News
FHA Program For Flipped Houses Extended
Reuters Date: Monday, January 31, 2011, 12:00am | Last Modified: Monday, January 31, 2011, 10:01am
From Banker & Tradesman (online)
The Obama administration on Friday extended through the end of the year a popular program allowing buyers of flipped homes to obtain loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
Flipping refers to the practice of buying a home and quickly reselling it in order to make a profit. The FHA in 2003 banned buyers from obtaining government-backed mortgage insurance on homes they bought less than 90 days after a previous sale.
Gov. Patrick Pushes for Major Overhaul of Criminal Defense System
Last week Governor Deval Patrick announced an ambitious plan to eliminate Massachusetts’s Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) system and replace it with a new agency under the executive branch staffed entirely with full time public defenders. This overhaul, motivated by the governor’s desire to cut costs and reduce government spending, will eliminate Massachusetts’s practice of appointing private attorneys to represent indigent criminal defendants, and instead assign those cases to a new government agency under the governor’s control staffed entirely with fulltime public defenders. The fiscal (and moral) responsibility of such a move is highly contested by lawyers and lawmakers alike.
Declines Reported in All 28 Major Metropolitan Areas; Unsold Inventory Piles Up
Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com (Wall Street Journal Online) January 31, 2011
Home values are falling at an accelerating rate in many cities across the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal's latest quarterly survey of housing-market conditions found that prices declined in all of the 28 major metropolitan areas tracked during the fourth quarter when compared to a year earlier. The size of the year-to-year price declines was greater than the previous quarter's in all but three of the markets, the latest indication that the housing market faces considerable challenges.
10/13/2010 16:39:16 -0500
