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FTC targets mortgage rescue scams Premium Content

By Inman News, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a coordinated national effort to crack down on mortgage rescue scams, with federal regulators and 23 state attorneys general taking action against 178 companies accused of deceptively marketing foreclosure rescue and loan modification services.

At a press conference Los Angeles with California Attorney General Jerry Brown, the FTC announced four new lawsuits, bringing to total number of mortgage foreclosure rescue and loan modification scam cases the Commission has brought since April to 14.  more...

The home construction 'moral hazard'

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

In the case Westfield Insurance Co. v. Sheehan Construction Co., defective work by one of Sheehan's subcontractors resulted in a $2.8 million construction-defect judgment against Sheehan. Sheehan wanted Westfield Insurance to indemnify the expense of the judgment under Sheehan's general commercial liability policy, which expressly covered accidental bodily injury and property damage, but expressly excluded property damage caused by Sheehan's own work.

The trial court found that numerous definitions and exclusions in the policy weighed against Westfield's liability, and ruled in favor of Westfield.  more...

Social media burnout Premium Content

By Kris Berg, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.
Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26429107@N03/2509107412/in/set-72157605302725246/" target=blank>Ford Racing</a>.

Don't worry. This isn't going to be another article on social media. Like you, I am starting to feel like we have come dangerously close to beating that horse senseless.

And it's not another article on spam. Spam is not exactly breaking news. Dating back centuries, even before the cross-directory or the Omaha Steaks catalog, we had firmly established ourselves as an annoying, opportunistic species.

I suspect entrepreneurial Oog liked to draw pictures of his flint inventory on all of the other guys' cave walls when they weren't looking. I bet he even sent out calendar magnets on the off chance that when someone got a hankering for fire, they would think of him.  more...

Lower rates spur refi demand

By Inman News, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

Lower rates sent applications to refinance mortgages shooting up 17.7 percent the week ending July 10, but requests for purchase loans were down 9.4 percent, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in releasing the results of its Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey.

Requests for refis accounted for 54.9 percent of all mortgage applications, up from 48.4 percent the previous week.  more...

Do-it-yourself fix for squeaky floors

By Bill and Kevin Burnett, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

Q: My partner and I have lived for four years in the upstairs flat of a two-story San Francisco Victorian built in 1912. We own the building.

I bought a heavy studio piano about 15 months ago that had to be wheeled down a 14-foot hallway to get to its new home. The professional movers brought it in on a short piano dolly. A few months after the piano arrived, the wood flooring in the hallway started to creak. It now creaks and squeaks a lot, and when I walk on it with bare feet, I can feel the ridges of some of the boards.

The flooring in the room the piano was moved into, where the path would have been mainly diagonal to the boards, squeaks a little but may have before. The floorboards are 2 inches wide.  more...

$5.5M in refunds settles kickbacks lawsuit Premium Content

By Matt Carter, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

Refund checks are in the mail to more than 50,000 Californians who allegedly overpaid for natural hazard disclosure reports because the real estate brokerages that listed their homes were taking kickbacks from the company producing the reports.

A total of $5.5 million in refunds are being paid out to consumers under the terms of a class-action lawsuit settlement. But the lawyers who filed the case ended up taking home nearly twice that much: $9.47 million in attorneys' fees plus $363,000 in expenses, or $9.83 million in total.  more...

Posterous simplifies social media Premium Content

By Robert Hahn, Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

You may have noticed from my past writing that I'm not overly impressed with technology for its own sake. Sure, Google Chrome is nifty, and Twitter sure does suck up a lot of my time, but I'm rather more interested in how one might use technology than in the coolness factor of technology.

Sometimes, though, even I run across technology that just blows me away as I wonder, "How did they do that?"

Google Maps is an example; the multi-touch screen (introduced by Jeff Han, a computer scientist at New York University) is another example.  more...