Critics say the “ability-to-repay” mortgage rule proposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in January will hurt small lenders, who will have less leeway to make loans including those with “balloon” payments. Another item of contention is which fees will be counted in calculating a provision of the rule that caps fees at 3 percent of the total loan amount. The proposed rule — set to take effect in January, 2014 — came under fire from Democrats and Republicans at a House Financial Services Committee hearing today, the Wall Street Journal reports. Source: blogs.wsj.com.

The economy will be a little stronger in the second half of 2013 than the first half, with housing expected to act as a tailwind throughout the year and into 2014, economists at Fannie Mae said in releasing their latest forecast.

Recent housing indicators point to continued recovery, with a surge in multifamily construction pushing the annualized pace of total housing starts in March past the 1 million mark for the first time since mid-2008. The boom in multifamily construction is driven by the continuing decline in the homeownership rate, which dropped to 65 percent during the first quarter of 2013, the lowest rates since 1995.

While new-home sales are “showing signs of life,” sales of existing homes are “moving sideways,” Fannie Mae economists noted in a summary of recent economic events.

“Lean inventories, a declining share of distressed sales, and increased efforts to implement short sales and other foreclosure alternatives have helped boost home prices, which showed strengthening annual gains so far this year,” Fannie Mae economists said.

Fannie Mae’s affordability index, which looks at mortgage rates, family income and home prices, estimates that affordability peaked in 2012 but that homes will remain more affordable than during “normal” times through 2017. Source: fanniemae.com.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — “Obamacare” — mandates that all Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty starting next year.

Recognizing that many Realtors, as independent contractors and small-business owners, do not have access to quality, affordable health insurance, NAR has launched a “Realtors Insurance Marketplace,” described as a one-stop online shop for health insurance needs.

In addition to offering two of NAR’s existing health insurance plans, the Realtors Insurance Marketplace will offer two new insurance plans:

• A major medical health insurance exchange for NAR members, featuring HMOs, PPOs, HSAs and high-deductible plans.
• Short-term insurance designed to be an affordable temporary major medical policy.

NAR is partnering with SASid, Smart And Simple insurance development.

The open enrollment period starts Oct. 1, 2013. Starting in 2014, individual major medical plans are “guaranteed issue,” meaning you cannot be turned down for coverage due to insurance underwriting.

Many real estate professionals will qualify for health care tax credits to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

What do you think about mandatory health insurance, and NAR’s efforts to provide health insurance options to members? Leave your comments below.

Realogy Holdings Corp. franchisor Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate is expanding into Idaho with the addition of brokerage 43° North Real Estate to its franchise network.

The Boise-based brokerage company is now doing business as Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate 43° North, serving the Boise, Nampa and Caldwell metro areas under the continued leadership of founding broker and owner Jeff Martel.

“Jeff and his team embrace truly creative approaches to buying and selling real estate, and that innovative way of thinking makes us ideal strategic partners for now and the future,” said Sherry Chris, president and CEO of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate LLC, in a statement. “With a national shortage of home inventory, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate 43° North’s unprecedented expertise in new construction will be a vital asset to its growth.”

Since launching in 2008, Martel and his team have sought to foster new construction relationships through savvy marketing and a relational-based business model. The firm has 14 Realtors assigned to its Boise-based new construction team, and 19 other agents serving the general market.

“Developers and builders of new construction demand innovative and proactive marketing to reach out to what is truly becoming a national market,” said Joe Grubiak, new home sales director at Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate 43° North, in a statement. “I believe that our association with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate will help yield faster sales for our clients and a higher degree of productivity for our agents, and we look forward to our continuing growth with this national brand.”

Last week, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate announced it was expanding its presence in the Pacific Northwest with the addition of Bend, Ore.-based brokerage GoBend Realty to its franchise network.

The firm’s 23 sales representatives, who serve the greater Central Oregon area, are now doing business as Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Northwest Living under the continued leadership of broker-owner Terry Denoux.

The Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate network now includes approximately 8,300 sales associates and 250 offices serving homebuyers and sellers in Canada and 26 U.S. states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

What do you think of real estate franchise networks? Do brokerages that affiliate with franchisors have an advantage over unaffiliated, independent brokerages? Leave your comments below.

Forget about a soft landing for slumping Canadian housing markets, says an economist who’d previously predicted home prices in the Great White North were headed for a 25 percent decline over the next few years.

David Madani, an economist at Toronto-based Capital Economics Ltd., said he doesn’t expect home prices will rebound this year, even though builders reined in housing starts in April for the first time in three months.

Phil Soper, chief executive officer of Brookfield Real Estate Services, said at the Bloomberg Economic Summit that he expects a soft landing, noting that there’s only 6.5 to 6.8 months of inventory at the current rate of sales. Source: bloomberg.com.

The Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors has launched a consumer-facing residential property search website with tools designed to help local Realtors in southeast Tennessee and northwest Georgia compete with national portals.

GCAR’s “Spring” platform features responsive design compatible with mobile devices and a common interface for real estate professionals and consumers.

Instead of providing separate search environments for consumers and Realtors, each user will get access to functionality that’s appropriate to them.

Separate logins will allow real estate professionals to access the same proprietary information, analytics and features they currently have, but within the same navigation experience as their clients.

Spring was created through a partnership with Huntsville, Ala.-based real estate technology vendor Solid Earth. The new software platform will roll out in phases to give GCAR members and consumers time to adjust before the association’s old public-facing search portal, mlsarealistings.com, is replaced.

The new public-facing search portal, homes.gcar.net, is live, with the new back end for Realtors set to launch later this year.

The new back end will provide agents with analytics that shed light on their clients’ preferences and search behavior, for a more interactive agent-client experience.

“Spring provides a locally branded, national-level look and feel equipped with a range of analytic, lead-generating and social media tools all focused on maintaining the broker and agent position as expert,” GCAR said today in announcing the launch of homes.gcar.net.

For consumers, GCAR said Spring “represents a new level of access to current and accurate MLS information based on their wants and needs during the home shopping or selling process.”

The National Association of Realtors adopted a policy Saturday intended to allow MLSs to operate and promote public-facing websites as a “basic” service paid for by all members. Some large brokerages objected to the change, saying they would rather not compete with MLS-run websites or be forced to pay for MLS-provided services that they can provide to their agents themselves.

“We made the investment in Spring, which has been under development for the past several years, as a way of securing our place as an industry leader and standing out among the ever-increasing competition,” said GCAR President Mark Blazek in a statement.

What’s your take? Should MLSs operate public-facing websites? Leave your comment below.

Lead generation and customer relationship management (CRM) platform Kunversion LLC has rolled out a new user dashboard that’s mobile-optimized, integrated with Google Apps, and interacts with leads via text, email and chat before a user has to personally respond.

Tom Ray and Justin Tracy, co-founders of Kunversion, founded real estate lead generation platform Realty Generator LLC in 2001, ran it for six years and then, in 2007, sold it to Market Leader Inc., which remade its business around the technology (Market Leader is, in turn, set to be acquired by Trulia later this year).

Kunversion co-founders Tom Ray (CEO) and Justin Tracy (chief technology officer) introduce Kunversion.

Ray and Tracy are back with another lead-gen product in Kunversion, an all-in-one website, blog, CRM and lead-gen platform geared to brokers and teams that costs $1,000 per month for up to 30 users.

They launched Kunversion in early 2011 after three years of silence due to a noncompete clause associated with the sale to Market Leader, and are now ramping up to make a splash in the space, Tracy said.

The updated platform “is what we wanted to do from launch, but are just now rolling out,” said Tracy, who is also Kunversion’s chief technology officer.

Kunversion features an IDX website; a mobile-optimized, HTML5-formatted back end; Android and iOS mobile apps; free e-signatures from HelloSign; a drip email marketing platform; and handles the initial interaction with a lead with live chat. Every day from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern time, Kunversion powers live chat from an outsourced team of 10 people who respond to leads on users’ Kunversion platform.

The system also automatically sends texts and emails to leads on a user’s behalf based on triggers like if a lead visits one house five times, checks out a just-listed home or hasn’t been on the site in a while, Tracy said.

The system’s new dashboard view also helps users navigate the system to see details about each lead, prioritize leads into an “active” list and see activity properties laid out in a Pinterest-like grid, Tracy said. The firm is currently working on a new front-end design, which should be out in three weeks, he said.

Curaytor LLC launched a similar all-in-one CRM and website platform — with a heavier focus on marketing — for brokers and teams last month.

What do you think of all-in-one broker/team technology products? What features do you like the most? Leave a comment below.

A Toronto-based startup is offering to help buyers and sellers in Ontario choose a real estate agent by furnishing metrics about agents’ prior transactions, including statistics on the number of homes sold, average days on market, average sales price and average listing price.

Commission Pitch says data for each agent can be filtered and sorted by city or neighborhood. Agents can manage Commission Pitch profiles for free or pay a monthly fee for a “Pro” account that connects them directly with buyers and sellers.

Commission Pitch launched in January as a site where consumers could solicit competing offers from agents detailing their commission rates and fees.

“We’re committed to being the go-to source for real estate agent information across Canada, and the primary channel for connecting buyers and sellers with expert local agents,” said company co-founder Chris Silvestre in a statement today. “Buyers and sellers can now complete the entire agent selection process on our site, from browsing detailed statistics to anonymously negotiating offers of representation, with better insight than they can get anywhere else.”

What’s your take on websites that say they can help consumers find agents by providing them with access to information about their past transactions? Leave your comments below.

Remember back before the dot-com crash, when tacking a lowercase “e” onto the beginning of your company’s name was thought to magically bestow the cache of an innovator (or wannabe)? The modern-day equivalent seems to be mixing capital and lowercase letters throughout and refraining from hitting the space bar, The Real Deal’s Stuart Elliott complains in a lighthearted rant.

In addition to architectural firms like SHoP Architects, FXFOWLE and FLAnk, Elliott gripes that development firm WEmi:t (Where East Meets West) seems to have named itself with the express intention of causing “any self-respecting editor to commit hara-kiri.”

Real estate brokerages that Elliott thinks are having a little too much fun with cases include CORE, EAR NYC, Brick&Mortar and I&I. Elliot also advises that new brokerages opening up in the Big Apple refrain from incorporating the words “Manhattan,” “Citi” or “Urban” from their names “because it (will make) them instantly indistinguishable from 10 other firms.” Source: therealdeal.com.

Asset management firm BlackRock Inc. will nearly double its investments in real estate by buying investment firm MGPA, which has $12 billion in assets under management, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move gives BlackRock a bigger presence in the Asia-Pacific region, where two-thirds of MGPA’s real estate holdings are located, and Europe. Source: wsj.com.

Eight people and two companies have pleaded guilty in connection with an FBI investigation into alleged bid rigging at public real estate foreclosure auctions in southern Alabama, the Department of Justice said.

Prosecutors said Robert M. Brannon and his son Jason R. Brannon, and their Mobile-based company, J&R Properties LLC, conspired with others not to bid against one another at public real estate foreclosure auctions in southern Alabama from 2004 to 2007. After a designated bidder bought a property at a public auction the conspirators would hold a secret, second auction, prosecutors said.

The Brannons were also charged with conspiring to use the U.S. mail to carry out a fraudulent scheme to acquire title to rigged foreclosure properties sold at public auctions at artificially suppressed prices; to make payoffs to and to receive payoffs from co-conspirators; and to cause financial institutions, homeowners and others with a legal interest in rigged foreclosure properties to receive less than the competitive price for the properties.

The Brannons were each sentenced Monday to 20 months in prison for their participation in the conspiracies, and ordered to pay $21,983 in restitution to the victims of the crime. Source: justice.gov.

Marketing solutions provider HomeFinder.com recently announced it will donate $1 to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals for every Re/Max agent who enters the 2013 HomeFinder.com Agent Makeover Sweepstakes.

The five winners of the contest will be flown to Chicago for a two-night stay Sept. 18-20 to receive a “business and style makeover.” Source: HomeFinder.com

Is FHA intentionally targeting condominiums, trying to exclude hundreds or thousands of them around the country from qualifying for financing under its mortgage insurance program?

FHA officials tell me absolutely not. But an abrupt new “no-tolerance” move by the agency has large numbers of condo associations across the country wondering whether FHA is looking to dump them.

The issue is technical and involves language buried away in condo associations’ core legal documents — their “CC&Rs,” or covenants, conditions and restrictions. Buried in many CC&Rs is language that prohibits units in the project from being leased for periods of less than 30 days.

But many associations’ CC&Rs have for decades contained a seemingly innocuous exception for units taken back through foreclosure by mortgage lenders or investors — language insisted upon during the 1980s and 1990s by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide more flexibility for them in the management of their real estate owned (REO) properties.

Until a few weeks ago, according to condo association leaders and industry groups, FHA showed little interest in the 30-day language in certifications and recertifications of projects for insurance. Then suddenly, without warning, it began rejecting applications solely because the underlying CC&Rs permitted transient leases by mortgagees “in possession” of foreclosed units. According to HUD lawyers, this violates a 1994 amendment to the National Housing Act.

The Community Associations Institute (CAI), which represents 30,000 homeowner associations and management companies, said it immediately began receiving complaints from members outraged by what they view as a sudden, unannounced policy shift. Jon Eberhardt, CEO of Condo Approvals LLC, a firm that assists associations get through FHA’s certification hoops, told me last week that “FHA has no idea how many (condos) this will affect” — most likely in the thousands.

For example, Eberhardt estimates that up to 30 percent of all condo projects in California, including many previously certified by FHA, have the short-term leasing exception in their CC&Rs but now face potential loss of eligibility. In a number of states, he says, language like this is routinely present in condo documents.

A little background: FHA does not insure “spot” loans on individual units; the entire project must be certified and meet the agency’s requirements on budgets, reserves, insurance, owner-occupancy and other tests before any one unit can be financed with an FHA-insured mortgage. Put another way, if the condo association hasn’t passed FHA’s certification procedures, no one in the project is eligible to sell a unit using FHA insurance, and no buyers can obtain FHA financing.

Yet FHA’s low down payment loans have served for decades as an important route to homeownership for young, moderate-income, first-time purchasers, many of them minorities. More recently, the agency’s approval of a condo project for financing also has been the only way for older unit owners to obtain a reverse mortgage to help with personal expenses. FHA’s reverse mortgage program dominates the field and accounts for roughly 95 percent of all loans outstanding.

The point here: FHA financing is crucial for certain segments of the housing marketplace. If it’s suddenly not available or associations find compliance too costly, large numbers of owners and potential buyers — including many of the “underserved” that FHA is statutorily required to assist — will get cut out.

According to officials, 26,652 condo associations nationwide are certified for FHA insurance. But that number has dropped sharply in recent years — down from about 40,000 — as the agency has steadily toughened its certification procedures.

When rejected condo associations have complained to FHA about the sudden and unannounced change of policy on short-term leasing, CAI officials and Eberhardt say they’ve all gotten the same steely answer: Amend your CC&Rs and get rid of the offending language.

But that’s no simple task and FHA knows it, argues Eberhardt. Changing CC&Rs “requires in most cases a supermajority vote and (sometimes) even the vote of the mortgage holder,” he says. “Such a vote is used for exceptional purposes” only and cannot “be undertaken lightly” by a condo association. It also “usually involves an attorney and costs many thousands of dollars.”

As a result, Eberhardt added, “few (association boards) will entertain a change to their CC&Rs unless it is for a full tuneup (of the documents), but not to change a HUD technical issue. They will forgo HUD approval in the face of such a rejection.”

Which, in turn, will further reduce the number of condos eligible for FHA financing, and in some cases, reduce the values of individual units cut off from buyers who need FHA financing to swing a purchase.

So why the sudden switch if FHA itself denies that it wants to reduce its traditional role in the condo arena? Why no advance notice and no willingness to provide a little wiggle room on an issue that the agency itself has ignored previously?

FHA officials last week would only tell me that they “are aware of the problem,” but have limited scope for compromise because federal law prohibits the language contained in the associations’ CC&Rs. Once HUD lawyers spotted the noncomplying language in some condo project applications, FHA “had no choice” but to take action immediately.

FHA is interested in finding some sort of accommodation, officials said, and they are consulting departmental lawyers this week.

But meanwhile, if you are a unit owner, board member or a realty agent representing buyers or sellers of condos nationwide, be aware: The grim reaper at FHA is still rejecting certifications because of arcane language in documents that it never objected to before and that no one has connected with any statistical risk of default or foreclosure.

Ken Harney writes an award-winning, nationally syndicated column, “The Nation’s Housing,” and is the author of two books on real estate and mortgage finance.

Market Leader Inc. is making some capabilities of the Market Leader Professional and Business Suite available to users of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

Market Leader Mobile, which will be offered at no additional cost to customers, “provides lightning-fast access to follow up with leads, add contacts to marketing campaigns, and stay in touch with an entire database of contacts,” the company said.

“It is absolutely critical that busy, successful agents have instant access to their business throughout the day, and Market Leader Mobile makes that easier than ever,” said Market Leader CEO Ian Morris in a statement.

Market Leader provides CRM tools to a number of real estate industry heavyweights, including franchising giants Keller Williams Realty, Century 21 Real Estate, and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate. Market Leader has been pursuing a strategy of partnering with franchisors and brokerages in order to upsell premium services to their agents.

Real estate marketplace Trulia announced May 8 that it plans to acquire Market Leader for $355 million. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

Market Leader’s latest product release illustrates one of the main motivations for the deal: It will make Trulia an instant player in the business of providing real estate software to real estate brokers and agents.

By offering marketing tools like those announced by Market Leader today, it has allowed Trulia “to catch up with Zillow and (Realtor.com operator Move Inc.), and I suppose, they would argue, actually surpass them,” Brian Boero, co-founder of 1000watt, recently told Inman News.

Market Leader cited research by CRM provider Leads360 that suggests following up with new leads within three minutes can double conversion to paid customers, and following up under an hour can increase conversion by 36 percent. It also cited a statistic from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) that indicates that more than 55 percent of buyers and sellers hire the first agent who contacts them.

Market Leader said its mobile offerings enable brokers and agents to perform the following tasks from mobile:

• Get new leads instantly.
• See what prospects are searching for.
• Call, email or text a lead.
• Add comments and set reminders.
• Put contacts on “set it and forget it” marketing campaigns.
• Search for contacts and add new ones.

How are you using CRM tools to serve clients? Leave your comments below.

The integration of Dropbox into Imprev’s Marketing Center makes it easier for agents to collaborate with others to bring photos, video and documents into their marketing materials, the company said.

Professional photographers, for example, can upload photos to a shared folder within the Marketing Center for brokers and agents to use in their campaigns.

Imprev’s Marketing Center is a mobile-optimized platform with single-property websites, YouTube-enabled videos, and prewritten email, print and social media ad campaigns.

Dropbox, the cloud-based document storage platform, allows users to share files and folders with others, and to modify and access them in real time. Dropbox is free for users who need up to 2 gigabytes of storage, $9.99 per month for storage up to 100 GB, and more for higher storage limits.

In April, Imprev rolled out a bilingual (French and English) marketing platform for the 14,500 agents affiliated with the Ontario-based franchisor Royal LePage Real Estate Services.

In January, a selection of Imprev’s tools became available to agents affiliated with the Denver-based franchisor Re/Max.

In August the firm introduced a video creation platform that takes music and a listing’s photos and puts them in a video.

Getting people to visit your website presents its own unique challenges: the right keywords, top-notch website infrastructure, modern design, exceptional content, responsive architecture and consistent promotion are all part of the mix. But what happens when someone gets to your site is really where the action starts. Calls to action, or CTAs, as many marketers call them, are some of the most important elements of online marketing and lead generation.

We generally use the term “call to action” to describe the instructions we give website visitors to guide their behavior. Note that CTAs are not limited to websites: Your emails, fliers, Facebook posts, advertisements and conversations all include calls to action whether conscious or unconscious. Calls to action can be as simple as the links in this post, a request to tweet this, or something more direct, like a forced lead capture pop-up requesting a sign-in to read more.

We’ve all experienced the situation where we’ve willingly given our personal information in exchange for access to content or some newfangled app that we just had to have. Those are all different variations on a theme: the offer of value, real or perceived, in exchange for personal action.

The reason this is so important is because in business, as in life, things don’t happen just because you want them to. You need to ask for what you want and align your actions to make it possible for your dream to become a reality. Now, you just can’t go around demanding that your website visitors do what you want, but with an understanding of your audience you can create a clear vision of the actions that would be the best fit for their desires and your business.

Understanding the customer is key here: It’s the only way to tailor your communication to their needs. What are they searching for? What motivates them? And more importantly, what will it take to earn their trust and get their permission to interact with them?

That’s where the CTAs come in. Once a visitor starts engaging on your website, they are providing valuable insight into their interests and motivation. Using Google Analytics, you can learn a lot about your visitors even without knowing exactly who they are. When they give you their contact information, they are giving you an opportunity to communicate in a more personal and direct manner. This opportunity is the first of many tests that you will have to pass in the consumer’s eye.

Remember: Don’t come on too strong, you haven’t earned it yet.

For more insight into CTAs, we’ve put together a visual guide outlining 14 tips for calls to action and why they’re crucial for your online marketing.

Let us know what’s working for you. What are your most successful calls to action? Are there any you have been reluctant to try? Lastly, if you’re willing to share, post a link to an example that you find exceptionally effective. (Again, another call to action.) You get the idea, now leave a comment!

The financial analysis website Department of Numbers shows that the number of existing homes for sale is up 17.7 percent so far this year, about triple the percentage growth from the beginning of the year in 2011 and 2012 at the same period, according to the finance and economics blog Calculated Risk.

The quick rise in inventory of existing homes, which represent about 90 percent of homes on the market, leads Bill McBride, who runs the Calculated Risk blog, to say that an inventory bottom is near. In April, he thought the bottom would happen sometime in 2014.

Source: Calculated Risk

Automatic federal spending cuts that took effect March 1 will force the Department of Housing and Urban Development to close up shop on seven business days this year. HUD offices nationwide will be closed Friday, May 24, reopening Tuesday, May 28 following Memorial Day. If Congress does not take action to restore HUD’s funding, future “furlough days” will also be paired with weekends and holidays to ease their impact. Source: hud.gov.