest only to investors. But mortgage industry professionals say that the subprime collapse has significant implications for all homeowners — even those with good credit.
“This will have a circular effect on a lot of things, including housing prices,” said Steve […]

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IN New York’s construction boom of the last few years, many people have been buying apartments in buildings before they actually rise out of the ground. The buyers can’t see them, smell them or touch them. When they finally do, they are sometimes in for very big surprises, some of them infuriating.
Rooms are often smaller […]

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The number of homes with ”For Sale” signs in South Florida reached new highs in February. At the current sales pace, it would take nearly three years to sell all the condominiums on the market. For single-family houses, it would take almost two years.
Why so long? Even as sellers get more creative, and desperate — […]

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SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation’s hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.
In suburbs like this one, officials are installing alarms, fixing broken windows and […]

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LIKE many parents, Madhu and Kishore Agrawal do whatever they can to help their children. For their 25-year-old daughter, Natasha, that help has ranged from sending her through Tufts University to watching her cat, the General, when she traveled to India to visit relatives late last year. Recently, they made the most financially demanding commitment […]

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Perhaps the American dream of homeownership is not for everyone.
That may sound at odds with a bedrock notion of society promoted by presidents for decades. But many experts say it is a message that can be drawn from the rising troubles with mortgages provided to home buyers with weak credit.
Several large mortgage companies have stopped […]

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BY now it is no longer news that people are jiggling the planet’s thermostat.
One response is to go green: New Yorkers who were terrified into action by Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” are shaping up their lives and homes with a compulsion formerly reserved for the Atkins diet.
All this carbon cutting is a boon, […]

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BECAUSE of new policies from Freddie Mac, some, if not many, of the millions of borrowers with poor credit could be shut out of home mortgages. But Freddie Mac also says that it is planning new mortgage products in an attempt to reduce the risk of default.
Freddie Mac, which buys loans from lenders and, in […]

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