Countrywide Home Loans, who used to be the largest home mortgage lender before being acquired by Bank of America, reached a settlement agreement with several state’s Attorneys General regarding their huge pool of subprime loans.

One of the tenets of that agreement is that Countrywide will proactively modify 400,000 loans to more “reasonable” terms.

But that’s easier said than done.  According to my research, many of the loans Countrywide made are owned by outside investors who were not party to the agreement Countrywide made and are balking at taking less money than they are owed.

In fact, Mr. William Frey is suing to prevent Bank of America (owner of Countrywide) from performing the loan modifications since, according to Frey, doing so is in violation of the contracts that investors hold with Countrywide.

So who is right?  Mr. Frey, who advocates that contract law should be followed in this and every case?  Or BOA/Countrywide/Attorneys General whose agreement requires that this circumstance be judged as an exception to contract law?

Your thoughts and opinions are welcomed and encouraged.  Thank you for reading RealEstate.BryanEllis.com!

With foreclosures at epidemic levels right now, there’s more opportunity than ever.  Problem is, most investors use the same old tired, worn out tools to attract the unfortunate home owners facing that circumstance.  As a result, more properties are hitting the auction block than necessary, and investors are missing out on thousands of excellent opportunities.

I can do something to help, and I’m going to give it away for free so that you can use it too.

But before I tell you what it is, I’d like to get your input on the topic.  I’ve been involved in a lot of foreclosure deals, but I want the benefit of your experience also, so here’s the favor I am asking of you:

In the comments area below Please tell me the most common questions and concerns you’ve experienced from people facing foreclosure.  The questions/concerns can address any topic, including the foreclosure process itself, questions about contracts, questions/concerns about where the home owner will go, etc.

If you want to include your answers to the questions/concerns, please do that also.

Important: As more people tell us about the questions/concerns they have encountered, you’ll probably be tempted not to tell us about the questions/concerns you’ve encountered because you may see that someone else has already listed a similar or identical question/concern.  Please, please:  Go ahead and tell us what you have encountered, even if someone else has already mentioned it.  This will bolster the significance of the question/concern at issue.

My friend, if you will assist me with this, I will provide a free resource you can use to get more foreclosure deals more easily, and you’ll have it by the end of this month.  But for that to happen, I need for you to tell me about the questions/concerns you’ve faced in dealing with foreclosure victims.  Thanks so much!

(Note - please feel free to enter as many separate questions/concerns as you can think of.  There’s no need to limit this to one or two issues.  Thank you!)

Thank you so much for being a loyal FreeRealEstateTraining.com reader.  I truly appreciate you!

If you’d like to see some hard numbers to demonstrate the revitalization of the U.S. real estate market, you’re in the right place.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange manages a stock index called the Housing Index (symbol HGX).  The housing index is calculated based on the market value of 20 of the largest home builders across the United States.

To be certain, this index tracks the value of home building companies rather than real estate values.  However, a reasonable observer can not deny that a primary driver of the value of home building companies is the health of the underlying real estate market.  So in many ways, the HGX index can reasonably be viewed as a proxy for the underlying real estate market.

The Housing Index hit a low value of 96.50 back in July of 2008 - right when the negative news was at its height about the U.S. real estate market.  Since then, the negative news has continued, with the “fall” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with regulatory intervention by the FDIC into many banks and lenders.

But ever so quietly, the Housing Index has been on the move - and by a very significant margin.  Since it’s low value of 96.50 back on July 11, the HGX has gone all the way to its current value of 133.98 - an increase of 38.8% in under two months.

Consider these interesting facts:

• The stock market tends to be a “leading indicator” - this means that the action of the stock market (or pieces of it) tend to predict what will happen in the broader economy.  If the Housing Index is a leading indicator, much better times are headed towards home builders and by extension the U.S. Real Estate Market
• The primary index used to judge the value of U.S. real estate is the Case-Shiller Index.  It is a “lagging indicator”, which means that it is based on data from the past rather than expectations for the future.  The Case-Shiller index has shown month-over-month improvements for most of the 20 major real estate markets they track during the past couple of months, along with a significant leveling of the national real estate decline.  If the Case-Shiller index is a lagging indicator, then real estate values are already more firm and better than anyone yet realizes.

There’s a lot to be happy about if you’re an active real estate investor.  You just have to read between the lines to get to the real heart of the matter!

Thank you for reading FreeRealEstateTraining.com!

In part 1 of “Why The Real Estate Website Your Guru Sold You Is Disliked By Google“, I exposed to you why it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to get significant, if any, free listings at all on Google for the website your real estate guru sold to you.

And that’s bad, because Google is the king of the hill when it comes to free (aka “organic”) search traffic.

But that’s not the whole story. You’ve probably noticed that when you run a search at Google, there are search results in colored boxes on the right side of the search results page. These are paid advertisements, also known as “Pay Per Click” ads. And Google drives a HUGE amount of traffic through their Pay Per Click system.

The simple way to understand a pay per click ad is this: If a person wants their website to be listed on Google for a particular search term, that person can pay Google to put up a listing for their website whenever that term is entered in Google. And each time that ad is clicked, the advertiser has to pay Google.

Google’s pay per click program is called AdWords, and the AdWords program is how Google makes the bulk of their income.

Adwords would seem to solve the problem for those of you who have a “real estate guru” website. You won’t be able to get your website listed in the free results, but at least you could just buy some ads from Google and the problem is solved, right?

Not so fast.

Google implemented a policy a couple of years ago regarding the advertising of “Affiliate Programs” using AdWords. To Google, an “affiliate program” is basically any circumstance in which traffic from multiple advertisers is being directed to the same domain name. And that’s a no-no. The rules are more exact than this, but fundamentally Google will only allow one domain name to be advertised per keyword.

This is a huge negative for those of you who have a subdirectory of your real estate guru’s website as your only URL. For example, if the link to your specific website address is something like “GuruDomain.com/YourNameHere”, you may have a problem. Because if both you and some other person who uses your real estate guru’s website both try to get listed for the term “we buy houses” through AdWords, at least one of you will probably be refused (though maybe not immediately - you might get away with it for a few days before Google sees it).

The only real hope you have (if you insist on using your real estate guru’s web pages) is that you select keywords in which there’s no interest from other people using the same service.

The news isn’t a whole lot better if you’ve been issued a unique domain name for a website that is otherwise identical to every other website issued by your real estate guru. The rules are less clear here, but generally speaking Google does all they can to avoid duplicate content, even when that content is hosted on different domain names. So if you have a website called “BobBuysHouses” that you bought from Guru “X” and someone else bought the same website and theirs is called “TinaBuysHouses” but is otherwise identical, it’s likely that Google will not show both of your ads for the same keyword phrase.

The fundamental solution to all of this is to have a truly unique website. But how do you have a truly unique website if you already have a job and a full life? It’s easier than you think, and I’ll tell you about it in an upcoming post.

Thanks for reading FreeRealEstateTraining.com!

Generally speaking, it would take an extraordinary circumstance to cause the number of mortgage applications to rise in this country despite an increase in mortgage rates.

But that’s exactly what happened in the past week, according to an article from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Why would this happen?  My suspicion is that in some parts of the country, real estate prices are becoming too good to ignore.  And when that happens very little can get in the way of an improving market.

We’re not at the bottom nationwide.  But many markets are already past their bottom and are already increasing. (Don’t believe me? Check out Real Estate Investors: The Time Is Now.)  Real estate is on sale now, and the sale won’t last forever.