Or how banks try to unload high-risk loans.

Major banks and Wall Street firms seem to keep busy trying to get rid of sticky subprime mortgages. As more Americans in this segment fall behind on payments, Merrill Lynch & Co., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., HSBC Holdings PLC and others are trying to force mortgage originators to buy back the same they sold to people who are a default now.

And the trickling effect goes much deeper. While some subprime lenders are facing serious consequences, big banks face another problem as they lent money to small firms.

Back a few years and we find HSBC, Merrill Lynch and others on a buying spree, fresh from the over-inflated market, buying subprime loans from small mortgage banks that lent money to homebuyers. As the hype goes on, many lenders loosened their standards and the rest is what we have now.

The Real Estate Journal talks about where these banks are now and what could happen.

“Party With A Purpose On Pine To Unite City And Help Raise Money For Local Charitable Organizations” according to the Business Journal.

Thanks to community and business leaders who organized this event to celebrate the community spirit and support dozens of local charitable organizations and their causes. The party will end with the last leg of the AMGEN Tour of California in Long Beach.

The party will run from 6 to 11 PM on PIne street, with many restaurants opened.

We will be at the Grand for the Junior League of Long Beach’s 75 Anniversary party and auction sale.

A lot of news is prematurely reporting worse year since 1996 lately and BigBuilderOnline is no exception. You really, really need to take all the news you read with a serious grain or two of salt. Most numbers are compiled over sometime and are usually, at the very best, last months numbers. So when I read title like “Worse Year Since 1996″, my first question is why is this person so pessimistic after only a month and a half?

After all, it has only been almost two months and te news are poring in. January is notoriously a slow months on the heels of equally slow December, but saying it is the worse year since…? Seriously.

Warning, this article is about predictions, which are usually easy to make, hard to be right. It has some interesting points about what happened in the mid-90′s.

Not all news are bad in the lending industry as Fed officials were quoted saying mortgage debt was not a widespread problem. Good, could have fooled me behind all the media press cover about the end of the world in the lending business. Then again, that is how the news media industry function, self-fulfilling prophecies and exaggerated headlines to grab attention. Once the market is hurt, the headlines turn around and come to think of it, this makes for a great control tool… but I digress.
However, it still seems the subprime adjustable rate mortgages segment of the industry acts in a problematic way, according to the Duke University Fuqua School of Business.
Most problems are in the the subprime market with mounting debt delinquency and foreclosures. To make things worse, most subprime mortgages have adjustable interest rates.
Still some folks at the Federal Reserve don’t seem to think this will greatly affect the market.
You can read the USAToday below from that link. Yes, my editing on typepad has to be redone. http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2007-02-20-mortgage-debts-problems_x.htm?csp=34

Lakewood is having a senior’s mortgage program today at 10 AM. Yes, in a half hour so barely news.
The program is sponsored by the reverse Mortgage Company and aimed at seniors over the age of 62.
It will take place at the Weingart Senior Center, 5220 Olive Ave, in Lakewood. Telephone: 1-888-781-4111.
Had a hard drive crash on me and I am very late…

I’ve missed the mark by not reporting too much on Long Beach lately but I found out that Cessna Service Center is relocating to Arizona.

Might seem trivial but news like that have to be taken into consideration.  If many businesses fell, we would face an obvious shortage which could lead to panic and really effect prices of our homes.

Cessna Aircraft Company announced last week that it will relocate its service center at the Long Beach Airport to Mesa, Arizona, by 2009. The move will result in a loss of 61 well-paying jobs.

Long Beach Business Journal.

That is a question we have all asked for some time now while Zillow Inc. has made many familiar with computer-generated quick estimates.

So, how accurate is it anyway?  Wall Street Journal analysis tackled the questions by looking at 1,000 recent home sales and found Zillow’s "Zestimates" often are good can be off the mark by more than 25% on one in 10 homes.  Again, it is a free estimate and doesn’t take into consideration many other crucial market data.  The company draws revenue from online advertising.

As much as I wouldn’t recommend basing your home price solely on Zillows, it is another way to start looking.

You can read the Real Estate Journal article here.

According to DataQuick: the Bay area prices fell and were the slowest sales since 1996.  This comes on the heels of another previous survey that found the same but not since 1998.  Re-evaluation of a market gone wild?  Normal thing?

Home sales slowed for 24 months in a row in January with prices slipping.  The last numbers I found for Long Beach and Lakewood showed no price drop which would make sense, considering we were almost immune to what our other closer over-hyped city neighbors went through.  And no, it is not a justification for the high prices of homes in California.

New, resale houses and condos were down 26.3 % in December, and down 4.1 % from January last year, according to DataQuick Information Systems.  Obviously, December to January sales are always low due to the holidays.  But sales last month were the lowest for any January since 1996.

Is it just another sign that we are nowhere near any leveling?  It’s hard to say and I think the market will try to grasps for stability until Spring.  In the meantime, here is Calculated Risk.

The slump in home prices was both deeper and more widespread than ever in the fourth quarter, according to a trade group report Thursday I found on CNN.

Prices slumped 2.7 % in the fourth quarter compared to the 4th quarter a year earlier, according to NAR. That’s the biggest year-over-year drop on record and follows a 1.0 percent year-over-year decline in the third quarter.

NAR

Over at Calculated Risk the feeling was that the first half of 2007 was when we would start to seethe spillover effects from the housing market into the economy.  The home-building industry dipped in 2006, but interestingly few workers lost their jobs.  But Calculated Risk thinks this year might not be the same story.

Also, with a significant decline in Mortgage Equity Withdrawal (MEW), and a negative impact on consumer spending and rising defaults with an impact on lenders.

As some of you might have noticed, I am not much for prediction but do appreciate careful evaluations that can give definite ideas of what can happen.  That is on of the reasons why I often go to Calculated Risk.  I like his style, I like the fact that he, too, blogs because he likes it and as a free gift to the community.  He is usually right on the market.

Calculated Risk.  OK, OK, I will hunt for more information elsewhere for variety’s sake…