Lenore & Alex Wilkas

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If only my MLS would or could be as cutting edge on this as Redfin. Living in, and working in the Silicon Valley, one would think that the MLS's representing Realtors here would be cutting edge on this stuff, but no, the Luddites they are, lag in offering us tools to help ourselves and our clients. I find it a royal pain searching for the data concerning a short sale. We have a rule in our MLS that the listing must state whether it is a short sale yet countless numbers of listings avoid saying this in agent comments. What I want is an opportunity to run a search either including short sales or excluding them; including bank owned or excluding them. What is so hard about writing code for this? Especially when the boards went and designed and wrote the code for their own sites rather than going out of the box and customizing. We are only as good as our tools and our tools in my MLS are no way as good as Redfin or many of the other real estate sites out there. We don't have a huge number of short sales in our local markets but there are those interested in them and likewise for bank owned properties. FISBO's? I don't see many of those here either. I love the mapping that Refin has done. It's very slick, but I sure don't want to lose clients to Redfin because of this! Lenore Wilkas Prudential CA Fine Homes International Read Our Blog @ www.SanMateoRealEstateNews.com

As an agent who works in a very high wealth, high housing priced area, I want to see the FHA conforming limit remain at $729,750. It will help our community greatly and open up home ownership to many people who were priced out with jumbo loans or seconds wrapping the old conforming. California is as high a cost state to live in as Alaska or Hawaii and we need this conforming rate to stay. What I do not want to see is a reduction in the down payment. No skin in the game allows someone to walk away and that's part of the big problem we are seeing today. I believe 3% is fair for entry level as a down payment. That's equal to the liquidated damages clause in the contract and that's what we require our buyers to put down as a good faith deposit. If a buyer can't do that because they don't have the resources, then they should not be buying a property. I am very concerned about the President's threats to veto this bill, so desperately needed, if the bankruptcy judges are allowed to make decisions that might be in the interest of the party seeking bankruptcy. It is unfortunate that the Senate backed down and removed this very important, and much needed clause giving back license to the judges who hear the individual cases. The Republican Congress has been anti-consumer since they took over power in 1996. This is such a sad commentary on our society today that this continues to show us all how partisan politics has hurt the whole country. I just don't understand how some of these Senators and Congressmen/women can look themselves in the mirror when so many of their constituencies are hurting so. Lenore Wilkas Prudential CA Fine Homes International Read Our Blog @ www.SanMateoRealEstateNews.com

I am curious what the government plans to do about the fraud perpetrated by borrowers misrepresenting to the lender that they plan to occupy the property when they had no intention to do so. I can't blame the lender on this one, as they can only go by what the borrower says they plan to do. But something must be done to these people to set a big fat example to everyone why this is bad and how it has effected the greater majority. A slap on the wrist isn't going to do it here. They need to have the hammer of the law banged on their heads loud enough that the average-Joe understands that misrepresenting occupancy leads to charges of fraud and perhaps, jail time? That would stop it cold.